ELLE Magazine: Inside the Lives of Soldier Girls
Journalist Helen Thorpe discusses her new book tracking the parallel lives of three women soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with Elle Magazine:
You write that “eventually as many as one third of the women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would report having been subjected to a sexual assault of some kind during their deployments.” Knowing that, did their stories still shock you?
I had heard some of those statistics, but when you hear them in a vacuum it’s hard to understand how they could be true. I had to dig a little bit to get them to tell me those things. But when they described the environment, it all became more explicable. There are so many more men, women are viewed as commodities, they’re very scarce, the men are competing for them, there’s illicit drinking going on sometimes, and everybody’s under a lot of stress. They didn’t think to tell me they needed a buddy to go to the shower: That’s just the way it was. You start to understand how these awful statistics could get so high.
