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Sex, Lies and Government Reports: Military Recruiters Sexually Abuse and Mislead Our Kids. We Can't Handle the Truth

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 01/29/2010 - 2:52pm.

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White 

Perhaps, in a culture where one-third of women serving in the U.S. military can expect to be raped, I shouldn't be surprised when a Marine recruiter is charged with impregnating a 17-year old girl in a high school where he was recruiting students to serve. 

I'm not surprised. I'm outraged.

Nestled within a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a list of examples of different types of "recruiter irregularities" recorded in 2008. The list, which included recruiters lying to National Guard applicants about the realities of service, purchasing drugs with a Navy recruit and falsifying information in an Air Force application packet, made note of several instances of sexual misconduct, one of them the aforementioned incident that resulted in pregnancy.

The report does give examples of disciplinary action taken by the military, but does not connect that action with the abuse that precipitated it.

Sadly, none of this is new. This report from Veterans for Peace illustrates that dozens of such cases are uncovered each year. Who knows how many are silenced?

GAO does give the U.S. Department of Defense credit for an unspecified improvement in recruiter accountability. One would hope for progress in that arena. A GAO report released in 2008 found that the military's programs to counter rampant sexual assault among its ranks were inadequate in at least five key ways. 

In the new report, the GAO recommended that the Defense Department better integrate the reporting of such incidents and adequately train each wing of the military in tracking and reporting, as well as to take steps to make the data more accessible and transparent.  

The Defense Department concurred with the recommendations in the report, and outlined plans to comply. But is that the best solution? The notion that a reporting system will preclude this kind of abuse ignores some of the more important cracks in this system.

In a way, recruiters for the U.S. military have one of the toughest jobs around. And in general, they don't apply or volunteer for such an assignment. 

Chief among the difficulties faced in such a job is the notion that a recruiter much reach a quota, or goal, of warm bodies volunteering for military service. In order to reach these goals (which one assumes increase in wartime, and even more so in a time of multiple deployments and defections) some find it necessary to fudge the awful truth of war and life in the military in general. This is pretty well documented; you can watch a whole slew of undercover videos of recruiters lying to potential recruits here and here you'll find a list of the top ten lies told by recruiters.

One lie that is not explicitly expressed in that list is the implicit lie that a soldier will be taken care of for the rest of his or her life in exchange for serving the nation. As I've pointed out before, most of us believe that all veterans' health needs are covered by the Veterans Administration. But it's simply not true. And even if they can get coverage, the quality of care is not as unfailingly excellent as some politicians might have us believe, a fact that many were faced with for the first time in the shocking reports about abuse at Walter Reed Hospital in 2007.

So, the fact that some find it necessary to lie to meet their quotas might suggest to the attentive that serving in the military really isn't all its cracked up to be. Furthermore, a quick study of the usual target of recruiters -- adolescents -- illustrates the delicacy of the situation. Perhaps you've seen the military's ad campaign where parents are depicted deciding to trust in the wisdom of their clench-jawed teen who wants to join the military. These people know what they're doing. Recruits on the other hand, often do not.

Should there be any wonder then, as to why communities might reject huge recruitment centers that spend millions in taxpayer dollars to entice children into the military with intense video games and the chance to sit in a real tank? The efforts of concerned parents to keep recruiters out of their kids' high schools make a lot more sense in this context. And, in the nature of a vicious cycle, the need for recruiters to lie to potential service members becomes even more evident in light of such efforts.

Yet, what is the alternative? Rely even more heavily than we already are on military contractors who rape and murder with even more impunity than the military, and who set up offshore shadow offices to evade taxes and avoid paying the benefits their employees deserve?

Or do we risk the international instability that may occur if we withdraw from our war zones, in order to save the nation's moral soul?

There are precious few choices here, and anyone who tells you differently is lying. 

I guess in this case the most we can hope for is that perhaps the 17-year-old pregnant girl in question was one of the few exposed to the truth of military culture before she joined up.

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS




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Study used in the article as a reference

Submitted by mhodge99 on Mon, 02/01/2010 - 8:46am.

 

 

Statement by

 

Kaye Whitley, Ed.D.

Director

Department of Defense

Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office

 

Regarding:  Factor Associated With Women’s Risk of Rape in the Military

 

The “Factor Associated with Women’s Risk of Rape in the Military” study, description of sexual assault in the military states that “1 in 3 women are raped in the military,” was conducted in 2002 (published in 2003).  This data is now outdated, as it was conducted prior to the establishment of the Department of Defense (DoD) Sexual Assault Prevention and Response office and the implementation of the DoD’s comprehensive Sexual Assault Prevention and Response policy.  Tremendous strides that have been made by DoD in sexual assault prevention and response since that time.  In particular, the Military Services have established extensive programs with highly trained staff who are working day in and day out to implement Department policies directed toward sexual assault prevention.  This includes our latest Outreach campaign that focuses on bystander intervention, “Our Strength is for Defending…Preventing Sexual Assault is part of our duty.” 

 

Also, more current research findings than those cited in the film suggest dramatically lower rates of sexual assault within the military.  An anonymous Gender Relations survey conducted by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) in 2006 found that 6.8 percent of women and 1.8 percent of men experience “unwanted sexual contact” in the active duty component.  There is an almost five-fold difference between the DMDC data and the statistics cited in the film.

 

Our concern with this study is its depiction that little has been done to protect the women and men in our Armed Forces from the crime of sexual assault.  These are dedicated individuals who put their lives on the line for this country every day.  Leaving the false impression that sexual assaults happen to every third female Service Member may cause those needing help not to come forward.  They may feel that the system does not care about them.  That could not be further from the truth.

www.sapr.mil/11/02/09

 

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Marching To Oblivion

Submitted by neoconned on Sat, 01/30/2010 - 2:06am.

Have you ever considered that the raft of violent video games and the lack of popular brain-boosting activites isn't part of a larger scheme of things? It is to prepare our young for their future as corporate predators, plundering the countries they are sent to invade for any potential enrichment they might personally realize. This will be necessary for their post-military service, for the moment they can't tote a gun, they will be tossed aside and be left to their own devices. No more protecting the wealthy from the consequences of their actions. Your retirement is what you can take from someone else at the point of a gun while you are young.

But there is a limit to what our nation can do. America is rapidly reaching the point where our national activities are costing too much. Those services which benefit individual citizens have already been slashed almost to non-existence. Now, those services which primarily benefited commercial interests with military applications are being gutted, one of which is the space program. But the military marches on, with Obama pledging to boost spending on nuclear weapons on top of the largest Pentagon budget ever. Such toys are expensive, and I doubt that the nations of the world are going to fund the means of extorting their riches from them.

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VA Hospitals

Submitted by DemoGoddess on Fri, 01/29/2010 - 5:52pm.

Your article listed the "abuse at Walter Reed Hospital in 2007" as an example of VA Hospital inadequacy; however, Walter Reed only serves active military.  It is not part of the VA hospital system.

That is not to say that the VA hospitals are filling the bill.  About 20 years ago my father (now deceased) as WWII veteran checked himself into the VA hospital in Washington, D.C. for back trouble, imagining that his service during the war entitled him to adequate health care.  After several days in the hospital he called his wife to get him out!  They were not helping him with his severe back pain.  He and his wife had to borrow money to get him back surgery at a private hospital and with a private doctor, which had an excellent outcome.  I wonder if they could have afforded it at today's costs?

The problem is that Congress is not willing to foot the bill for adequate care, instead granting tax cuts to those most able to pay.  The "voodoo economics," so dubbed by Bush I in his run for the presidential nomination against Reagan has become zombie economics--it will not die!  So while the most priviledged in our country are unwilling to part with their cash through taxes and manage to convince so many of the rest of this that all taxes are bad, our nation fails those who gave her so much.  The Right has dominated the dialogue, frightening people from doing anything other than the status quo.  Oh, and corporations pretty much own Congress and won't allow anything that doesn't add to their bottom line.

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