A Culture of Coverup: Rape in the Ranks of the US Military

I do not believe that major reforms are being implemented in the military, to protect female veterans in substantive ways from sex crimes. I hope I am wrong. Instead, I find telling the superficial level of concern directed at this issue raised by The Invisible War.

The reaction to the film is an interesting Rorschach test for the country -- revealing its attitudes to women, violence, sex and sexual violence. On the one hand, women in the military face rape and coverup, as related by The Invisible War, because of an aggressive patriarchal culture. That military culture is a traditional one. In this time-honored, empire-honed culture, war is a manly space; women are interlopers and thus "fair game," or else they are controlled and exploited as camp followers and sex workers. The old boys' network guarantees coverup for attackers; few women are present at the top to change this culture of sex crime and impunity.

The likelihood of rape being systemic in these more recent wars is raised by the desensitization that all soldiers undergo in order to kill, as well as by the kind of institutionalized tolerance or normalization of abuse that is part of the Baghram base detention center, the Abu Ghraib prison, and other scandals involving desecrating bodies and assaults on civilians. Rape could be systemic, and more systemic than usual, in other words, because war turns soldiers into dehumanized versions of themselves. Our especially brutal prosecutions of our recent wars makes that brutality quotient even greater. This hypothesis could help explain the very high rate of suicide among these veterans, compared with other, more lawfully prosecuted wars fought before we abandoned the Geneva Conventions, and before torture and illegal detention were part of America's foreign occupation tool kit.

The film has been covered widely by CNN, Hollywood Reporter, Amy Goodman, and many other outlets. That level of media coverage of a rape-related issue is very unusual. I have looked elsewhere -- at the Assange prosecution, and at the Dominique Strauss Kahn investigation -- to explore the issue of which allegations of sexual assault are "taken seriously" by our society's gatekeepers. Women are raped and beaten up, at home, every day, in vast numbers: there is systematic rape in campus fraternities every year, and sexual assault in prisons.

Congress isn't holding hearings, nor is CNN giving much if any real estate to these phenomena. No one is promising major overhauls of these reporting systems. So why are these rapes different from all other rapes? I would say that the politics of who is involved trigger these atypical responses.

This broad willingness to look at the issue, at least cosmetically, is revealing. The issue of rape in the military seems part of a cultural tipping-point: there appears something so timely and representative about shining a light on military rape, as a symbol of the general trauma Americans are becoming aware of among the population of veterans as a whole: news reports document that suicide now outpaces death under fire as the leading cause of mortality among vets. It also seems that we are willing to look at military rape, in a way that we aren't at, say, college rape, which is just as systemic, because the icon of the "military woman" is one of the few we have of a woman who is blameless.

How can our culture imagine a military woman as a "virtuous" victim, and thus more readily look at what happened to her?

She has sacrificed herself -- that ultimate cultural marker for female virtue -- and is facing dangers on our behalf. She is not out on her own, uncontrolled, being wild or "asking for it." She is, rather, in a state of discipline, under command, subordinated to the ultimate patriarchal control system. Also -- though this is ridiculous to have to point out but bears noting if you follow the standard trajectory of rape prosecutions -- military women generally get raped, when they do, while wearing a shapeless, sexless uniform: this takes off the table the usual inquiry into whether a woman was dressed "provocatively."

Finally, there is an impetus for corporate culture to tackle the issue of women being raped in the military, or at least make very loud tut-tutting noises about it -- for the same reason that the Katy Perry video I critiqued got supported and widely promoted by the same media outlets that are owned by, or have advertising supported from, the corporations that make weapons systems and subcontract war the service industry.

Women who are willing to enlist are a major new profit center for War Inc. They are a new "product line," if you like, representing new growth capacities. New regulations that let women serve on the front lines represent a major boon to those industries that profit by expanding illegal combat zones around the world. It is useful for this market if women in war are glamorized, as in the Katy Perry video I analyzed, and bad for growth potential if it starts to get a reputation as a dangerous, sexually threatening place for a woman to work.

For the sake of women soldiers, who face so many other hazards and spend such long tours of duty away from their families, let us hope that the response to The Invisible War sparks more than five minutes of outrage and a gloss of concern. It needs to lead to actual housecleaning of a very corrupt and dangerous situation.