Not a happy fun reblog post: US Military Rape (Congress is finally investigating it!)

About flippin' time. I remember a year or two ago, DemocracyNow doing several hours on the subject. It's disgusting that we call our soldiers "heroes" but can't protect them from and respect them enough to stop rape from their own. Here's something Stowe Boyd reposted on his UnderpaidGenius.com:

via dekrazee1's posterous, BBC News - Women at war: Sexual violence in the US military

Congressional leaders, who have been holding hearings this month on sexual assault in the armed forces, say that more needs to be done to tackle what recent studies indicate is a widespread problem.

Once you have been raped in the military you are most likely to be raped over and over. - Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez

In 2003, in a survey of female veterans conducted by the University of Iowa, funded by the US Department of Defense, 30% of the 500 female veterans interviewed reported an attempted or completed rape.

Equally worryingly, the Department of Defense estimated in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault, that around 90% of rapes in the military are never reported.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, who sits on the Military Personnel Subcommittee, successfully lobbied last year for the development of a Sexual Assault Database to encourage accountability within the Armed Forces.

%u201CThere are plenty of phone calls that come into my office of alleged assault of women by our military men,%u201D she says.

%u201CThey are heartbreaking. Some women don%u2019t want to go public with it, some have gone public with it and they%u2019ve been drilled out of the military.

%u201CI%u2019m told that the statistics are that once you have been raped in the military you are most likely to be raped over and over.%u201D

She says that not enough prosecutions are happening and that while the Pentagon is taking it more seriously, big changes still need to be made.

%u201CWhy is it that when a woman alleges rape, the outcome shows that the man who supposedly did this was demoted or moved to another unit? I want to know why this is happening!%u201D

via underpaidgenius.com

When I was a kid I was in Jr. ROTC. I can think of quite a few women who were under my command. I worry that some of them went on to serve in the actual military and had to suffer through this. If I had known what the rape statistics were back then I don't think *I* would have been so gung-ho about the military (especially since men get raped in the military, too).

Posted via web from thepete's posterous