Sexual assaults by U.S. military men against their female comrades-in-arms amount to a different kind of “friendly fire” in the Iraqi-Afghan theater, victims’ advocates told members of Congress on Wednesday. “While these friendly fire attacks leave no trail of blood, they leave many damaged souls in their wake,” Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, told a panel of women lawmakers. “They rob our country of the services of many we have trained and nurtured to protect us.” There have been 129 cases of sexual assault reported to the independent Miles Foundation in the current theater of operations — Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Bahrain — but only 27 were reported to military officials, according to foundation chief Christine Hansen.
Women should not be in the military. Period. No doubt some cretinous feminists will argue that the answer is to kick out the aggressive disrespecters of other individual’s bodies and human rights instead. Of course, blowing someone’s head off or incinerating them tends to require a certain disrespect for other’s bodies, not to mention right to life, liberty and happiness, so you’d be sacrificing a lot of good potential killers-of-the-enemy in order to keep militarily useless rear echelon clerks. I don’t know why this sort of thing should come as a surprise to anyone. If you’ve read any history at all, you know that in addition to killing the enemy, soldiers in wartime also tend to be rather more prone to burning things and raping women than the average peacetime civilian. It is far from the only reason, but the inevitability of intra-service rape is a good reason to keep women out of the military.