Raped and Silenced in the Barracks

AlterNet: Investigative Report

When military sexual assault survivors call Susan Avila-Smith, she advises them to keep their mouths shut while she works on getting them home. “It breaks my heart to do that,” she says, “but I want to get them out alive and that’s my main goal.” Since she left the Army in 1995, Avila-Smith estimates that she has helped about 1,200 rape survivors separate from the U.S. Armed Forces and claim their Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits. As founder of Women Organizing Women, an online support group for survivors of military sexual trauma (MST), Avila-Smith has heard it all.


[..]The Lauterbach case, according to Avila-Smith and many others, exemplifies the “criminal failure” of all branches of the military to address sexual assault for what it is—a violent crime. It is a “broken system” that she says puts victims on the defense, grants immunity to assailants and, in the end, puts rape survivors who have the courage to speak out, in even greater danger than if they had just accepted the abuse as collateral damage in their military careers.


In 2003, a firestorm of media reports and investigations, prompted by an anonymous whistle-blower at the Air Force Academy, exposed the prevalence of sexual assault in the armed forces and its training centers. That same year, the results of a study conducted by Dr. Anne Sadler of the Iowa City VA Medical Center found 28 percent of female veterans having suffered MST while on active duty.


[..]A 2004 survey of U.S. service members conducted by the Pentagon’s Advisory Committee on Women in the Services found fear of repercussions to be the number one “perceived barrier” to reporting sexual abuse, noted by 81 percent of female respondents and 73 percent of male respondents. Confidentiality, career-related concerns and distrust of leadership were also cited by a majority of rape victims.


[..]Former CID agent Sgt. Myla Haider told In These Times that Thornton’s case is not rare. “If there was an adequate response to begin with, it might have made it to court and gotten prosecuted,” she says, “but [Thornton’s case] wasn’t anything unusual from what I’ve seen.”


Haider has investigated dozens of rape cases and says she almost always encountered a pervasive “attitude toward victims,” that guarantees the failure of the case. “The investigators themselves,” Haider explains, “when working on cases, tended to focus on reasons a victim could be lying.” She described seeing “tag team interviews,” in which “one agent after another is sent in there to ‘get the truth’ out of the victim.”


“On occasion, that results in the victims becoming very upset,” she added, describing one case in which a victim “went running out of the office and declined to cooperate any further.” Every MST survivor interviewed for this investigation told a similar story.


[..]“My CID wasn’t an investigator, he was an interrogator,” says Pvt. S. Clark, of North Carolina, who preferred her first name not be used. “The thing that I remember is him leaning over the desk, with his cigarette breath, screaming at me, ‘Why won’t you admit that it was rough, consensual sex between two drunken adults?’”


Clark’s attacker had beaten her so badly that, months later, she began having seizures, which her doctors attributed to “cranial tearing.” Still, she says, the CID agent “made me feel as if I had dishonored my army and my country by speaking out against another soldier.”


Sometimes this attitude, says Haider, leads to claims being recanted. “The law enforcement response makes it so that victims don’t want anything to do with the investigation anymore,” she says. Even if the victim continues to cooperate despite being re-victimized by law enforcement, the focus on her credibility happens at the expense of collecting relevant testimony, leaving the case little chance of surviving.


While physical evidence is collected according to protocol, Haider says this can seldom prove anything other than intercourse—useful for “stranger rapes,” but irrelevant for proving acquaintance rapes, which are the majority of cases.


“CID training does not focus on evidence collection for acquaintance rape situations,” Haider says. As a result, “CID agents tended not to take acquaintance rape seriously.”


CID spokesman Chris Grey says that since Haider left the command, it has begun “a very comprehensive Sexual Assault Sensitivity Training program. However, according to Haider, recent data call into question the effectiveness of that training. According to the Pentagon’s “2006 Annual Report on Military Services Sexual Assault,” 18 percent of the cases reported in 2004 were thrown out for being unfounded, unsubstantiated or “lacking sufficient evidence,” prior to reaching a court martial. In 2006, the first full year during which the training program had the opportunity to reap results, the proportion of cases thrown out on the same grounds more than doubled, to 37 percent.


Even when cases do result in commander action, that action is rarely ever a criminal justice response. In 2006, only 292 cases (out of 2,974 reported) resulted in a court martial. Meanwhile, 488 cases resulted in an “administrative punishment,” such as a letter of reprimand, a discharge from the military, forced resignation or a reduction in pay or rank. “The 2005 reforms have done nothing in terms of offender accountability,” Haider explains. “There are public service announcements and ad campaigns that say the military has zero tolerance for sexual assault, but the reality speaks a different truth.” She said she doesn’t believe there are many rapists in the military, but those that are sexual predators learn quickly that they can get away with it and will inevitably go on to attack again.


“They are sending women into combat zones, but not doing what it takes to protect them,” she says.


Protection, however, is not only a matter of deterring crime through punitive measures. It is also a matter of taking action to protect victims from their alleged assailants after a crime is reported. That responsibility rests in large part with commanders. Thornton was allegedly left to live in the same barracks as her assailant for a full six months after her assault, despite repeated requests for a transfer.


[..]Leaving survivors in the same place to fend for themselves also leaves them open to the scorn of their fellow soldiers. Many survivors call it the “second rape” -- the moment when they realize that not only their command but their platoon, as well, is going to desert them.


[..]According to ex-CID agent Haider, the chauvinist culture might explain quite a bit. “Rape is not taken seriously enough in the military because it is a crime that affects primarily women—and women are still not taken seriously in the military,” she says. “There is a lot more sympathy if the victim is a man because most agents are male and they can relate to the violation. They are horrified by that. But when it’s a woman, it’s the opposite. Their attitude is almost contemptuous.”