Guest Blog: Support Justice for Military Women
Thanks to Sarah L. Blum for her guest plog on support for women in the Armed Forces. Sarah is a decorated nurse, Vietnam Veteran, and author of, “Women Under Fire: Abuse in the Military,” whic will be released on November 2. Learn more at: www.womenunderfire.net
It is time to support justice for women serving our country in the U. S. Armed Forces. Not only is there a culture of abuse toward women in our military, there has been a very high level of passivity and resistance in the DOD and the Joint Chiefs to address it. The crisis today is worse than ever and has been going on since WWII. In 2012 one in 16 women were sexually assaulted, up from 1 in 23 in 2011. The numbers for the military academies are also worse with 80 cases reported in the 2011-2012 academic year as compared to 65 in the previous year. There are over 70 sexual assaults a day in the U.S. Military.
We recently saw a show of tremendous power and authority in the June 4 Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing where there were three full rows of uniformed military and two women survivors to testify. A statement by Vice Joint Chiefs Chairman, Admiral James Winnefeld in Polymic, got my hackles up. He said, “We can assume that there will be at least some takedown of power.” What does that mean? I would hope as a part of the Joint Chiefs, that he would want the best for our Armed Forces, yet instead he is focused on maintaining their own power.
Our military has been covering up their pervasive culture of abuse toward women for decades and the time has come for them to look at what they have created and cultivated. It is time for them to live up to their own values of honor, integrity and courage. They need to be of good courage, as the soldiers they have been and those they train are, and do what is right and best for women serving our country and our military as a whole.
The U.S. Military is a target rich environment for sexual predators because they feel and are safe there doing their heinous acts of sexual assault. They have been consistently protected by their brother soldiers and commanders and even been promoted in rank, while the women they raped were humiliated, isolated ostracized, denied compassionate care, had their health and self respect destroyed, and lost their careers. Sixty-two percent of the women who reported sexual assault were retaliated against. Many were kicked out of the military as unfit for service, even with exemplary records, yet because they had the audacity to report their sexual assault by a soldier or higher-ranking superior, they were no longer acceptable. The military services all have their protocols for how they handle women who report rape and rarely is it appropriate.
Outrage is called for by the public and Congress. You have to know what is actually going on within our military services so that you can take a stand and insist on justice. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has expressed her outrage directly to those three rows of men, and one woman, in uniform. She also did something substantial when she introduced the Military Justice Improvement Act of 2013 with Senator Boxer, Senator Collins, and a bipartisan group. S967 would take the reporting and decision-making, in cases of sexual assault, outside of the victim’s chain of command and put it in the hands of a trained military prosecutor. Senator Gillibrand and many women veteran survivors of military sexual assault believe that is the way to have accountability in the military justice system and they are asking for full-scale congressional support.
Until the culture of abuse toward women in our military is changed, women will not be willing to report. There is no reason for them to be victimized first by their assailant and then by the military corps they are part of, because they report a crime. Criminals need to be brought to justice. Survivors need appropriate support, care, services and justice.
The UCMJ, Uniform Code of Military Justice, is broken severely and must be fixed. I have interviewed over 58 women veterans over the past seven years to write the book Women Under Fire: Abuse in the Military which details the pervasive abuse culture and gives specific structure to our military on how to bring positive change to their injustices and foul treatment of women.
