Military Veterans and Rape

In my twisted mind, this seemed appropriate for Memorial Day:

AlterNet has a great piece up about new recent finding that 29% of incarcerated veterans are in on rape or sexual assault charges, which means that they are twice as likely to be incarcerated for that reason than non veterans. Why? Here’s one insightful answer:

Sexual violence has been a de facto weapon of war since the beginning of the patriarchal age. Raping and assaulting women is seen as a way to attack the honor of the enemy, and women have always been the spoils of war. The result is that many types of violence against women are exacerbated by militarism, including the indirect effects on civilian populations both during hostilities and after the conflict ends and soldiers go home.

. . .

Examples are not hard to find. Before and during WWII, the Japanese enslaved as many as 200,000 “comfort” women, and after the defeat of the Japanese, the United States continued to use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves. During the 1990s more than 5,000 women were trafficked into South Korea primarily to work as “entertainers” near U.S. military bases. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, frequently for the purpose of ethnic cleansing in countries such as Bosnia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Amen. Read the whole piece. It’s short, but spot-on. I will be up-front and say that I have a lot of problems with the military, but I definitely believe that teaching people to kill will devalue humanity. If those that we teach to kill are predominantly male, if they grow up in a patriarchal culture where they are taught that women are not worth much anyway, if the people who are teaching them to kill purposely exclude women and create an environment that encourages pornography and prostitution, women are going to be at the top of the list of the devalued.

Notice that rape cultures seem to exist mostly in strongly in all-male, patriarchal, hyper-masculine organizations. Fraternities. Sports teams. And yes, the military. Get a bunch of men together, teach them about how important masculinity is and that they are meant to devalue anything feminine and be aggressive? You’ve got yourself a recipe for rape.

Tagged as: war