I saw The Invisible War on Independent Lens last night, and was duly and thoroughly horrified.
It’s about sexual assault in the US military. There’s a lot of it, and it goes almost completely unpunished. 20% of women are raped during their service, and 1% of men are. Because there are a lot more men than women in the military, the 1% is a big absolute number.
The military is exactly like the Catholic church in this respect – sexual abuse including rape is dealt with in house – with the major difference that in the case of the military that’s legal.
But guess fucking what – that doesn’t work. It’s in house, so the people who should be policing are instead protecting. Rape victims have to go to their superiors to report a rape, and their superiors don’t want to do anything about it.
There was a lawsuit about this…and the court ruled against the victims. Rape is an occupational hazard in the military, the court ruled.
There were 26,000 sexual assaults in the military in 2012, which is a 35% increase over 2011.
In units where sexual harassment is tolerated, the incidence of rape triples.
Let me repeat that.
In units where sexual harassment is tolerated, the incidence of rape triples.
One woman was called a whore and a slut and a walking mattress after she was raped. She was told she should deal with it like a marine officer: ignore it and move on.
Rape is obsessive. People who do it once do it over and over. It’s not about ordinary soldiers run wild, it’s about sexual predators who go into the military.
(That last item seems inconsistent with things like Tailhook.)
One more obstacle – soldiers can’t sue.
Add the Feres doctrine to the list of hurdles. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court passed the doctrine in response to three cases of military members injured from causes unrelated to the battlefield — one man in a building fire from a malfunctioning heater, and two from botched surgeries. As such, they weren’t liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which at that time prevented individuals from suing the military for injuries on the battlefield. The military didn’t want to worry about getting sued for the very thing servicemembers had signed up for.
But with Feres, the court expanded the Tort Claims Act to ban servicemembers for suing based on any injuries that “arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service.” The Feres doctrine’s domain has stretched to prevent just about anyone from suing the military, including victims of rape. Servicemembers have been effectively blocked from civil courts, according to The Baltimore Sun.
“As strained and improbable as this analysis may be, its true danger has rested less in its immediate application to tort cases than in the foundation it has laid for a widely-metastasizing theory of intra-military immunity from any civil claim at all,” writes Rachel Natelson, Legal Director at Service Women’s Action Network, in Time magazine. “Over half a century later, Feres is not only a judicial invention, but, more alarmingly, the seed of an ever-increasing body of flawed doctrinal offspring.”
Judges have cited Feres to block the use of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which protects workers from sexual harassment and assault.
Even the Catholic church doesn’t have that on its side.