MILITARY RAPE (another of my upbeat stories)

MILITARY RAPE: Rampant, Ignored
by Nan Levinson

When Panayiota Bertzikis tried to tell her commanding officers that she had been raped by a shipmate in May 2006 four months into her tour at the Burlington, Vt. Coast Guard Station, they discouraged her from talking to an Equal Opportunity officer, barred her from seeing a civilian therapist, ignored a written confession from her attacker, and browbeat her into silence.  No wonder she thought she was the only one this had happened to.

But thanks to victims-turned-activists, such as Bertzikis, who are pulling military sexual trauma out from the shadows, it’s becoming harder for the U.S. military to ignore the problem.  In February, Bertzikis, along with 14 other women and two men, filed a lawsuit (Cioca et al v Rumsfeld and Gates), charging Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, with mishandling their sexual assault cases.  New plaintiffs are being added.

MST is an epidemic -- nearly a quarter of women serving in combat areas say they have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers – but everyone agrees that reliable statistics don’t exist.  The Pentagon, which recorded 3,158 incidents of sexual assault in 2010 (a slight decrease from 2009), estimates that only about 14 percent of all incidents are reported. 
Last December, the advocacy group, Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit to shake loose records about the prevalence and cost of MST.

Back in 2006, when Bertzikis went online after her rape to look for help, she found almost no information, but when she blogged about her experience, stories similar to hers poured in.  In response, Bertzikis – who left the Coast Guard in 2007 and is now 29 -- set up the Military Rape Crisis Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She estimates that it has provided some 6,200 people with counseling, legal advocacy, case management -- and the assurance that they are not alone.

Susan Burke, the attorney in Washington, DC, who initiated the lawsuit, says, “The military is woefully mishandling these cases all the time.”  Intending to file what she calls “a reform lawsuit,” she sought plaintiffs through advocacy groups, including the Crisis Center. 

Their allegations are not  easy reading. The plaintiffs report being spat on, grabbed at, masturbated over, stripped, drugged, threatened, stalked, beaten (in one instance, so brutally the examining physician cried), and raped.  One rapist took photos, another videotaped the event.  (That tape was later used as evidence against the victim because, she was told, it showed that she “did not struggle enough.”)

When the victims reported the abuse, their commanders ignored them, insisted the sex was consensual or a result of drinking, and ordered them not to pursue action because it would ruin their attacker’s career.  In a world where rank is everything, those raped were generally low-level, while their rapists were often their superiors.  The plaintiffs report being  forced to continue working under their attackers‘ supervision or to live nearby, allowing them no safe place to heal. 

Retaliation was routine and punishment was rare.  By the Pentagon’s reckoning, fewer than 21 percent of reported cases make it to court martial and only a little over half of those result in convictions. And in the ultimate insult, as a result of their trauma, many MST victims are deemed unfit to serve and get kicked out of the military. “Every case I get,” says Bertzikis, “it’s always, they blame the victim, the perpetrator never gets punished, and the survivor is the one who ends up losing her career.”       

The lawsuit depicts a culture in which such behavior is routine, systemic, and pervasive. Because the military investigates itself, there is little incentive to deal with a problem that makes everyone look bad.  Of course, in civilian life, most rapes also go unreported and most assailants don’t spend time in prison, but the military is a world unto itself and once you’ve enlisted, you can’t just walk away, so the aftermath of an unpunished assault there can be especially traumatic for victims.  Commanders have control over enlistees’ work, career, living situation, safety, medical care, community standing, and, to an alarming degree, sanity.  When a rape survivor is forced to confront her attacker daily, Bertzikis said, “The only options out are going AWOL or suicide.” 

With all that power, individual commanders face little accountability.  Anu Bhagwati, Executive Director of SWAN and a former Marine captain, believes that is the biggest problem.

It may not be possible for civilians to change military culture, but it is possible to institute some oversight and accountability. Language inserted in the 2010 defense spending bill addressed some of the issues, but was watered down at the last minute, leaving major gaps.  In April, a few legislators introduced bills intended to pick up the slack. 

The Defense STRONG Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Niki Tsongas [D-MA] and Mike Turner [R-OH], would guarantee access to a military lawyer, allow victims to  transfer from the base or unit where the assault happened, ensure confidentiality of communication with advocates and counselors, give some teeth to SAPRO, the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, and make a stab at instituting effective rape prevention training, which now seems to focus on telling service women how to avoid getting raped. [Provisions from this act made it into the House version of the 2012 Defense Authorization Act in May.]

The Holley Lynn James Act, written by Rep. Bruce Braley [D-IA] with the help of SWAN, would go further to institute independent oversight and ensure that MST cases would go to military court automatically. 

The bills’ prospects are uncertain, but the lawsuit, along with some horrific, high-profile cases, has focused attention on pervasive sexual abuse and trauma in the U.S. military. “There’s a groundswell,” says SWAN’s Bhagwati. “The epidemic is widely known, so Congress can’t afford to ignore it any longer.”


(c) Nan Levinson 2011

(A slightly shorter version of this appeared in the June 2011 issue of In These Times.)