compiled by Patrick H. Moore
Although some crime news seems repetitive as in “so what else is new”, there is an under-reported crime that GQ covers in a new feature article – male-on-male rape in the military. It turns out that simply enlisting in the military increases a man’s risk of being sexually assaulted by a factor of 10 times. (It would be interesting to know how this differs from the increased odds of a guy being raped in prison.)
Matt Cantor of Newser.com writes:
Each day, the Pentagon says, 38 men in the military suffer sexual assault, but it’s not often talked about. In an extensive piece on the topic, GQ speaks to victims, gathering stories many felt they couldn’t tell. “When a gunnery sergeant tells you to take off your clothes, you better take off your clothes. You don’t ask questions,” says one victim.
To add insult to injury, before the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, military sexual assault victims were reportedly thrown out of the armed services for BEING THE VICTIMS of sexual assault. (I guess that, in a sense, this is better than being raped in prison cause you for damned sure are not going to get out of prison for being a sexual assault victim.)
And, of course, the vast majority of military sexual assault victims do not report the attack. Matt Cantor writes citing the GQ article:
About 81% of male victims in the military don’t report the attack. Some report having their lives threatened, and many feel that they’re somehow responsible for the violence, GQ reports. And “there’s the fear that “if other people know this about me, well, then, my life is over,” says a VA psychologist.
Cantor reports that one victim, who apparently confided in a military doctor, was told:
“Son, men don’t get raped.”
Of the cases that are reported, only 7 per cent result in convictions. And then there is the issue of just who are you going to report it to, or as one victim stated:
“Who was I going to report it to? He had serious rank over me.” This particular victim who tested positive for HIV after his attack. In other powerful victims’ quotes:
Another victim stated:
“My first sexual experience ever was being raped by these guys. It screwed me up: That’s what sex is supposed to be—anonymous, painful.”
Nathaniel Penn, the author of the GQ article recounts the story of a certain Navy man who was ambushed by three men in a remote area of his ship wehere he had been sent to get supplies. This was two weeks before his warship was due in port. The assailants threw a black hood over the victims head, strangled and sodomized him (no doubt brutally), then left him for dead on a stack of supply boxes.
The victim told no one for fear that his attackers, whose faces he hadn’t seen, would kill him if he did. In a state of great and profound panic, he hid in a bathroom until he could calm down a bit and until THE PAIN had subsided to a more tolerable level. After that, this man “quietly returned to his post”.
The victim says that he might have killed himself had his father not arrived to visit, and he considers the timing of the visit “almost a miracle. When I saw him, it was the most safe feeling I’d ever felt in my whole life.”
But still, although the victim spent the next five days on board ship with his father, he couldn’t tell him what had happened. “I just kept it inside.” All the while he felt certain that he was being watched by his assailants.
* * * * *
I am reminded of a remark by Sir Winston Churchill. According to Kay Halle (Robson Books, 1985), in 1913, when the young Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, he was having trouble with some of his admirals at a strategy meeting. Sir Winston was apparently a bit biting and one of the admirals accused him of “having impugned the traditions of the Royal Navy.” This provoked Churchill to reply:
“And what are they (the traditions)? They are rum, sodomy and the lash.”
Or as Bob Dylan once stated in a song named “George Jackson” about the Black Panther, George Jackson, who was murdered in prison:
“Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners. The rest of us are guards.”