Feminist Concern over Military Sex Assault - Essay Example

Among the reported crimes, major part involves crime forcefully perpetrated on unwilling and helpless victims. Military rape or other sorts of sexual assault challenge the dignity of the military profession as a whole as the issue has become increasingly common among sex crimes reported in the US. Traditionally, war victims are always prone to rape and sexual assault throughout the world. However, today female soldiers working in the US military are also extremely vulnerable to sexual molestations.

Admittedly, the growing crime rate in this field has affected the flow of female candidates to the army. What causes the rise in the military sex crime is a topic for comprehensive research. In this context, it is important to discuss the intensity of military rape in the US giving specific focus to feminist theory. According to Pentagon reports, over 19,000 sexual assaults occur in the US military annually among which many of the cases remain unreported or unresolved, because sometimes the offenders are the high ranked military officers.

The most unfortunate factor is that female soldiers are generally assaulted by their own male counterparts or the individuals at the helm of affairs (Whitten). According to the estimates, “over 26,000 men and women in the military experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2012; and of those cases, only 3,374 were reported and only 302 of the incidents were prosecuted” (Feminist News Wire). Many of the female soldiers who took part in the Iraq war reported that they were raped by their male counterparts; and many researchers maintain that one out of every four women that serve the military are likely to face sexual assault at least one time during their career.

Erin Solaro explores the intensity and the actual causes of the issue in detail. According to Solaro, there are over 165,000 American servicewomen who have participated in war as volunteer professionals. Another aspect of the active involvement of women in the field is that women today constitute ‘15% of the military, 11% of the deployed troops and an unprecedented 2% of the casualties’. The author also points to the fact that no significant war failures, disasters, rapes, discipline breakdowns have been reported due the presence of women in the troops.

Solaro argues that wherever bad things have been reported, the problem lies with the fundamental evils of leadership and discipline. Hence, it is in bad units women sufferer when in good units the ‘jerks’ do not dare to cross the line of discipline. The feminist author is sure that the solution to this problem is not to punish women by removing them from the posts but removing or punishing the real perpetrators. To define, the term military rape refers to rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment that occur during military service.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) collectively terms them as Military Sexual Trauma (MST). At the same time, ‘wartime rape’ indicates mass wartime rape rather than isolated cases of individual rapes. As per available reports, increases in the frequency of wartime rape might range from an estimated 300% to 400% by the end of the World War II (Gottschall) although the reliability of the data is not beyond question. According to some estimates, more than half a million people have been raped while serving the US army; and nearly 100,000 cases of military rape have been occurred within the past seven years (Koss, 2004).

Evidently, women constitute the major victim group in this regard whereas men are also prone to sexual harassment in the army. To illustrate, according to the Department of Defense survey