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Male Soldier Allegedly Beat Female Comrade for Hooking Up

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Male Soldier Allegedly Beat Female Comrade for Hooking Up

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Andrew Avila, and Lucas Curtis beat up a woman and male soldier after finding them kissing. The beating for the woman only stopped when another solider stood  in between them. The female was said to have had severe injuries and could have died if no one had stepped in.

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A female U.S. Army soldier said she was beaten so severely by a soldier after making out with another man in their unit that she "thought I was about to die."

Jacob Andrew Avila, a combat engineer, and his friend Lucas Curtis stumbled onto the 18-year-old woman and her comrade in a bedroom at Avila's home in Copperas Cove. Avila and the victim are both based out of nearby Fort Hood, Texas. According to a police affidavit, Avila and Curtis asked her to leave the room, beat her companion, and then some time later grabbed her while she was exiting a bathroom. The twentysomethings allegedly grabbed her neck, shoved her into a wall, slapped her, and started strangling her.

The woman told investigators she suffered a concussion, ruptured eardrum, and abrasions to her face and neck. At one point, she said she lost consciousness.

Curtis "had his hand around her neck" and "was squeezing tight enough that she was unable to breath," police recorded her saying. Affidavits state that he punched her multiple times, until she tripped and injured her back. Once she was on the floor, Curtis "straddled her," keeping her from getting up.

The assault only stopped when another soldier saw it and intervened, according to documents. That man took her to a Fort Hood military police officer's home, who drove her to the emergency room.

Police say they're still perplexed by what led to the assault.

"We're still trying to figure out why and what the motive is for this one," Copperas Cove police Sgt. Martin Ruiz said. "They're not ex-boyfriends or anything like that." (The victim's make-out partner was minorly injured but does not want to press charges, Ruiz said.)

According to the affidavits, Avila admitted slapping her and said Curtis slapped, punched, and choked her. Avila was jailed at the Copperas Cove police department on charges of assault causing bodily injury and unlawful restraint, a court clerk said. (He was released on a $6,000 bond Wednesday afternoon.) Ruiz said the same charges have been filed against Curtis but he has not yet been arrested.

Avila is a specialist and combat engineer assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Army officials said.

Fort Hood spokesman Tom Rheinlander said military law enforcement officials are investigating the incident in cooperation with Copperas Cove police.

"III Corps and Fort Hood takes all reports of assault seriously," Rheinlander said. "The chain of command for the soldiers involved are aware of the incident and will ensure all appropriate measures are taken."

An Army spokesman said the victim is a combat engineer and private assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division at the base.

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Male Soldier Allegedly Beat Female Comrade for Hooking Up

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A female U.S. Army soldier said she was beaten so severely by a soldier after making out with another man in their unit that she "thought I was about to die." Jacob Andrew Avila, a combat engineer, and his friend Lucas Curtis stumbled onto the 18-year-old woman and her comrade in a bedroom at Avila's home in Copperas Cove.

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How the Military's 'Bro' Culture Turns Women Into Targets

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How the Military's 'Bro' Culture Turns Women Into Targets

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This story talks about Kayla Williams Experience in the Military after being put in an all guys group. She was sexually harassed and when she told someone about it they told her that she entered a men's profession so what should she expect.

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Kayla Williams, an Arabic linguist, was the only woman with a group of about 20 troops posted to Iraq's Sinjar Mountain in 2003, and she was almost one of the boys. To kill time while off-duty, the men pretended to hump everything in sight, including the Humvee, during their relatively unsupervised patrol. They put their testicles on one another's faces in a practice called "tea bagging." Their behavior was ridiculous but common among bros deployed in dangerous, remote locations. Sometimes, the men included Williams when they threw pebbles at each other, aiming for holes near the crotches of their pants. "[They started] throwing rocks at my boobs when they were throwing rocks at each other," Williams recalls. "Is that sexual harassment, or are they treating me like one of them? Is it exclusive or inclusive? I can't answer that. It's complicated." But she didn't let it bother her too much.

Then one night, while monitoring the outpost on the side of a mountain, Williams went to relieve a guard on duty. He grabbed her hand. "He had pulled out his penis and was trying to put my hand on his cock," Williams says. She wasn't quite worried she'd be raped-the junior enlisted Army soldier, then 26 years old, was carrying a gun within earshot of others who would hear her if she screamed-but the guard was frighteningly aggressive. After trying to get her to sleep with him, or at least give him a blow job, he gave up and left.

Still, Williams was angry. When she told men in her unit about the incident, they said she'd joined a man's military and asked what she expected to happen. "It definitely made me feel guys who were sexually harassing me, who were violating the rules, who were doing the wrong thing-that guys felt they were more important as soldiers because they were men." Williams, now a Truman National Security Project fellow and the author of Love My Rifle More Than You, didn't want to be a victim, so she stopped joking around and came off as unfriendly, she says. It was a lonely decision with potentially steep costs. "It's hard to be in a combat zone when I'm expected to rely on these guys for my life, but [I] no longer felt I could trust them to not sexually assault me if I let my guard down."

The military's sexual-assault epidemic is well-known-and it is not confined to high-profile cases like the sex-abuse educator discovered running a small-time prostitution ring at Fort Hood, Texas; the Army sergeant charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in West Point bathrooms; or the 33 instructors ensnared in a sex scandal involving twice as many students at Lackland Air Force base, also in Texas. Those scandals fueled the congressional and media frenzy over the 3,374 reported sexual assaults in the military last year. The Pentagon estimates that sexual assaults actually occur far more frequently-and that 26,000 troops were victims of unwanted sexual contact (6.1 percent of the military's women and 1.2 percent of its men) last year alone. Fewer than 1 percent of adults in the civilian world experienced something comparable, according to data in the most recent National Crime Victimization Survey.

Less understood is why the military's culture of abuse has been so hard to combat-let alone eradicate. Other civilian crimes (such as violent assaults or theft) occur at far lower rates in the military, but rampant sexual abuse among the troops persists. The reasons are diffuse and, because of fundamental military values, hard to change. They include a stark gender imbalance (roughly seven men for every woman), blurry lines between professional and personal lives, intense bonding that can foster lascivious rituals, and a hierarchical command structure that can inadvertently enable assaults. The military, of course, is not peopled by rapists. Yet despite the Pentagon's apparently sincere efforts to change the culture, it is proving almost impossible to alter the standards of acceptable behavior, especially in situations where young people have little supervision-leaving intact an environment that can allow those who would assault someone to take things too far. This is the story of why.
A MAN'S WORLD
Pentagon brass appear to comprehend the problem. In a May interview with USA Today, the director of the Defense Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, Maj. Gen. Gary Patton, described how sexism and sexual harassment in the military helps create a "permissive environment" where assaults can occur. Women who reported a hostile working environment were six times likelier to say they experienced rape in a survey of female veterans conducted by the University of Iowa Social Science Research Center in 2003; and those who said their ranking officers or supervisors allowed (or made) sexually demeaning comments or gestures were up to four times as likely to cite rape.

The military is full of traditions that linger from its all-male days, and these prompt some women to complain that they are treated as second-class citizens-bolstered by actual job inequality: Women are still barred from front-line combat (at least until 2016) and are outnumbered in the officer corps. They make up only 15 percent of 1.4 million active-duty service members; only 16 percent of officers are women. Of the military's 38 four-star generals or admirals, just one is a woman.

Women's lower status means that their male colleagues sometimes see them as less trustworthy in a "he-said, she-said" scenario, according to psychologist Stephanie Sacks, author of an essay in a 2005 Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs publication on military culture and sexual-assault victims. If a woman is assaulted, wrote Sacks, who also trains military troops in sexual-assault prevention, many men believe "it is at least a little bit her fault because she didn't really belong [in the military] to begin with.... The line goes that if you are going to voluntarily put yourself in the company of large groups of men, especially who are on a deployment and so not having easy access to consensual sex, what do you expect?" If a woman complains, Sacks says, men may feel women are diverting the mission's focus with secondary issues.
The line goes that if you are going to voluntarily put yourself in the company of large groups of men, especially who are on a deployment and so not having easy access to consensual sex, what do you expect?
Williams, who found out the hard way that she wasn't really one of the boys, says this describes her experience. Yes, she was easygoing and joked around, but the men somehow thought they could turn their explicit jokes into reality. While Williams was lucky to have escaped an assault, many others were not, and the attitudes displayed by her peers after the incident help show why so many assaults go unreported in the military. When Williams was considering complaining, they asked her, "Why would you ruin a man's career just because you can't take it?" She inferred that because she was a woman and not allowed in combat, she was effectively a "second-class citizen": "My career was seen by my peers as being less important."

More worrisome, many servicemen aren't inclined to believe women's complaints in the first place. According to a Corps survey in September 2012, Marines listed being falsely accused of sexual assault as a top concern about opening combat positions to women. A broad swath of research in the civilian world shows that the rate of false reporting is very low, around 2 to 8 percent, as is the case with other felonies. But of 3,374 reported incidents in 2012, military prosecutors won only 238 convictions. A big reason, says former Air Force JAG officer David Frakt, is that "in these he-said, she-said situations, there's no witness, no other physical evidence to corroborate the claims. When the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, and you have an accused who has a long record of positive military service, no prior history, there's a very high chance of acquittal in that situation."

The military is a highly regulated organization, and that is part of the problem. It has rules to cover everything from lipstick shades to suitable golf buddies. These guidelines make it nearly impossible to frame a discussion about consensual sex versus assault, argues Bruce Fleming, a professor at the Naval Academy, where everything from hand-holding to intercourse is outlawed for all four years. "The military is basically a no-sex zone." All bases are intended to be sex-free. Oral sex and adultery are crimes. Public displays of affection in uniform are banned. Officers cannot date, sleep with, or even spend too much time with enlisted troops. The same goes for superiors and inferiors within those ranks. The military's unsuccessful strategy has been to "forbid and punish" everything sexual to try to stop assaults, when instead, Fleming says, it should be "targeting the specific deviant behavior that really matters."

Blanket regulations against everything sexual can create the perception that sexual assault is somehow a lesser crime. Training to be an Arabic cryptologist for the Navy at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., Tia Christopher, then 19 years old, invited a fellow service member (a pastor's son who had taken her on a Bible study date) to stop by her room-breaking the rules. "It went from, 'Hey, what are you doing, stop!' to him hitting my head on the cinder-block wall behind my bed." Two women were drinking next door and heard the struggle. But because the military offers no amnesty for "collateral misconduct," they at first refused to support Christopher's allegation, fearing they'd be punished for drinking. (They were.)

SEMPER FIDELIS
In the military's closed society, there's a pervasive belief that "you know who can be trusted and who can't," Sacks tells National Journal. Anyone you know so well in your unit couldn't possibly attack someone else, the thinking goes.

This enhanced loyalty is vital in combat, but it's counterproductive when it comes to believing that someone has been assaulted. The victim who reports an incident becomes the "squeaky wheel"-the troublemaker, especially if performance starts to suffer as he or she processes the trauma, Sacks says. People think rapists are ugly and can't get sex another way, says Chris Kilmartin, a psychology professor at the Air Force Academy. They're not. "They tend to be more handsome, charming, and have more consensual sex than non-rapists, and [are] very good at cultivating the appearance of being a nice guy. So when there's an assault taking place, people who know this guy say, 'He's such a nice guy, there's no way he can do it.' " Afterward, of course, civilians assaulted in the workplace can look for another job if they want; troops are locked in for years.
Enhanced loyalty is vital in combat, but it's counterproductive when it comes to believing that someone has been assaulted.
Knowing they have to stay in an environment where the group may side with the perpetrator can discourage victims from reporting the attack. Christopher heard stories about women who lost their careers and friends by divulging the incident, so she bleached her sheets and tried to forget that her assault took place. But because her attacker started stalking her at the chow hall and en route to class, she finally came forward. When her commander in charge of the Navy detachment at the language-training base belittled her rape report, she started having panic attacks, lost 30 pounds, and began failing classes where she'd previously scored A's. Even other women turned against her. "This girl, she was Puerto Rican"-like the attacker-"called me a 'racist bitch.' " Victimized men may face even higher hurdles. "It's hard to imagine how could a man, especially a strong, tough man with a weapon, be sexually assaulted. So if they are, it brings up questions about their masculinity," Sacks says. "Do you want somebody on your team who is a victim, somebody who couldn't fight back?"

Acquittal, of course, is not the same thing as innocence, Frakt notes. Yet the military's judicial system can fail victims even before a case gets to trial. Senior commanders, who have convening authority, make the decision about whether to refer a case to a court-martial, where the allegation must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to earn a conviction. If a commander does not want to move the case forward, he or she can take no action; unilaterally mandate an administrative response (such as a reprimand or counseling) to correct the accused's behavior; or preside over a nonjudicial punishment hearing in which the commander is the "sole decider of facts and punishment," according to Frakt. Punishment options in this case are rather limited-no jail time, no bad conduct discharge, and no criminal convictions.

With so few courts-martial resulting in sexual-assault convictions, troops may be disinclined to believe there's a real problem-an environment that would-be perpetrators can exploit to carry out assaults. So the Pentagon is working to combat this perception. "Between 92 to 98 percent of the time, a victim is telling us the truth. Those are pretty good odds," Nathan Galbreath, a senior official in the Pentagon's Sexual Assault and Prevention Office, says. "We're also trying to educate folks on the difference between a false report and a report where there's insufficient evidence." Last year, commanders could not take action in 509 cases because of "evidentiary problems." Another 1,028 were either outside the department's legal authority or officials thought the accusations "unfounded"-false or baseless. A baseless report usually is presumed truthful but does not meet the formal standards of the crime. It doesn't mean the perpetrator is innocent.

That's why officials are trying to modernize the fight against sexual assault, which has persisted through many pledges to reform since the 1991 Navy Tailhook scandal, in which 83 women and seven men were assaulted at a Las Vegas aviators' conference. Back then, "prevention" often meant instructing troops to stay safe by locking doors and windows; now trainers tell them how to identify and disrupt a potential assault. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in May said commanders would be accountable if they fail to foster a climate that prevents assault, cares for victims, and reduces stigma associated with reporting. This month, Hagel ordered that assault victims get legal representation throughout the judicial process; that the department's inspector general audit closed investigations; and that senior officials within the chain of command receive follow-up reports on assaults and responses. Hagel has also ordered inspections of military facilities to remove sexually explicit and degrading material. Yet attitudes in the military, where those who complain of misconduct are often seen as nuisances and worse, are not very pliable.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jennifer Smith, popular among the fighters she worked for, was on track for success. When a young female pilot training at Luke Air Force Base received the call sign "Grassy" because another student revealed she never shaved her private areas, Smith shrugged it off. When pilots screened pornography in front of the crew to amp up for flying missions in Iraq, she shrugged it off. When they sang ditties from the Vietnam War era that had lyrics about mutilating and raping women, she shrugged it off. (To the tune of Willy Wonka's "Candy Man": "Who can take a cheese grater, / Strap it to his arm? / Ram it in her pussy, / And make vagina parmesan? ... The S&M man cause he makes it with pain, / And makes the hurt feel good.") The attitude of the older male pilots, Smith recalls, was, "If you're going to run with the men"-especially when men are the bosses-"you'd better learn how to deal with it."
The attitude of the older male pilots, Smith recalls, was, "If you're going to run with the men"-especially when men are the bosses-"you'd better learn how to deal with it."
When Smith went to find equipment from a storage area for a flying exercise at Shaw Air Force Base in 2008, she found porn instead. When she asked commanders to remove it, pilots started calling her a "bitch," even though her complaint was supposed to be anonymous and unofficial. After that, Smith deployed to Iraq. There, a service member threw her against a wall and tried to rape her when she was working an overnight shift. At first, Smith didn't come forward because, she says, she was discouraged that her seniors had failed to eliminate the porn stash. Meanwhile, she lost her tolerance for sexual jokes. "I would say, 'That's really inappropriate,' and that didn't go over well. That's like questioning their authority." Fed up, she filed a formal report after she'd returned stateside, disclosing both the porn and her assault. Because she "snitched," her coworkers "dropped me like a hot potato," she said.

Assailants in the military who go unchecked in an environment skeptical of assaults can find more victims. Christopher later found the same woman who insulted her crying in a stairwell. "She said, 'I'm so sorry. He raped me.' "

Because of the long odds for a conviction and the high cost (in stigma) attached to reporting, the Pentagon worries that victims are disinclined to file complaints. New programs allow "restricted reporting" so victims can get health care without pressing charges or naming their attackers, but these options can reinforce the belief that sexual-assault victims are weak, need special treatment, or made it all up to milk the system. "The victim is immediately identified as a victim," says Frakt. Fellow troops may see the person receiving "all kinds of perks," including getting off work, obtaining counseling, and taking convalescent leave. "In an environment like the military, which treasures toughness and sort of dealing with your own problems, all of these services may feed a perception these people ... [are] not cut out for the military way of life." Already, male soldiers often see pregnancy as a tactic women use to escape a war zone. They may now believe that restricted reports are a "guilt-free" way for women to escape an unpleasant deployment, Frakt says. "Maybe they don't like their commander, supervisor."
New programs allow "restricted reporting" so victims can get health care without pressing charges or naming their attackers, but these options can reinforce the belief that sexual-assault victims are weak, need special treatment, or made it all up to milk the system.
What's more, would-be sexual predators have many opportunities in a culture where everyone is a direct superior or subordinate. A trainee, according to Protect Our Defenders President Nancy Parrish, is told that superiors are essentially "your preacher, your boss, your father figure, your God." If the superior orders, say, an unusual after-hours office visit, trainees go. Otherwise, they can be written up for failing to follow orders. Sexual-assault victims are usually lower-ranking. At Lackland Air Force base, where every recruit goes for basic training, 24 instructors were convicted recently of misconduct with trainees, according to reports. In August, the Pentagon removed 60 recruiters, drill instructors, and sexual-assault counselors from duty after finding violations related to alcohol, child abuse, and sexual assault. Another problem is the difficulty in screening for predatory behavior: Until a person is in a position of authority, it's hard to tell who will abuse it.

Because higher-ranking service-members are responsible for what happens on their watch, they have an incentive to ignore accusations against their subordinates or even to attack victims' credibility, Parrish says. "So the retaliation begins: charging them with collateral misconduct, beginning to write them up for a series of so-called misbehaviors, or sending them to psych wards to be misdiagnosed with errant medical diagnoses such as personality disorder." Those procedures can even lead to discharge. According to the Pentagon report, 62 percent of victims who filed complaints said they were retaliated against professionally, socially, or administratively. Commanders can also make judicial decisions, as when a three-star general overturned the aggravated-assault conviction of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, whom a jury of military officers sentenced in November to detention and dismissal from the military.

That case fueled a push on Capitol Hill for an independent military judiciary to handle sexual-assault cases, but the Pentagon still believes commanders are best equipped to deal with the problem. Frakt notes they can dole out administrative punishments like fines or demotions when a court-martial conviction isn't likely. "They recognize it's probably less [punishment] than the person deserves, but it's not going to be in the hands of a jury. People work very hard to do the right thing." Yet victims often interpret these moves as just a slap on the wrist for their attacker. Delilah Rumburg, who leads the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, says the biggest complaint she hears from female victims is "not so much they failed to get a conviction" but that the military system did not allow for a fair process.

HOLLOW FORCE

When Christopher left the military, "I was like, 'I'm going to go to fucking Oprah.'" Four days later, she watched on television as the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. "Walmart started selling flag T-shirts. You hadn't really seen a lot of patriotism in a long time. I thought to myself, 'There's no way I can talk about this. No one's going to want to hear what happened to me when there's this fervor going around.' I was silent for many years."

Now that the military is no longer on a war footing, victims like Christopher and advocacy groups hope they will have a chance to reshape the military's structure and focus on combating the enemy within. The onslaught of media reports on sex scandals has fueled momentum among lawmakers on Capitol Hill and senior officials in the Pentagon.

Despite this can-do attitude, no quick fix is available. Policymakers can install victim-assistance programs, but until there's less stigma attached to reporting sexual crimes, they will go underused. Commanders can promise to take assault cases seriously, but until the conviction rate rises, victims will see their superiors as ineffective or untrustworthy. The military can oust abusers, but in a system where commanders ultimately make all the decisions, it won't get consistent results. The Pentagon can mandate prevention training and the press can sensationalize abuse scandals, but when troops see all this as a witch hunt rather than a true problem, they will foster a culture that allows true assailants to operate relatively freely.

And defense leaders themselves may be out of touch with behaviors that evolve on the front. When Kayla Williams lived on an Iraqi mountainside among all those men, she and her fellow soldiers slept in a pen circumscribed by barbed wire to prevent incursions. Despite the many military regulations, they created their own culture from norms they thought were acceptable. It was powered by sexually explicit jokes and exposed genitalia.

This article appears in the Sep. 7, 2013, edition of National Journal as The Boys' Club.

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How the Military's 'Bro' Culture Turns Women Into Targets

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Kayla Williams, an Arabic linguist, was the only woman with a group of about 20 troops posted to Iraq's Sinjar Mountain in 2003, and she was almost one of the boys. To kill time while off-duty, the men pretended to hump everything in sight, including the Humvee, during their relatively unsupervised patrol.

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Panayiotas Story of Sexual Assault in the Military

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Panayiotas Story of Sexual Assault in the Military

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Panayiota tells the story of her sexual assault from a fellow military member who she trusted after going hiking with him. Her experience with telling her higher up about it and getting told she is a liar as well as shamed.

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Panayiota's Story of Surviving Military Sexual Assault

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http://www.ProtectOurDefenders.com When Panayiota reported that she had been raped by a fellow coast-guardsman, the commander called her a liar and ordered them to "work out their differences." After being forcibly discharged for speaking up, she founded the Military Rape Crisis Center. This is her story. Protect Our Defenders Foundation is a human rights organization.

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12 Stories About Military Sexual Assault

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12 Stories About Military Sexual Assault

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This video shows 12 different stories from different people about their experience with sexual assault in the military. Though its not said that these are all women, sexual assault is a huge issue for women in the military.

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12 Harrowing Stories About Military Sexual Assault

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"When will it end?" Check out more awesome videos at BuzzFeedVideo! http://bit.ly/YTbuzzfeedvideo GET MORE BUZZFEED: www.buzzfeed.com www.buzzfeed.com/video www.buzzfeed.com/videoteam www.youtube.com/buzzfeedvideo www.youtube.com/buzzfeedyellow www.youtube.com/buzzfeedblue www.youtube.com/buzzfeedviolet www.youtube.com/buzzfeed BuzzFeedVideo BuzzFeed Motion Picture's flagship channel. Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, always shareable. New videos posted daily! MUSIC Our Flight To America licensed by Warner Chappell Made by BFMP www.buzzfeed.com/videoteam.

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Shaye Haver one of two women to complete the Ranger School, one of the hardest and grueling military courses.

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This picture states that women have a higher chance of being sexually assaulted than they do of getting killed in battle.

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Susan Ridge will be promoted to major general and when she does she will be the highest ranking women in the army.

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This website shares the story of Suzanne Smith who was sexually assaulted by three sergeant in Iraq. To avoid seeing these men she refused to redeploy and was considered AWOL.

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U.S. Army Specialist Suzanne Swift will spend her 22nd birthday tomorrow confined to the Fort Lewis base in Washington, where she is awaiting the outcome of an investigation into allegations that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three sergeants in Iraq.

Swift says the sergeants propositioned her for sex shortly after arriving for her first tour of duty in February 2004. She remained in Iraq until February 2005. "When you are over there, you are lower than dirt; you are expendable as a soldier in general, and as a woman, it's worse," said Swift in a recent interview with the Guardian.

When Swift's unit redeployed to Iraq in January 2006, she refused to go and instead stayed with her mother in Eugene, Ore. She was eventually listed as AWOL, arrested at her mother's home on June 11, sent to county jail and transferred to Fort Lewis.

"She's miserable and isolated," says Sara Rich, Swift's mother. "It's not good to have an idle mind while you're dealing with PTSD and sexual trauma. I want them to release her so I can get her the care she needs. I'm tired of waiting."

A colonel outside of Swift's chain of command is investigating the case, but Rich says she has been given little information with no time frame. "I believe they're trying to break her down using fear and intimidation."
Midnight phone calls
While Swift's case has gotten a fair amount of national and international attention, the overall issue of sexual assault committed by military personnel in the Middle East has been largely ignored.

"Regrettably, Suzanne Swift is not the first," says Anita Sanchez, communications director of the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides services to victims of military violence. "There have been several young women who have been declared AWOL for seeking treatment due to sexual assault, but most of them are too scared to speak out."

Since the fall of 2003, the Miles Foundation has documented 518 cases of sexual assault on women who have served or are serving in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain and Qatar. The foundation has counselors on staff around the clock and often receives midnight phone calls from service members or their family members. After counselors and attorneys help the women access medical care and explain the reporting process, they try to transport them to a safe place for care and treatment.

"Because they're in a combat situation, we've had to develop protocols. We can't just send a chopper in there for them. We have to get their permission to contact military authorities to get them moved," says Sanchez. "If you were at Fort Drum, we wouldn't have to tell anybody, but if we need to move you out of Baghdad or Kuwait, then we have to get your permission to contact the military and say, 'We need to move Joanna Jones because this has transpired.'"

Sanchez says a counselor recently received a call in the middle of the night from a young woman who was raped in the Green Zone in Baghdad. "She said, 'I was raped, and I've only got 10 minutes on my phone card. What do I do?'" The woman was helicoptered out of the Green Zone, sent to Kuwait and then Germany, and eventually returned to the United States.

Another recent case involved a young American woman who was raped by a coalition partner in a rural area. Sanchez says it took two weeks to get to a one-room medical facility in Kabul. "They had no facilities to do a rape testing, so they couldn't test for pregnancy or HIV. An American doctor literally handed her high-dose antibiotics and told her, 'This will kill anything you've come in contact with.'" The young woman is now recovering in the states.

Sanchez says another woman was told she would receive the morning-after pill a few days after she was raped, but received birth control pills instead.
No official documentation
While these cases aren't officially documented with the government, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense both conduct general studies of sexual assault, but the findings can be difficult to obtain.

Last year, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., the ranking Democratic Member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, criticized the Bush administration for failing to release a Veterans Affairs study on military sexual trauma among the National Guard and Reserve. It found sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape is 60 percent among females and 27 percent among males. The estimated prevalence for rape among females is 11 percent and 1.2 percent among males.

The report, which was originally due by March 2001, was released last September. In a statement, Evans said, "The women and men who have suffered military sexual trauma deserve our respect, compassion and commitment to provide them with ready access to counseling and treatment. I am releasing the report, which I have obtained through other sources, to shine a light on a serious problem that the White House wants to hide in the shadows."

In 2003, Congress began requiring the Department of Defense to report the number of sexual assault cases on file. In 2005, military criminal investigators received 2,374 allegations of sexual assault involving members of the armed forces worldwide. "That number is a 40 percent increase from 2004. The '04 number is a 25 percent increase from 2003, so that's a 65 percent increase in two years. That's substantial," says Sanchez.

While there has been an increase in sexual assault in reports, Sanchez says there hasn't been an escalation in the number of prosecutions. "Of those cases, only two to three percent go to court-martial, and those who are convicted get only a year in jail."
Former victims turned advocates
The majority of people working as advocates for women who've been assaulted in the military are former victims themselves. Colleen Mussolino, co-founder of Women Veterans of America (WVA), an advocacy group for women veterans, served as a cook at Women's Army Corps headquarters in Fort McClellan, Ala., from 1965 to 1967. "I was gang raped, beaten and left for dead," she says. "I was taken by the criminal investigation team and treated like a prisoner of war for six weeks, with threats. I finally signed a paper promising that I wouldn't prosecute, so I know how the system works."

WVA estimates that nine out of 10 women in the military have been either harassed or assaulted. "Look at the numbers that have been presented. You have to realize there are far more that have not come forward," Mussolino says. "When I counsel women and help them with medical benefits, I find most were too scared to report the assault. It's such a horrible thing that you just keep it to yourself for years."

"The military is closing its eyes," she adds. "They don't want to deal with it. They may be battle-ready, but when it comes to assaults on women, they don't know how to handle it."

Rev. Dorothy Mackey, executive director of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel (STAAMP), was raped and assaulted while serving as a U.S. Air Force Captain and Commander from 1983 to 1992. Her cases were never prosecuted after a Justice Department attorney said they "could not bring this case to trial for national security reasons; to do so would be contrary to good order, morale and discipline in the military."

"If a woman is raped overseas, she better pray she has a good commander who has the clout to get her medical treatment and then get her out," she says.

STAAMP's toll-free number for sexual assault victims in the military has received 5,200 calls since 1997, including many from women and men now serving in the Middle East. "These kids are trying to figure out how to survive. The system is shutting down on them and putting them at risk," Mackey says. "We've been able to get some of them out of the military by going directly to the Pentagon and saying, 'We are telling you about a criminal incident. Here are the people who are raping and abusing. We are now putting you on notice that if anything else happens to this person, we will expose you,'" she says.

Mackey says Specialist Suzanne Swift should be commended for speaking out, knowing what the consequences would be. "It's not easy because you're either told to keep your mouth shut or threatened," she says. "This administration justified going to war because we said we wanted to stop Saddam's rape rooms. This administration said we can't afford to have priests raping, and yet in the same breath and lack of action, our own military leadership are free to rape at absolute carte blanche. This has been going on for too long. We must hold the government accountable for refusing to deal with this issue."

Saturday, July 15 marks a national day of action to call for Suzanne Swift's honorable discharge. Protests will occur at the gates of Fort Lewis at noon, followed by a press conference at 3 p.m. A separate protest will be held at the Federal Building in Eugene, Ore., at noon. Supporters are also encouraged to sign a petition calling for an honorable discharge.

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Female Soldiers Treated 'Lower Than Dirt'

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The case of Suzanne Swift reveals that women deployed in the Middle East are facing rape, abuse and sexual harassment -- from their own comrades-in-arms. U.S. Army Specialist Suzanne Swift will spend her 22nd birthday tomorrow confined to the Fort Lewis base in Washington, where she is awaiting the outcome of an investigation into allegations that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three sergeants in Iraq.

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Marine Corps: Women Worse Than Men In Combat

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Marine Corps: Women Worse Than Men In Combat

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Women have to deal with not only fighting for their country but also have to either keep up with men's score or surpass it. There was a survey done that said that groups of only males performed better than groups of only women or a mix of both genders.

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Marine Corps: Women Worse Than Men In Combat

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A year long study by the Marine Corps found that all male units performed better than squads that were mixed gendered. All male units were faster, more lethal, and more capable of evacuating casualties. All male squadrons performed better than 69% across the board at hitting targets, climbing obstacles, and also avoiding injuries.