Our local paper recently carried a syndicated preview of "Lauren," a three-part dramatic series forthcoming on YouTube which focuses on sexual assaults of women in the military. The article contained a couple of alarming statistics: it appears that the Defense Department has estimated that nearly 3,200 sexual assaults were reported in the military last year and, what’s more, 86 percent of sexual assaults of women each year go unreported.
What are the implications of these statistics?
Well, for starters, we can conclude that the 3,200 assaults actually reported in 2011 were just 14 percent of the total — which means that there were a total of 22,850 sexual assaults of women in the military that year. This, in turn, translates to about 1,900 a month, or 63 a day.
There were a reported total 214,100 women in the U.S. armed services last year. Assuming that none of them was assaulted more than once, it means that 10.7 percent of all military women were assaulted that year. If 2011 is a representative year, in other words, more than one in 10 military women are sexually assaulted each year.
In 2010, the year of the last census, there were a total of 143,300,000 women over the age of 12 living in the United States. That year there were an estimated 207,750 sexual assaults, reported and unreported, committed against that population (one every 2.5 minutes); again assuming that none was attacked more than once, about .15 percent of all women were victims of sexual assault. These figures, monstrously high as they are, pale into comparison with military figures for, statistically, military women are over 70 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than civilian women.
As I see it, these numbers give rise to two glaring implications. First, the U.S. military is a terribly violent and dysfunctional organization when it comes to the treatment of women and to sexual behavior within its own ranks. It’s not surprising that sexual offenses against women soldiers are notoriously inadequately investigated and prosecuted for, if they were, we’d probably have to pull out of Afghanistan just to raise the manpower.
And second, why would any woman even remotely consider joining the military? Why?
