Sexual Assault: The Uncomfortable Reality

Well, if the gaggle of well-pampered and positioned men who lead the military won't defend our culture, then I guess we'll have to outsource to those who seem to have a .... spine; women.

Back in May, I posted about the excellent broadside against the smear-machine by Major Lindsey L. Rodman, USMC.

So, after another six weeks of official thumb sucking by the XY leadership - another woman has stepped to the front to speak truth, acknowledge math - and to also offer some suggestions.

I highly recommend that you read in full Rosa Brooks's article from 10 JUL in Foreign Policy; Is Sexual Assault Really an 'Epidemic'?

Though not a servicemember, I think her CV gives her quite a bit of heft;

Rosa Brooks is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. From April 2009 to July 2011, she served as Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy at the U.S. Department of Defense.
...
Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard, followed by a master's degree from Oxford and a law degree from Yale.
...
Brooks has two children and a dog. She divides her time between Alexandria, Virginia and Colorado Springs, Colorado, where her husband is a battalion commander in the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division.

Again, you need to read it all, but here are my pull quotes to ponder by;

Sexual assault in the military is a genuine and serious problem, but the frantic rhetoric may be doing more harm than good. It conceals the progress the military has made in developing effective sexual assault prevention and response programs, and it distracts us from the even higher rates of sexual violence in comparable civilian populations.
...
There's no question that the military needs to do more to address the problem of sexual assault. Nevertheless, when you look more closely at the statistics, there's much less reason than commonly assumed to condemn the military. Although the New York Times editorial board insists that the military has an "entrenched culture of sexual violence," rates of sexual assault in the military in fact appear to be substantially lower than rates of sexual assault in comparable civilian populations. And although underreporting remains a serious problem, military personnel are substantially more likely than civilians to report sexual assaults to the authorities.
...
Relative to the size of the military population, 26,000 sexual assaults means that 6.1 percent of female servicemembers (and 1.2 percent of male servicemembers) experienced unwanted sexual contact during 2012. If you favor your glass half full, you might prefer to note that 93.9 percent of female servicemembers and 98.8 percent of male servicemembers had no unwanted sexual contact.

Thank you Rosa for doing something rather unusual in this conversation - using facts.

On the other side of the equation, we are forcing warfighters to go through theater that is as painful to watch as it is injurious to our ethos.

Bask in over 2-hrs of washing the same plate over and over. At SERE School they need to have this thing on a loop.