Basic Training
Never got around to that angry part yesterday. Spent most of the day attempting to procure potting soil with only a bike and flagging enthusiasm for my gardening project.
Onto the angry. Remember that blog I posted a little while back about the women being raped and otherwise sexually assaulted while being recruited for the Armed Forces? Turns out, it may have just been basic training. Helen Benedict, writing here for Salon, interviewed over 20 female veterans; they said:
…the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.
I just want to go back and highlight the phrase “by other soldiers.” Yes, female American troops are being attacked by their fellow US soldiers. One woman Benedict interviewed carried a knife to protect herself from her own countrymen.
So much more after the jump…
Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them… The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them.
Meanwhile, the NYT reports that other women have been harassed and coerced into having sex with their superiors. Some women just refer to it as “command rape”.
She claimed that [her sergeant] propositioned her for sex the first day the two of them arrived in Iraq and that she felt coerced into having a sexual relationship with him that lasted four months - the relationship consisting, she said, of his knocking on her door late at night and demanding intercourse. When she finally ended this arrangement, Swift told me, the sergeant retaliated by ordering her to do solitary forced marches from one side of the camp to another at night in full battle gear and by humiliating her in front of her fellow soldiers.
The seargant denies her allegations.
Thirty percent of women in the armed forces report being raped, of those 37% report being raped multiple times. Only 14% of those were gang raped. So only a 4.2% chance overall of being gang raped. There’s a 95.8% percent chance that you won’t be raped by a group of your fellow soldiers. Them’s pretty good odds. That is, of course, if the numbers are accurate; I would guess that they’re almost certainly understated.
Don’t want to miss the silver lining here, though. At least our laws ensure the women soldiers are over 18. And, as far as I know, most of them haven’t been murdered along with their families. By the way, don’t miss the part in that article where it mentions that the soldier will be eligible for parole in just 10 years.
A regretful hat tip to Erica C. Barnett of The Stranger for putting me onto the two articles.
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