In Veteran's Day panel, service members discuss military sexual assault

A Veteran’s Day panel on the role of America’s armed forces held Monday afternoon turned tense when participants broached the topic of sexual assault within the military.

Initially, participants — a group of military veterans, several of whom were alumni — discussed various less controversial aspects of veterans’ affairs, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and the importance of thanking soldiers for their service upon their return home.

However, the dynamic changed considerably when Roy Scranton GS, an Iraq war veteran and Ph.D. candidate in the English department, began to speak.

Scranton criticized what he saw as the American public’s unquestioning and uncritical trust of the military, which he called “corrosive and dangerous.”

In particular, Scranton said the military does not do nearly enough to protect service members who are sexually assaulted while serving in various branches of the armed forces.

Scranton claimed that one in three women who serve in the military report military sexual trauma — a significantly higher proportion than the number of cases that reach military courts or end in convictions.

According to Scranton, women who are raped in the military must report the assault to their superior officer, who is often the assaulter. Even when this is not the case, officers fear reporting such cases for fear their unit will be labeled a “problem,” Scranton said.

He compared the military to the Catholic Church, claiming that it “spends more energy on protecting sexual predators than prosecuting them.”

“If you sexually assault a fellow service member, you have a 90 percent chance of getting away with it,” he said.

Scranton said he first became interested in the issue of military sexual assault when the sister-in-law of a friend was gang-raped while serving as a Marine officer, he said. She was subject to “consistent structural harassment” and is “still seeking justice,” Scranton said.

Joseph Holliday ’06, a veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and is currently a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said that the problem of sexual assault in the military was a “question of character” of those officers who do not report assaults and engage in cover-ups.

“It’s important not to extend that indictment [of officers’ characters] to the efforts of leadership in these conflicts," Holliday said.

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Peter G. Knight, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the director of Princeton’s ROTC program, emphasized the importance of acknowledging the sexual assault issue in a developing coeducational military.

“We need to break down barriers and realize that we’re building one team,” Knight said. “We need to be able to coexist and cohabitate together without people feeling uncomfortable.”

Nevertheless, Knight expressed confidence that the military is changing its attitude toward the problem of sexual assault.

“Sometimes there’s a blurred line between education and training, but the education piece is catching up,” Knight said.

Scranton, however, said he was skeptical.

“That’s what the military always says,” he said in an interview after the panel concluded. “They’re not going to say, ‘We got caught with our pants down.’ They’re going to say, ‘We’re on top of it, don’t worry about it.’ ”

While he acknowledged that recent policy changes made by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — who recently vowed to crack down on military rape cases and called the scandal “an outrage” — were a step in the right direction, Scranton said such measures were not enough given the rising rate of reported sexual assaults.

Scranton said the source of the military’s behavior was external to the military itself. The rising rate of sexual assault, he said, is a consequence of modern military-civilian relations, in which a civilian culture pays so much unquestioning respect to the military that military leadership gets “a free pass.”

Ron Milam, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War and an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, said the root of this attitude was in the perception, both real and imagined, that Vietnam veterans were treated badly by a country in opposition to that war upon their return home.

The debate’s moderator, sociology professor Miguel Centeno, framed the panel’s discussion in terms of a central paradox in military-civilian relations: the need at once to be critical of the military and to acknowledge its difficult job.

“Is there a limit to what we can ask of human beings and what we can hold them accountable for?” Centeno asked.

The discussion was held at 4:30 p.m. in Dodds Auditorium in Robertson Hall.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article misstated a quote by Iraq war veteran and Ph.D. candidate in the English department Roy Scranton GS. He said that the military “spends more energy on protecting sexual predators than prosecuting them." The 'Prince' regrets the error.