Women in the Armed Forces: Part 3 Sexual Harassment of Women Soldiers in the US

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The US society is highly emancipated and liberal with women having equal status in all walks of life. However, the recent case of Specialist Suzanne Swift of 54th Military Police Company has traumatised the entire nation and exposed the degree of ill-treatment meted out to women in the US forces. Swift has declined to serve in Iraq during her unit’s second tenure of duty there.

During her first tenure in Iraq, she was one of three women in her unit and has accused her superiors of intense sexual harassment using ‘war zone as a pretext’. She has claimed that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three sergeants in Iraq. Intense publicity received by the case has forced the authorities to take a fresh look at the problem that they all knew existed but preferred to ignore. Sexual harassment and assaults of women soldiers is known to be blatant and quite prevalent. The Defence Department has conceded that reports of sexual assaults rose 40 percent to 2,374 in 2005.

The extent to which the malaise of sexual harassment pervades can be gauged from the fact that a sexual harassment hotline set up at Aberdeen received 6,825 calls from women from all branches of the military in just two months. Many women have been too traumatised to lead a normal life afterwards and need continuous counselling and medical attention.

According to Miles Foundation, a non-profit organisation that provides service to victims of military violence and advocates stricter implementation of protective laws, approximately 508 women have complained of sexual assault in the forces since the beginning of Iraq war in 2003. Due to the ongoing hostilities, rape victims are neither given any medical treatment nor can any test be carried out in field conditions to collect medical proof of rape for pressing criminal charges.

Many women dread duty in war zone. Several young women prefer to be declared ‘absent without leave’ due to their fears of sexual assaults. But most of them are too scared to speak out. The case of Colleen Mussolino, who served as a cook at Women’s Army Corps, is symptomatic of the fear stifling women’s complaints. She was gang raped, beaten and left for dead. Under continued threats, she ultimately signed an undertaking promising not to press for prosecution.

‘Command rape’ has come to be accepted as a common phenomenon in the military. A superior official, under the might of his command authority, can force a subordinate woman soldier to accede to his sexual demands. Many feel that women in the military are no good as soldiers and their real value lies in their contribution to keep the organisation in good cheer.