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Often improper behavior is rooted in inequality in the structure of the military
Essay/Comment, Iowa View/Rosemarie Skaine
“Harassment Is A Leadership Issue,” _The Des Moines Register_, November 29, 1996, 13A.
The charges of rape and sexual harassment against military trainers at the Army Ordnance Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., focus the nation's attention once again on sexual harassment in the military, even as the effects of the charges that arose from the Navy's Tailhook Convention in 1991 still reverberates throughout the military.
The more than a dozen female soldiers in their second eight weeks of training at Aberdeen are just the latest victims.
The military is not above the law, but military personnel are subject to a different set of “laws,” the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There are strict rules against fraternization that prohibit improper behavior such as undue familiarity between junior and senior ranks, whether male or female. Fairly enforcing these rules is important.
Important to fairly enforcing rules is the command climate. A commander I heard speak told the young audience, “If you tell your guys to respect women, they will.” So sexual harassment is a leadership issue; a “commander’s challenge.”
Deborah Lee, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, called the training environment one where if the commander is abusing his absolute power, the result is the creation of absolute fear and intimidation. The drill sergeant is the single most important person responsible for a recruit’s transformation from a scared kid to a soldier. If the drill sergeant abuses his power, the transformation is more difficult to complete and in some cases impossible. This scenario, then, is not the female recruit’s responsibility, but the drill sergeant’s. The drill sergeant has the most power.
It is not easy to go forward in the military. In researching the book I am writing on women in combat, one woman told me, “I would think long and hard before I exposed sexual harassment. There are sanctions in the military that are not in civilian life that never go away. Every one loses.”
The young woman’s statement confirms interviews I had during my research of Tailhook ‘91. However, some officers felt the pilots were being set up in that the disciplinary letters written to the aviators truly signified the end of their career.
Retired commanders have told me that once a male is accused, “It just won’t go away.” One commander believes that the zero defect policy is bad because as a leader he questions how to get something out in the open and deal with it if you can’t admit anything is wrong to begin with. This may very well be true if one looks at the difficulty in resolving the Tailhook ‘91 episode. Aviators accused of sexually abusing females wouldn’t talk.
In the case of Tailhook `91, Rear Admiral John E. Gordon, believed enforcing policy was part of the problem. He says it is overstated to say the predominant response of attendees was closing ranks or engaging in a conspiracy. The aviators were not protecting each other as much as they were protecting themselves. Gordon says, "Once an officer admitted seeing misconduct, he or she would be held accountable for not reporting it earlier and careers would be in jeopardy. I believe individuals ‘couldn't remember' to protect themselves."
We need to view the military with compassion, but not without common sense. It is sometimes difficult for the civilian to view the military with compassion. We hold our military in high regard and expect high moral behavior. Often improper behavior is rooted in inequality in the structure of the military. If we as a country believe it makes us a higher society to insure equality, then we have to look at the hierarchical position of women in the military.
The position of females, though changing, is not yet on par with males. It takes time to train a woman or a man for command. We have to give the military credit for their “beginning,” but some parts of the military are slower to change than others. In my interviews with military women and men, many feel that if a female is viewed as “a soldier is a soldier,” we will not hear of gender issues. We have not yet reached that point.
Sexual harassment is based in a context of unequal power structure. The military is hierarchical by nature. It is just beginning to change. It will take time to change enough for women to be commanders, for men to view them as colleagues and, therefore, decrease the possibility of sexual harassment.
c1996 The Des Moines Register, Inc.
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I come to this issue from the perspective of the Fire Service and there, the upper body demands of the job severely restrict the number of females able to compete for line positions.
Males DO look down on females from a physical standpoint...that much is fact. The reality that sports must be segregated by gender enhances this view. Guy's don't look at women's basketball to see a good game, but to "scope out hot chicks," if they even look at all. Recently, one of the UConn female players (one of the best female basketball players in the nation) when told, "She played like a guy," she responded "That's a compliment, the best basketball players are all men," So it's not surprising that guys openly make fun of the way women throw and run, etc.
With that kind of legacy, it's very hard to be taken seriously when competing with males in physical pursuits. Add to this that military installations, police units and Fire stations are awash in porn and on occasion alcohol - they can often be uncomfortable, even dangerous places for women to be.
The NYC Police Department still has tons of problems with gender in the police ranks. Many women trade sex for protection from the guys. Like the military, the NYPD has been awash in on-the-job pregnancies between trysting officers.
In the Fire Service women are just flat-out not wanted. Rightly or wrongly, they're perceived as "too emotional," and "too empathetic" and those are NOT seen as desirable characteristics in a firefighting force.
As long as humans are interested in sex and so long as we maintain the assigned sex roles teasing, sensual females and rugged, mach males, it would seem that this is going to be an ongoing problem. Given that the assigned sex roles are as much hormonal/biological as social/environmental, I think this will be a very difficult problem to deal with.
Fine writing! A fascinating article.
"It will take time to change enough for women to be commanders, for men to view them as colleagues "
I feel this is hypothetical at times, when you see magazines filled with women depicted as sex symbols showing off the naked bodies. This makes man grow greedier for her and reduce her still, to an object of sexual desires. In these circumstances, I feel it's still a distant thought of this type of equality. Many women just ask for it...