Helen Benedict claims 30% of women who fight wars are rapes by male soliders. Author uses the well worn feminist mantra that men are bad and women are victims with made up stats to sell something.

SilencingNarrative · 2012-06-05T17:11:44+00:00

Anyone happen to understand what this research amounts to?

Collective82 · 2012-06-05T17:21:07+00:00

Funny, in my two tours no women were raped, though tere was a guy raped on a base after my unit had left, and women were known for shacking up wih who they wanted or selling it. If things are so bad they should form women brigades of only women.

I wonder how many would like the military then.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2012-06-05T17:48:17+00:00

30%.

Ha. The DoD sexual assault reports show around 2000 reports a year, which includes civilian victims and assailants(where the other was a servicemember), both men and women, and attempts; there were fewer than 1000 rapes. A large portion however aren't handled by the military because of jurisdictional conflicts.

Such as 2008:

In FY07, there were 600 cases reported and investigated in which the commander was able to take action.

The number of civilian rapes reported in the UCR does not include reports determined to be unfounded (defined as false or baseless), which are “backed out” of the UCR reported statistics. The Department of Defense reports all sexual assaults, which includes all complaints received, regardless of whether they were later determined to be unfounded or not. For this reason, the military reports proportionately more cases than its civilian criminal jurisdiction counterparts.

Maybe this person is only reading bits and pieces of statistics to further their claim.

There was a survey that showed a percent of a women and men that had been assaulted, and they just decided to extrapolate those percentages out to the entire armed forces(with a meager sample size of less of a thousand) and then new organizations claimed "AMG 19,000 women in the military were sexually assaulted last year", without reporting that if the percentage of men was extrapolated the same way, 15,000 men had been too

In Iraq, women still only make up one in 10 troops, and because they are not evenly distributed, they often serve in a platoon with few other women or none at all.

Um, that would be a result of even distribution actually. There aren't enough platoons to have multiple women in all of them.

This isolation, along with the military's traditional and deep-seated hostility towards women, can cause problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself

I'm sorry, but it must be really difficult having to be less fit and held to a de facto lower disciplinary standard all while getting the same pay.

Between 2006 and 2008, some 40 women who served in the Iraq War spoke to me of their experiences at war. Twenty-eight of them had been sexually harassed, assaulted or raped while serving

Um, sample bias? Or possibly outright lying.

The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.

More bullcrap. Please point out where it says that in the DoD Reports, because I can't find them, and I've read several.

Of course reading over the 2008 one again it's clear it's been edited with the whole "only X % of rape accusations lead to arrests and Y% of arrests lead to prosecution, so only a tiny Z% of rapes leading to prosecution and that's because people are looking the other way" crap.

I remember pointing out all the bullshit people were saying about the DoD reports months ago and now they're being edited to make it look more like it's really the case with these obfuscatory tactics to inflate statistics. I won't say it's due to me pointing it out, but I doubt I'm the one who saw through it.

Propaganda is strong. Oy.

For shame BBC. I'd email the author of this article but I can't seem to find it. Time to find an editor.

Edit: Emailed them pointing out the errors. My cynicism tells me nothing will happen though.

2012-06-05T21:43:45+00:00

Of course upon mentioning the numbers aren't right I got down voted to hell.

Alanna · 2012-06-05T17:47:33+00:00

Am I the only one thinking that the US military is less suited to have women in it than gay men?

a_random_hobo · 2012-06-06T02:09:44+00:00

I also read somewhere that women are far more likely to be raped by a fellow male soldier than to die in the line of duty. When you consider that most rapes go unreported (especially by women who were raped by coworkers), it doesn't seem that far off (if a bit exaggerated). Note: not saying that what this lady is saying is 100% true, or that I agree with everything that she says, but I'll buy that a lot of women are raped by the fellas and don't want to talk about it (Also: even if they report it to their superiors, the superiors can simply shoo them off and not file a report if they see fit, which would also explain the unreported rapes).

Octagonecologyst · 2012-06-05T22:11:41+00:00

You're like 3 years late, broheim.

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