Military’s War on Sexual Assault Proves Slow Going
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Just like the Pentagon’s recent real-world wars, its latest dispatch from the front in the battle against sexual assault contains both good and bad news.
There are enough numbers crammed into the document that military boosters can hail the progress that has been made, while critics can claim the Defense Department still isn’t doing enough.
“There have been indications of real progress,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said as he released the report Thursday afternoon, but “we still have a long way to go.”
According to that latest accounting, the bad news is that reported assaults continue to rise—from 3,604 in 2012, to 5,518 last year, and to 5,983 in 2014 (the report charts fiscal years, which end Sept. 30). That’s an 8% jump in the past year.
The good news, the 1,136-page report says, is that reforms in handling sexual assault have encouraged more victims to come forward and not cower in secret. The study estimates that while only 10% of alleged victims came forward in 2012, 25% did in 2014. The number of active-duty women complaining about unwanted sexual contract dropped from about 6.1% last year to 4.3% in 2014 (for men, the number fell from 1.2% to 0.9%).
An anonymous Rand Corp. survey of military personnel projected that approximately 19,000 had been subject to unwanted sexual contact in 2014 (55% of them male), 27% less than the 26,000 estimated in 2012. It was that spike—up from 19,300 in 2010—that focused attention on the problem and led to a host of changes into how the military investigates and prosecutes alleged sexual assaults.
Commanders are no longer free to reverse court-martial convictions, and each alleged victim is assigned a lawyer. When a commander and prosecutor disagree over whether a court martial is warranted, civilians are called in to review such cases. Statutes of limitations on such crimes have been scrapped. Anyone convicted of sexual assault in the U.S. military gets at least a dishonorable discharge.
But the tribal nature of military service persists: 62% of the women alleging unwanted sexual contact felt they had been shunned or punished for complaining. “The Department was unable to identify clear progress in the area of perceived victim retaliation,” the study said. “The news is a mixed bag,” says Elspeth Ritchie, a retired Army colonel who dealt with the issue as a military psychiatrist. “The numbers persist despite all the public education campaigns.” Reducing retaliation “is the key to further progress,” she adds. “It is very frustrating that so little progress has been made.”
The Pentagon has spent decades trying to rid its ranks of sexual predators—and encouraging victims to come forward—but progress has been slow. “An estimate of 20,000 cases of sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact a year in our military, or 55 cases a day, is appalling,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said. “There is no other mission in the world for our military where this much failure would be allowed.” Gillibrand plans to renew her push to take prosecution of such cases away from the alleged perpetrator’s commanders and give it to a corps of independent military lawyers.
“It is unfair to the commanders to put them in this position,” said Don Christensen, who recently retired as a top Air Force prosecutor. “It is a system set up for failure.”
Dealing with sex among young men and women—especially when there is a commander-commanded relationship, and liquor, or other such substances, are involved—is difficult under the best of conditions. And the military lacks the best of conditions, given its stresses, its work-hard, play-hard ethos, and the fact that the service attracts its fair share of dolts (like the sailor, according to areport Wednesday, who allegedly filmed female officers showering aboard their shared submarine).
As women have become an increasing share of the U.S. military—they now account for 15 of every 100 Americans in uniform—the service’s macho culture hasn’t kept pace. “Sexual harassment stems from certain widespread cultural attitudes that have been prevalent through the ages,” a 1993 Army report said. “Women have lived under male protection–benevolent or otherwise–thereby being forced to live by the rules of men who dominate them.”
That’s slowly changing, with the emphasis on slowly.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Iran, which dueled viciously over Iraq during the years of U.S. occupation, suddenly seem to be working in tandem as they confront what both see as a common, even mortal enemy: Islamic State.
Westerners in Abu Dhabi say they are concerned about rising extremism following the killing of an American teacher and the placing of a bomb outside the home of an American doctor in a state that is renowned for its security and tolerance of Western residents.
Police arrested a woman on Thursday in connection with the attacks. She was described by authorities in Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as an Emirati national in her late 30s but her name was not given. They also said that she had targeted the two Americans because of their nationality and not for any personal reason. The suspect was seen escaping from the mall in a long black robe in a video released by local police.
Late Thursday afternoon, Lt. General Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, said that the suspect had been arrested and that the same person had also “tried to plant a primitive bomb in front of the house of a resident U.S. doctor,” according to astatement from the state news agency WAM.
On Dec.1, Ibolya Ryan, a 47-year-old mother of three, was stabbed to death in the bathroom of a small shopping center in the bottom of an apartment complex on Reem Island, a development outside the center of Abu Dhabi. Ryan, who was originally from Colorado, was a teacher at a local kindergarten.
“My reaction is complete shock or surprise because nothing like that happens here, I’ve never felt any threat,” says Andres Calderon, a resident in the building where the first attack occurred. “I often leave my house door open, even my car sometimes is not locked. The sense of security here is incredibly high.”
The incident followed a warning by the U.S. State Department on Oct. 29 that jihadist websites had called for attacks on American and international educational institutions in the Middle East.
There are more than 30,000 Americans living in the UAE. Most live in Dubai but several thousand live in Abu Dhabi.
“I thought Abu Dhabi was a safe place but I’m seeing more extremism in passing comments and in the way that people are even covering up on a daily basis,” says Robyn Albers, an expatriate who has lived in the UAE for nine years.
“When I heard about the stabbing, I found it shocking,” says one elementary school teacher in Abu Dhabi, who requested anonymity because she did not have permission from her employer to speak to media. “A lot of my colleagues live on Reem Island and we shop there all the time. I feel really sad for the family.”
A professor at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed University, also declining to speak on the record, says the incident had made her more wary. But she continued, “I think most people feel very safe here. The security on this campus and others is really high.”
Analysts said the attacks could be part of a broader threat to Western expatriates in the Gulf region by Sunni militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group called for attacks on Americans following the formation of a U.S.-backed coalition targeting its operations in Iraq and Syria. All six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — are participating in the coalition.
“What we’re witnessing is a growth of potentially Daesh-related incidents in Gulf states,” says Theodore Karasik, a senior advisor to Risk Insurance Management, a consultancy based in Dubai, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. He cited several recent incidents in Saudi Arabia, including the killing last month of a Danish citizen, which an ISIS-linked media outlet later claimed was carried out by the extremist group.
“Expats in Gulf are probably more vulnerable than they were before and should take precautions because of what appears to be a growing pattern of attacks,” he says, adding that “it was not clear yet if any of these attacks have been lone wolf attacks” or were coordinated.
Some educational institutions have visibly increased security since the October warning from the State Department.
“After we brought up the American warning with the administration at our school, they assured us that everyone’s safety taken care of,” says the elementary school teacher. “We have policies that have been put in place.”
New York University Abu Dhabi, located on Saadiyat Island — a 10 minute drive from central Abu Dhabi — established a checkpoint for all cars entering the campus earlier this fall. A spokesman for the university declined to comment.
Abu Dhabi needs the skills of expatriates to work in its oil and service industries. Residents from Western countries often enjoy high tax-free salaries and a luxurious lifestyle. Both parties are keen that extremist violence does not threaten this mutually beneficial arrangement.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Moscow’s annexation of Crimea on December 4 by invoking Kievan Rus leader Vladimir the Great, who is said to have been baptized on the peninsula in the 10th century and converted the medieval Slavic state to Orthodox Christianity.
Ukrainians, however, could deploy the same logic to justify Crimea’s inclusion in the modern Ukrainian state, historians and religious experts say.
“From the Ukrainian perspective, Crimea is more relevant to Kyiv because Volodymyr was the ruler of Kyiv,” said Cyril Hovorun, a former senior spokesman for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, using the Ukrainian rendition of the sovereign’s name.
This interpretive impasse is among several competing historical, religious, ethnic and political claims to Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that was home to Greek colonies some 2,500 years ago and controlled by various kingdoms and empires until Russia annexed it from the Ottoman Empire in 1783.
According to legend, in 988 Vladimir the Great converted to Orthodox Christianity on the peninsula in the city of Khersones, also known as Korsun, near modern-day Sevastopol, after which he returned to Kyiv and ordered the baptism Kievan Rus.
In his December 4 state-of-the-nation speech, Putin compared the site of Vladimir the Great’s baptism to the holy sites for Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem.
"Crimea, ancient Korsun, Khersones, Sevastopol -- all of them bear an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning for Russia, just as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem does for those who profess Islam and Judaism," Putin said.
Given that the conversion of Kievan Rus established the Orthodox foundations for future Russian and Ukrainian states, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko could take the same message to his electorate, said Karl Qualls, a professor of Russian and modern European history at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
“It’s the same conversion, the same person and the same place,” Qualls told RFE/RL. “You could see the Ukrainians standing up and saying, ‘Well, yeah, this is our Temple Mount, too.’ … If Poroshenko said the same thing, it would resonate with Ukrainians as well.”
Tatars And Greeks
The Crimean Tatars also have a strong historical claim to the peninsula, with their ancestors having lived there as far back as the 13th century, Qualls noted.
The mainly Muslim Tatars administered their own khanate there in the 15th century and became an Ottoman vassal state until Crimea’s annexation into the Russian empire by Catherine the Great in 1783.
“I think the Tatars certainly have much more of a claim than Russians or Ukrainians, due to being the oldest settled population on that peninsula since the Greeks up and left,” Qualls said.
According to the 1897 census taken in the Russian Empire, Crimean Tatars constituted more than one-third of the population on the peninsula.
In May 1944, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia and Siberia for alleged collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. (Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred Crimea to from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.)
Crimean Tatars began returning to the peninsula in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and currently constitute around 13 percent of Crimea’s 2 million population.
Crimean Tatar leaders have accused Moscow-backed authorities on the peninsula of targeting their community for criticizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March.
After Russia seized the peninsula following Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster in February, Ukraine’s parliament recognized the Crimean Tatars as “both Crimea’s indigenous population and an official national minority.”
Qualls said the word “indigenous” is a misnomer when describing any single population in Crimea, given that the territory.
“This territory was so overrun for thousands of years by different nomadic groups, that I don’t think we can talk about an indigenous group,” he told RFE/RL.
Greeks, who constitute a tiny minority in Ukraine according to its most recent census in 2001, could make a solid argument for recognition as an indigenous people of Crimea given that Khersones, mentioned by Putin in his state-of-the-union speech, was an ancient Greek city-state, Qualls added.
“I don’t see Athens making claims on Crimea, although I think they could,” he said.
Deaf Ears?
During a meeting with Russian historians last month, Putin made a similar reference to the Crimea’s central importance to Russia as the site of Vladimir the Great’s baptism.
Putin is employing religious themes to “give more legitimacy to the illegal annexation of Crimea, at least in the eyes of the Russians,” said Hovorun, research director at the Institute of Theological Studies at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
Qualls said the religious motifs selected by Putin show that “he’s a clever politician, whatever we think about his politics.”
“He knows how to use words for dramatic effect,” he said.
One poll conducted last year, however, suggests Putin’s religious reference might fall on deaf ears at home.
According to the poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, just 25 percent of Russians surveyed were able to recall that the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity took place under Vladimir the Great.
With reporting by Reuters
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Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March, President Vladimir V. Putin has used strong language to inspire nationalist support at home and encourage pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. Here are 10 recent examples.
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