Having the courage to report a rape is difficult enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and simple fear prevent 59 percent of rapes from being reported, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. But within the military, reporting is even more risky. Military platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a rape has no realistic chance of remaining anonymous. She will have to face her assailant day after day, and put up with rumors, resentment and blame from other soldiers. Furthermore, she runs the risk of being punished by her assailant if he is her superior.
These barriers to reporting are so well recognized that even the Defense Department has been scrambling to mend the situation, at least for the public eye. It won't go so far as to actually gather statistics on rape and assault in Iraq (it only counts reported rapes in raw numbers for all combat areas in the Middle East combined), but in 2006 the DOD did finally wake up to the idea that anonymous reporting might help women come forward, and updated its Web site accordingly.
The Web site looks good, although some may object that it seems to pay more attention to telling women how to avoid an assault than telling men not to commit one. It defines rape, sexual assault and harassment, and makes clear that these behaviors are illegal. The site now also explains that a soldier can report a rape anonymously to a special department, SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response), without triggering an official investigation -- a procedure called "restricted reporting." And it promises the soldier a victim's advocate and medical care.
On closer scrutiny, however, the picture is less rosy: Only active and federal duty soldiers can go to SAPR for help, which means that neither inactive reservists nor veterans are eligible; soldiers are encouraged to report rapes to a chaplain, and chaplains are not trained as rape counselors; if soldiers tell a friend about an assault, that friend is legally obliged to report it to officials; soldiers must disclose their rank, gender, age, race, service, and the date, time and/or location of the assault, which in the closed world of a military unit hardly amounts to anonymity; and, in practice, since most people in the Army are men, the soldier will likely find herself reporting her sexual assault to a man -- something rape counselors know does not work. Worse, no measures will be taken against the accused assailant unless the victim agrees to stop being anonymous.
The DOD insists on the success of its reforms, the proof being that the number of reported military sexual assaults rose by 1,700 from 2004 to a total of 2,374 in 2005. "The success of the SAPR program is in direct correlation with the increased numbers of reported sexual assaults," Cynthia Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, wrote to me in an e-mail.
In fact, as anyone familiar with sexual assault statistics knows, nobody can ever tell whether increases in rape rates are due to more reporting or more rapes.
My own interviewees and advocates on behalf of women veterans say these reforms are not working. They say there is a huge gap between what the military promises to do on its Web site and what it does in practice, and that the traditional view that reporting an assault betrays your fellow soldiers still prevails.
"Are soldiers who report sexual assaults in the military still seen as betraying their comrades?" I asked Smith.
"Our soldiers are being fully trained that sexual assault is the most under-reported crime," she wrote in reply. "In that training, not reporting a sexual assault is the betrayal to their comrades."
Back in real life, Pickett watched several of her friends try to report sexual harassment and assault since the 2005 reforms, and she said that none of them were sent a victim's advocate, a counselor or a chaplain. "These women are turning perpetrators in and they're not getting anyone to speak on their behalf," she told me. "There's no one sitting in that room with you, so you're feeling all alone." In the end, she added, it boils down to the woman's word vs. the man's, and he is the one with the advocate, not her.
Meanwhile, the studies I have cited, along with the other past and present studies of veterans, who feel freer to talk than soldiers because they are out of the military, show that women soldiers are suffering post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of military sexual abuse. All soldiers with PTSD come home to some combination of sleeplessness, nightmares, bursts of temper, flashbacks, panic attacks, fear and an inability to cope with everyday life. They often turn to drugs or alcohol for escape. Some become depressed, others commit suicide. Many are too emotionally numb to relate to their families or children. But those who have been sexually assaulted also lose their self-respect, feel they have lost control over their lives, and are particularly prone to self-destruction.
I have yet to meet an Iraq war veteran of either sex who does not suffer from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, but officially the number of Iraq veterans with PTSD is estimated to be about 30 percent for those newly back from war, according to a 2004 study of combat veterans in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The extent and severity of PTSD in women who have had to cope with both combat and sexual assault in Iraq is still being studied, but as it is known that these are two of the highest predictors of PTSD, it is logical to assume that the combination is pretty bad. "When you are sexually assaulted by people who are your comrades, PTSD can be worse than in other circumstances," said Paula Shnurr, a research professor of psychiatry who conducted a new Veterans Administration study of therapy for women veterans with PTSD, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "You feel incompetent and helpless, like children feel when abused by the very people who are supposed to look after them," Schnurr told me. "The people you depend on have attacked you."
I am not claiming that sexual persecution is universal in the military, or that it is inevitable. Several soldiers I interviewed told me that if a commander won't tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen, and studies back this up. Jennifer Hogg, 25, who was a sergeant in the Army's National Guard, said her company treated her well because she had a commander who wouldn't permit the mistreatment of women. But another National Guard soldier, Demond Mullins, 25, who served with the infantry in Iraq for a year, from 2004 to '05, told me that although there were no problems in his unit he heard from his commanders that there were rapes in other units in his camp. "One time a woman was taking a shower late, and guys went and held the door closed so she couldn't get out, while one guy went in to rape her," he said.
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