Dear Readers,

This blog exists in order to circulate information about issues that affect female (and male) soldiers, as well as to provide a forum in which Americans citizens and citizens of the world can share ideas and opinions. I am confident that I have posted information and statistics from reliable sources like the U.S. Department of Defense website and well-respected news agencies. Please let me know if you find sources, links and/or published material that contradict or correct the statistics found on this blog. Feel free to post links and information as comments, and I will be sure to check them out. I appreciate your feed-back and your help. After all, this blog is supposed to open the conversation, to get people talking about the issues, and to provide accurate information. The status of fact is tenuous these days (perhaps always), but I would feel terrible if this blog, something that I care deeply about, were furthering lies. Please help me make this a good, helpful and truthful internet space.

Yours,

Russian Dollz

This blog article is about sexual harassment perpetrated by army recruiters. Also, check out the comments, there is a particularly interesting longer one with a few good links.

Another opinion and a few stats on rape in the military by Suburban Guerrilla Blogger.

Sorry, this link is busted for some reason. I will try to replace it soon.

Here’s a link to the US Department of Defense’s website that is committed to responding to sexual abuse in the military. The site contains a newsletter for April 2007. There is some pretty interesting data in the newsletter, and an address to which readers can respond.

I found the following clip on YouTube. Its from NBC News In Depth with Brian Williams, and is an interview with several women suffering from PTSD because of having been sexually assaulted while serving in the military.

On the U.S. defense department website there is an article, which sites that: “Officials estimate about three-tenths of a percent of men will be sexually assaulted while serving in the military — compared to 8 percent of women.” The total number of women serving in the military in 2001 was 199,850 according to this website.

This means that 15,988 women were raped in the military in the year 2001. In my last post, I sited a web page, which quoted that “In 2001 there were 102,000 victims of sexual assault, 63,000 victims of attempted rape, and 84,000 victims of completed rape, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. These numbers do not include victims under the age of 12.” Now, I do not know whether these statistics include the rape of women in the U.S. military, but if they do, it means that about 1/6, or about 16% of all of the rapes in the U.S. where committed in by military personnel.

http://www.cbsnews.com/images/2005/02/17/image674848x.jpg

The following link is an article about Jennifer Dyer, a female soldier who accused a fellow officer of raping her while she was serving in the New Jersey National Guard. There is also a link on the left hand side of this site under the heading INTERACTIVE, Sexual Assault, that has rape statistics from 2000 and 2001.

In an article that I found on alternet.com written by a woman named Rose Aguilar, the author states marks the shocking increase in rape allegations in the U.S. military. “In 2003, Congress began requiring the Department of Defense to report the number of sexual assault cases on file. In 2005, military criminal investigators received 2,374 allegations of sexual assault involving members of the armed forces worldwide. “That number is a 40 percent increase from 2004. The ‘04 number is a 25 percent increase from 2003, so that’s a 65 percent increase in two years.”

Ms. Magazine online also has an article about rape statistics in the U.S. military. Lara Friedrich and Anne Decleene write: “In May, Sanchez proposed legislation to replace the military’s antiquated sexual- assault laws — enacted in the 1950s — with the type of civilian laws now in use at the federal level and in 38 states. Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn’t recognize date or acquaintance rape, and it still places undue emphasis on a woman’s behavior rather than on the perpetrator’s, according to Sanchez.”

After reading these two articles, and considering the other research I have been doing, I get the sense that rape is something that just happens to you if you are a woman in the U.S. army, that you should suck it up, and that you should keep your mouth shut about it. The army is just one more arena in which some men feel as though they can physically and psychologically intimidate and dominate women. How do you fight an enemy, when those who are supposed to be your friends and comrades also threaten you? Rape in the military is not just a problem because of the physical and psychological trauma that it inflicts upon the victims, but also because it threatens the stability and the integrity of the army as a whole. As we have seen in some of the previous articles on the blog, the women are afraid to take showers and get water late at night because they fear rape. The culture of rape in the army is weakening our troops. I imagine that the immediate response to this comment may be: women shouldn’t serve in the military.

My response to this comment: If we were to punish women by not letting them serve their country because men are committing criminal acts, rape, against them, we would be condoning crime and not serving justice, we would be letting sexual desire supercede law, and we would be admitting that “might=right” or more specifically, “penis=right”. Learning more and more about the incidents of rape the military have made me angry against the larger tyranny against women. Perhaps the transmen have it right. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. This act of becoming the other makes a person less prone to being attacked by the other. But my other response; fight. Fight the complacency in the army and the acceptance of male sexual power. The military needs to train its men to fight their sexual urges. The military needs to train its men to view these women not as the other, but as their fellow human beings and fellow soldiers. Does this sound a little too warm and fuzzy for you? I believe that education is the way to solving most problems, and this one is no exception. The only thing that I fear, is that we will never be able to get men to see women as equal, perhaps because human nature, most notably sexual desire, will always win in the end. Call me an idealist, but I say we can stop rape in the military, even if a little social conditioning is involved.