"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I heard a disturbing interview on the BBC with the author of the book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq about epidemic of sexual assault against female soldiers in the US armed forces.
The author cited the Pentagon's own statistics: 30 percent of ALL female soldiers in the American military (not just those in Iraq) have been raped by male soldiers supposedly on their own side.
An astonishingly high percentage like this suggests not the deviancy of a few individuals but an institutional culture that, at bests, enables widespread sexual assault both by and against those venerated as Our Heroes.
In the interview, the author told the story of a woman she interviewed. The soldier explained how she was stalked and then raped by a colleague. She said that when she went to the authorities to report the incident, she was strongly discouraged from doing so and warned that she would be "court martialed for leaving her weapon unattended in a war zone."
If these women truly are Fighting For Our Freedoms So We Don't Have To, then isn't dealing with snipers and IUDs enough to ask of them? Should they also have to worry that their own "comrades" might brutally rape them? Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but when they signed up to be in harm's way, wasn't the understanding that the harm might come from the Enemy, not from their colleagues?
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