If anyone ever bought the idea that sexual liberation can come down the barrel of a gun, then the Guardian’s harrowing documentation of the sexual abuse of US soldiers by their colleagues destroys the notion entirely.
Interviews reveal a culture of denial so ingrained into military politics that women who report rape are often punished for bringing it to the attention of their superiors.
The way in which female soldiers are presented in wartime – in relation to the strange, foreign, Muslim men they are fighting – is linked to the way in which they are socialised at home.
Imperialist rhetoric insists that our ‘brave girls’ have the most to fear from homemade bombs and men with beards. The truth is, their barracks are more dangerous than the battlefield. Statistically, women serving in Iraq are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a colleague than hit with enemy fire.
This is a truth, however, which is not reflected in America’s mainstream media.
Take the frenzy surrounding the kidnap of Private Jessica Lynch in 2003. A serving soldier in Iraq, Lynch was made a prisoner of war by Iraqi forces and later released. Her capture and rescue were invaluable weapons in the American government’s rhetorical arsenal: a white American woman soldier being held hostage by demonic foreign men.
Her face was splashed across every newspaper and filled every pixel of Fox News and CNN. For the American administration, it was the perfect justification for a long and fruitless war: the damsel-in-distress patiently waiting for white men with guns and bombs to blast her to freedom.
But no such coverage was granted to Maricella Guzman; to Kate Weber; to Michelle Jones; just three of the countless women who survived rape in the US Army. All were raped by colleagues – men that they were socialised into trusting with their lives in the heat of battle. And, as the Guardian interviews document, all were dismissed, ignored or ridiculed for daring to report their attackers.
The parallels with peacetime are stark. Women are told to fear the unmarked minicab, the dark alleyway, the late-night drinks, lest a crazed lone rapist jump out of the shadows and attack them. The truth is that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a friend, a relative, a colleague or a partner. They mostly take place in spaces unhelpfully delineated as ‘safe’ – the marital bed, the neighbour’s sofa.
Both barracks and bedrooms can become sites of fear and violence, rather than security and friendship. And this is in countries which promise to wage wars of liberation – to make women in Muslim countries as ‘free’ and ‘liberated’ as women in the West. Free to do what? Free to wear a short skirt, and then be told that you’re inviting rape by wearing it? Free to be assaulted and attacked by your colleagues and then be punished for reporting it?
It should come as no great surprise that the American army is plagued by rape and sexual violence – this is not an institution known for its progressive sexual politics. Let’s not forget, also, that in Afghanistan, the American-backed administration introduced a law making it legally impossible for a man to rape his wife. These so-called wars of liberation are sickeningly hypocritical.
