Women at war: Sexual combat By Pamela Martineau and Steve Wiegand -- Bee Staff Writers Published 2:15 am PST Monday, March 7, 2005
Gina W. went to Iraq, and came back with a different kind of war story. Her battlefields were in the barracks and the mess hall. The weapons were innuendoes and threats. And the enemy? Her own boss. "When you go there, you have to be prepared for war," she says. "And then you have to be worried about being raped by your own people."
The former Army specialist is one of dozens of military women interviewed by The Bee who say they faced some kind of sexual harassment while in the combat theater in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Though publicity about sexual misconduct in the war zone has focused on rape, female soldiers said unwelcome advances, demeaning comments - and a feeling that being alone around male comrades in arms meant being unsafe - were far greater concerns.
"I think every female (soldier in Iraq) has been sexually harassed," said Sgt. Yolanda Medina of Long Beach, who is doing her second tour there with the California National Guard's 2668th Transportation Company.
The exact number of U.S. military women who have been assaulted or harassed is probably somewhere between Medina's "every female" and the number reported by the Department of Defense.
Defense Department numbers show that from August 2002 through October 2004, 118 cases of sexual assault on military personnel were reported in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. But the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps victims of military domestic violence and sexual assault, reports that it was contacted by 258 military assault victims in the combat theater during that same time span. That number rose to 307 through mid-February, according to the foundation.
A Pentagon official said the military would release more up-to-date numbers sometime this month. Yet military officials acknowledge their numbers don't reflect the true situation because many women are reluctant to report an assault. One study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found nearly 75 percent of military women who said they had been assaulted did not tell their commanding officer.
No statistics are kept on cases of sexual harassment that fall short of physical assault, and none reflect what many women interviewed by The Bee described as a bawdy combat zone environment that made them feel like second-class soldiers:
Playboy magazines on sale at the Post Exchange. Porno films purchased on the Iraqi black market and pornographic pictures scrawled on the bathroom walls. Platoon leaders handing out condoms even though sex between soldiers is illegal.
And the reality of mostly young women, vastly outnumbered and surrounded by mostly young men, far from home in a highly stressful situation.
One of the standing jokes in Iraq, returning female vets said, was that on the 10-point scale some men use to rate women, female soldiers got two extra points just for being there.
Those bonus points came with bathroom-wall taunts like the one a female soldier remembered from an Iraq camp latrine: "All you queens will turn back into frogs once you leave Iraq."
The sexually charged atmosphere brought continual come-ons from male soldiers, leaving women feeling unsafe even inside the military camps. Virtually every woman interviewed by The Bee said that while she was in the camps in Iraq or Kuwait, she did not walk alone at night.
the rest at: <http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/women_at_war/story/12523663p-13379149c.html>