The Invisible War: Sexual Assault in the Military

A female soldier shows the two items she always carries on her body: a cross and a hunting knife.
“You always have protection with Jesus,” she says, “but sometimes you need just a little bit more.”
Similarly, another female soldier explains, “[My] knife wasn’t for the Iraqis… it was for the guys on my own side.”

For this year’s Veterans Day, I wanted to acknowledge the efforts of women soldiers. More than any time before in history, women are serving in the armed forces. According to 2007 estimates, women made up 15 percent of active duty forces in the Iraq War, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War.
And while many women have happily served in the U.S. armed forces, forging noteworthy careers in service to their country, it is also estimated that over 20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted during their service. And it is quite possible the real figures are much higher.
Sexual assault of fellow soldiers is the U.S. military’s dirty secret. The 2012 Sundance winning film, The Invisible War, documents the rampant epidemic of sexual assault of soldiers by their own comrades, and the military’s systematic policy of covering up most such cases. The film captures the voices and experiences of women soldiers (as well as some men) in all branches of the armed services – women who were not only assaulted by those pledged to be their ‘brothers in arms’, but unable to seek justice due to the military’s internal handling of such cases. Watch the film trailer:

Over and over again, women in the film describe entering the armed services due to family tradition, dreams of honor, professional camaraderie, and public service, only to be treated as second-class citizens (“walking mattresses”) by their fellow soldiers. Women describe being harassed, ridiculed, isolated, and yes, assaulted. They describe being afraid to walk alone through their bases, afraid to go to the latrine at night, afraid to go into the room of a superior when summoned. Women describe being attacked, drugged, beaten, repeatedly raped, and then told by higher ups to “deal with it” or risk demotion, further harassment, or even facing charges themselves for everything from adultery (if their assailant was married) to conduct unbecoming an officer to court-martial. Women describe being unable to remove themselves from unsafe situations, being unable to access mental or other health services, being unable to even receive VA benefits for injuries received from their assaults.
The military’s culture of silencing and retaliating against those who report rape only exacerbates the trauma of the assault. As The Invisible War documents, many assault survivors are so traumatized, they quit the military (‘Go AWOL’), and receive dishonorable discharges – therefore disqualifying themselves from Veterans and other benefits. They may suffer more PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) than soldiers returning from war, becoming homeless, alcoholic, drug dependent, and, with all too much frequency, actively suicidal.

It was journalist and Columbia University journalism professor Helen Benedict who first broke this story in a 2007 Salon.com article called “The private war of women soldiers.” The article, based on interviews of 20 female Iraq war veterans, and Benedict’s subsequent book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving In Iraq point to the military’s long history of covering up sexual misconduct, from the Tailhook incident in 1991 to Aberdeen in 1996. According to Benedict:

A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. And in a third study, conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the military, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.

The burning question, of course, is why? Why is there such a culture of sexual assault in the U.S. military?

As an ex-military colleague recently said to me, “In the military, your body is not your own, it is the property of the U.S. government.”

To read the rest of this essay, please visit Adios, Barbie  

Revisiting the Classics: Mother Goose and the Marks that Stories Leave

This post was part of the blog tour for Two and Twenty Dark Tales: Dark Retellings of Mother Goose Rhymes (Month 9 Books, 2012)

  

Two and Twenty Dark Tales

Edited By: Georgia McBride & Michelle Zink

Pub. Date: October 16, 2012

Publisher: Month9Books

Pages: 340

In this anthology, 20 authors explore the dark and hidden meanings behind some of the most beloved Mother Goose nursery rhymes through short story retellings. The dark twists on classic tales range from exploring whether Jack truly fell or if Jill pushed him instead to why Humpty Dumpty, fragile and alone, sat atop so high of a wall. The authors include Nina Berry, Sarwat Chadda, Leigh Fallon, Gretchen McNeil, and Suzanne Young.

There seems to be a cultural moment happening right now – when all sorts of children’s and YA books are revisiting the classics.

There are Greek mythology take-offs like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams’ Goddess Girls series, and Charlotte Bennardo and Natalie Zaman’s Sirenz series. There are Grimm’s brothers take-offs like Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm series.

There are Shakespearean take-offs like Michelle Ray’s Falling for Hamlet, and Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly (which I recently wrote about in an essay called “Shakespeare in Black and White.”). And don’t even get me started on the endless Austen take-offs. From Mandy Hubbard’s Prada and Prejudice to Jennifer Ziegler’s Sass and Serendipity to … well, there are a whole lot of them is my point.

But what purpose do classic revisitations serve in the popular imagination? Clearly, there is a hunger for them, and the popularly accepted idea that being introduced to take-offs will make young readers more interested in the original stories from which they originated.

And I guess I can believe that, if it comes to stories we want young people to be reading in their original, stories whose evergreen relevance we want to celebrate – like those of Shakespeare or Austen. But what about all those mythological and fairy-tale take-offs? Are those being published because we, as a culture, are really interested in our children re-reading Ovid’s myths or the original Brothers Grimm Tales? I’m not so sure. Instead, I think, such re-tellings actually reflect how ingrained those old stories already are into our individual and collective psyches.

Take the Mother Goose retellings in Two and Twenty Dark Tales: Dark Retellings of Mother Goose Rhymes, a collection edited by Georgia McBride and Michelle Zink and released in October 2012 from Month 9 Books. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to enter a contest on YAlitchat.org to be the one “wild card” contributor to this volume. Unlike the other authors in the book, like Sarwat Chadda or Leigh Fallon, who were asked to contribute and therefore could choose the Mother Goose rhyme they wanted to revisit, I, as the contest winner, was given my task: to write a dark retelling of Little Boy Blue.

And so, I had to ask myself: why are childhood rhymes so important to us? How do they invoke so much memory and emotion, rising to the surface of our consciousness the moment they are mentioned? As I asked myself these questions, I kept mulling over the word "Blue" and suddenly thought of the Joni Mitchell Song Blue (which I listened to over and over again my first year of college on an old tape player I had, but I’m dating myself here):

 Blue, songs are like tattoos/.../Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to fill in                                                                                     ----Joni Mitchell, “Blue”

And so I started thinking about tattoos, ink, and if stories are one way we human beings mark ourselves. In my day job, I'm a professor of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, so I think a lot about the power of stories and how stories work for human beings, for communities, and for societies.

To read the rest of this essay please visit Ladybug Storytime.