According to official sources female US soldiers are several times more likely to be raped by their fellow male soldiers than to be injured by enemy forces. Now that says a lot about the state of the US Army!
What it says is that women and men shouldnât be serving in the armed forces together in combat, and especially not cooped up in places like submarines. Itâs a feminist experiment from the 1970s or so that people predicted wouldnât work, and it doesnât.
My question would be how many of those rapes are rape, and how many involve consensual sex and then regrets afterward. Especially at American universities, the rape statistics are much higher than the actual number of women a reasonable person would consider to have been raped, because over the decades they keep expanding the definition of rape to include all kinds of things that were clearly consensual at the time they happened. Itâs similar to the meaning of âsexual harassmentâ expanding to include even things like complimenting a womanâs professional clothing.
You donât mention what the âofficial sourcesâ were, and Iâd like to see them, so that I can evaluate whether I believe them or not.
You can read a bit more about it here: There was a comment made on a segment on the news recently about rape and women in the military that a woman in the military is more likely to be raped than to be killed by an enemy combatant.
On May 6, KELO evening news carried a story about Dave Eliason the manager of Anabelleâs and Oliviaâs, two adult Bookstores in Sioux Falls, who was charged with sexual harassment and rape by two former employees.
On May 9, KELO carried a story on their 10:00 news about workplace bullying. Susan was bullied for years, and bullying destroyed her reputation. There were a group of people who cooperated with the bullies. The story said that 40% of employees have been bullied on the job. They say that bullying is four times as common as sexual harassment and it is often motivated by jealousy, trying to get a person to leave their job. They think that bullying will become as important as sexual harassment was a decade ago.
NOW on PBS had a story about sexual harassment in the military on May 23, 2008. They said that a third of women in the military are harassed.
The DOD has created a unit to deal with sexual assault and an 800 number to report it. Very few perpetrators are charged and convicted of it. It leads to post traumatic stress. Women in the military are more likely to get PTS from sexual assault than from combat.
No woman with any brains goes to work for a man who owns pornographic bookstores. Did the article say whether or not he was convicted, or was he only charged? Or does charged mean convicted in your mind? Anyway, any woman with sense gets a job at Burger King â or any job â rather than working at a pornography store. These women were stupid. They may also be lying.
I have worked in many US corporations, and the 40% figure for workplace bullying is quite ridiculous. To the extent that any bullying goes on in a company, itâs unlikely that even 1% are bullied. The journalists must have a very flexible concept of bullying!
Well, thatâs PBS. Remember that in the United States almost anything can be considered âsexual harassmentâ, including many things that are not remotely sexual. There was a man who swore in a company meeting and the judge found him guilty of sexual harassment not because he swore, but because after he swore he said, âExcuse me, ladies.â The judge said that creating that sort of separation between the men and the women was âsexual harassmentâ. According to the judge, if he had just sworn and not apologized to the women, he wouldnât have been sexually harassing anyone.
I was once accused of âsexual harassmentâ because I wouldnât sign my approval to some work that I wasnât given time to inspect. There was no âsexualâ and no âharassmentâ in the situation at all, just a revenge motive, but I had to be dragged through a couple weeks of meetings and inquiries before the woman finally admitted I hadnât done anything wrong.
So in the US, âsexual harassmentâ can be as innocent as saying, âNice shoes!â two days in a row, or anything that a woman doesnât want a man to say or do, whether it is sexual or not. These stupid accusations get mixed in with the serious harassment cases, and it makes it look like âsexual harassmentâ is wildly out of control everywhere, which a reasonable man or woman would not agree with.
The fact that very few perpetrators are charged and convicted of sexual assault tells me that many of the charges are bogus. A lot of strange things have happened since the US armed forces began deploying women into combat along with men. Women soldiers have an uncanny way of getting pregnant right after they get their deployment orders. There tends to be a lot of sex and pregnancy on submarines. They should really go back to the old convention of not deploying men and women together.
I wouldnât be surprised if many women are claiming harassment or sexual assault just to get out of combat zones and be returned to the US.
Sorry, but that sounds a bit confusing. I always had the idea that people voluntarily join the Army in the US.
Now, if so, might some US native women have wrong ideas of the Army´s tasks? Especially the US Army is well known to be very active in warlike events all over the world. And if people enlist it, they must have known that they have to serve martial service, mustn´t they? Or haven´t they been unable to imagine combatsâŚhad they only had too heroic ideas of battlesâŚand later rue having joined the Army?
I served in the US Army side by side with women and there is no reason they need to be segregated. Some of the best soldiers I knew were women as were some of the worst. Hearing people say they shouldnât be allowed together reminds me if the equally idiotic opinions that gays should not be allowed to serve. Guess what, a big chunk of the Army is gay and a big chunk is female and amazingly enough the job still gets done with relatively few problems.
Some women soldiers do make false allegations to get out of their duties. The more common way to get out of combat is to get pregnant on purpose which happens far more often than anything else.
The reason a woman is more likely to be assaulted than shot is because most of the more dangerous jobs are held by men, and because the US military is the best trained fighting force in history and most of that training us based on keeping each other alive.
Sadly there is still a problem with sexual harassment. Probably no one on the planet does more to prevent it, but when you have a million employees, a few bad eggs are inevitable. Did your article also mention that a rape conviction in the military carries a life sentence? Probably not.
The thing you probably donât know about the US armed forces is that when you enter, if you sign up for a long enough hitch, maybe five years, you can get technical education that may have application in civilian life, such as engineering, supply chain management, and a whole host of other professions. When you finish your time in the military, they often pay for an entire civilian university education. You can get free or cheap healthcare, a military pension and a lot of other benefits. Plus, since most soldiers are never deployed anywhere dangerous, the average death rate of soldiers is lower than that of, say, motorcycle riders.
I think that some people enlist for the goodies, without thinking they might be deployed into a war zone, and then when they suddenly have to see action, they want to get transferred to something less dangerous.
Thank you, OxfordBlues, for giving women at least a little bit of credit.
I was starting to get somewhat tired and annoyed, honestly, to be constantly forced to defend my gender. Itâs really scary, in a way, how men view women and most often they donât even realize how sexist they are.
To say that women shouldnât serve in the military is to say that women should stay away wherever men are. Being a soldier is a job like any other. Might as well say that women shouldnât be allowed to work where men work. That sounds really silly and backwards, I think. Women donât take anything away from men, yet so many men seem to think that way.
When I was in the military, everybody had to have a so-called âbattle buddyâ. Even after training, soldiers are supposed to go about in pairs of the same sex. Kind of like a âwitness and chaperonâ kind of thing. It is done as a safety precaution for the women as well as the military.
In some other countries, women are also serving in the Infantry. In America, they donât, at least when I was there. Strangely enough, these women are pulling their load just as their male colleges do.
I have just recently read an article where a Sergeant said, âA female soldier is often called a bitch, a slut or a dyke, and even if she is married, she is still probably regarded as one of the three."
The question shouldnât be, âWhat does that tell you about the American Militaryâ, but âWhat does that tell you about men?â
Claudia
Yep. Strangely people who have never served seem to think theyâre the most knowledgeable of military life. I like to think that the military is the great equalizer. Surely you donât get anywhere near the amount of benefits people think you get (like the free degree) but you do get to live and work in an environment where you are measured by the job you do and not your race, religion, sex, or sexuality.
If only the civilian world were half as equitable as the military we should count ourselves lucky.
I actually wish the US had some sort of mandatory service requirement like Germany. I think it would help end a lot of ignorance.
One fish is enough to contaminate a whole river as the same is the case with military. There are very few "testosterone charged " men in the military who are serving the purpose and letting the repo down .
I just want to highlight the fact that it is not only in the military jobs that women are being raped but to deca the figure corporate world helps a lot.Why donât we ever look at them as if that is not a sin there? We took these matters seriously only when something big involve into it as like military.Go! and look all your around first and try to think a solution which is useful against rape be it anywhere , military or this âmrityulokâ.
Do it!
Sachin.
In English we say that one bad apple doesnât spoil the whole barrel. Itâs the opposite proverb.
Hello Sachin,
I think you said something really important here: women get raped not only in the military. A lot of sexual harassment and rape often gets swept under the table to save a companyâs image. Should women be forbidden to work where men work just because there are men who canât control themselves but want to act out their control on women? I donât think so.
Claudia
And what about Male US soldiers?
Just I donât see âfemaleâ in the heading?
And heres another Stat I find unbelievable
There were more deaths in 2009 by Suicides than Killed in action.
youtube.com/watch?v=nqdKQHUJ ⌠r_embedded
Jamie, youâve got a real obsession with male rape. You keep bringing it up. What happened to you?
This just means that (a) Iraq is gradually being pacified, (b) Iraqi troops are handling more of the combat, so (c) the rate of US combat deaths is getting low.
Note also that even when the war was really raging, most deaths were civilian, because Al-Qaeda and the dead-enders from the Saddam Hussein regime deliberately targeted them, or else they hid among them hoping to get civilian casualties for propaganda purposes.
hehe!! I was waiting on thatâŚ
I donât have any stats/proof but something just tells me there are way more cases of Guys getting raped in the Military - simply because there are far more guys in the Military?
Is that not logical?
I never heard of any guys being raped by other guys when I was in, but there were a few cases of women raping men they outranked.
Men raped by women? This can only happen to Americans!
How is that?
Anyone could use their position of power over someone else to force sex upon them. Thatâs rape.
There is an entire genre of sex clubs in Germany based on women raping men. Certainly doesnât appeal to me, but itâs obviously not limited to certain nationalities.