Oct 28, 2009

WOMAN, JOIN THE ARMY! THEN GET RAPED AND SHUT UP!

Did you ever heard about it on CNN, on the New York Times, on the Washington Post? They might have mentioned it briefly but they haven't make any noise about it. It seems it takes a French an a Spanish journalists to try to go deep into a an issue that seems too frightening for the US media: rape in the US army. Pascale Bourgaux was in New York this week for the premiere of 'Rape in the ranks: the enemy within', a short documentary that she directed and that was born after Mercedes Gallego's idea.


'The rape of Cassandra', a detail from The fall of Troy,
Greek pottery, c. 480 BCE

Gallego is the New York correspondent for the Spanish daily El Correo, great journalist and a good friend of mine. She was embedded with the American troops during the Iraq invasion in 2003 and she witnessed how the female soldiers feared going alone to the toilet at night. All of them knew that chances of being sexually assaulted were too many. All of them knew that being raped in the army it was too common. All of them knew that perpetrators were left unpunished and all of them knew that the victims were usually advised by their superiors to shut up and let it go. She wrote about it in her newspaper and also in her book Más allá de la batalla (Beyond the battle). She was astonished by the lack of information related to the problem in the American media and six years later nothing seems to have changed.

Bourgaux, who also spent sometime covering the Iraq war, partnered with Gallego to research the subject and this week their 29 minutes documentary finally premiered in American soil -so far only the French tv has screened it-. The film explores the issues through the testimonies of some of those women. It's very disturbing to listen to somebody like Jessica Kenyon, raped twice, once in the US and once in Korea. She quit the army because "it was the only way to escape", in her own words. Her rapists are free and have never being punished. Now she is a counselour for other veterans who have been raped, has a help line (1888 483 8725) and receives about 30 calls a week. It's equally disturbing to listen to a mother whose daughter died in Iraq in her sleep. The army says Tina Priest killed herself with her own gun. Her family doesn't believe it: weeks earlier the 21 years old girl came forward with a rape accusation and she feared for her life. The rapist is still free. In this clip from Democracy Now you can watch some of the film footage:



The statistics speak for themselves: A Pentagon report earlier this year found one in three female service members are sexually assaulted at least once during their enlistment. 63% percent of nearly 3,000 cases reported last year were rapes or aggravated assaults. It's anybody going to do anything about it? At least Pascale and Mercedes did but women in the army need much more than foreign press attention, they need big American headlines and real action. (a note to Spanish readers: Pascale was the only reporter who interviewed the soldiers in the tank that killed Spanish reporter José Couso at the Palestine Hotel). Beyond the crisis of the press, journalists that are still willing to do real reporting are doing it, even without money.

Here a series of links related to the subject:
Study of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine about the estimate of sexual abuse in the US Army (pdf)

U.S. Military Violence Against Women

Helen Benedict, “The Private War of Women Soldiers", Salon.com

5 comments:

  1. Hi, I'm a friend of JSB's that you met at the Getty, found your blog through a comment you left on his FB page, nice to meet you.

    Gary Trudeau's 'Doonesbury' has been doing Yeoman's Work in bringing this issue of military rape, and its long-term fall-out to public attention.

    The strips directly concerning the character Army character Melissa, who was raped by one of her superiors are locked behind a Pay-Wall, so here's a recent sample that I'm able to link to:

    http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=25ce82563f3643a528ed4f55b5e194c3

    Another character also brought up the issue:

    http://www.military.com/forums/0,15240,173186,00.html

    On another note, men in the military get raped too, y'know.

    At least I did when l was stationed in Okinawa when I was an enlistee in the Marine Corps under Reagan/Bush l. l was dealing with my own set of low self-esteem issues at the time so l didn't pursue bringing the perp To Justice. Shortly after this incident I found out that a Navy Corpsman who had also been date-raped by this individual took matters into his own hands, which led to that individual's arrest, so l let it go.

    This is not meant to conflate the idea that gays, (closeted or otherwise), in the military are rapists. I find it a travesty that one's sexual orientation can be used as a disqualifier for military service.

    But, obviously, that's just me.

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  2. Quick follow-up, I was just over on the Doonesbury page and noticed that they're doing a feature this week on the Melissa character who has gone to seek counseling at her local Vet Center for help with her MST, (Military Sexual Trauma), the new clinical abbreviation that's been recently coined for Military on Military rape.

    This is a better overview of what he's been doing on this issue:

    http://doonesbury.com/strip/melissas_story.html

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