Rape in the military: exposing the shocking truth

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abuse, armed forces, blame, crime, documentary, film, Military, rape, sexual assault

Rape in the military: exposing the shocking truth

He hit me across the left side of my face … and my face hurt so bad. He screamed at me and he grabbed my arm and he raped me.” Kori Cioca’s heartbreaking account of her rape by a commanding officer while serving in the US Coast Guard is not the most shocking part of her testimony. Following the attack, Cioca was told by her superiors that if she went forward with her case she would be court-martialed for lying; her assailant, who admitted the attack but denied rape, then received just 30 days of base restriction and loss of pay and the US Department of Defense continues to refuse to pay for the surgery she needs for the nerve damage to her face.

Cioca is just one of the women interviewed in The Invisible War, a feature-length documentary that lifts the lid on the abuse of women in the US military and which got its first UK screening in the Frontline Club in London last week.

The film has raised similar concerns this side of the Atlantic that rape is a hidden scourge in the military. According to figures released to Labour MP Madeleine Moon, a rape or sexual assault is reported by a member of the armed forces every week. Over the past two and a half years, there have been 53 reported rapes and 86 reported sexual assaults in the army, the navy and the air force, but Moon believes the figure is an underestimation and could be as many as an attack a day.

Between 2001-2011, Ministry of Defence figures show 56 members of the armed forces were court-martialed for sexual offences – of these, just 16 resulted in a conviction.

UK screenings of The Invisible War are in the pipeline, as is its release on iTunes in the UK, while its makers are urging UK viewers to host their own screenings.

Lifting the lid on the extent of the abuse is vital to tackling the problem of rape in the military, says Amy Ziering, producer of the film, which was directed and written by Kirby Dick. “There is a perfect storm of conditions to keep this secret,” she says, speaking from Los Angeles. “There is no incentive to report rape, it is not treated as a priority in the military and the nature of the crime means that it is so implosively devastating that many women get the blame, or blame themselves.”

The statistics revealed in The Invisible War, which won the audience award at this year’s Sundance film festival, make shocking reading: a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire, over 20% of female veterans have been sexually assaulted while serving in the US army, of 3,192 sexual-assault reports in 2011 only 191 members of the military were convicted at courts martial.

Rape within the military has been exposed before – the Tailhook Association meetings in 1991, the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1996 and the Air Force Academy in 2003 – but it has rarely been done with such a devastating combination of first-person testimony, watertight research and high-level interviews.

Through the testimony of victims and their families the extent of that devastation is laid bare, as well as the failings of a system that sees a rape victim’s commander decide whether to take action after a rape report.

Ariana Klay, who graduated with honours from the US Naval Academy and served in Iraq, describes her violent rape by a senior officer and her civilian boss. “He said that if I told anybody, that he was gonna have his friend Marv, from Indiana, kill me and throw me in a ditch, ’cause that’s how they took care of things in Indiana,” she tells the camera. When she reported the rape she was told to do “what a Marine officer should do, and that’s to ignore it and move on,” and she alleges the Marine Corps said she must have welcomed the assaults because she wore makeup and skirts – part of her regulation uniform.

“The thing that makes me the most angry,” says Klay, “is not even the rape itself; it’s the commanders that were complicit in covering up everything that happened.”

The film shows Andrea Werner, who reported her rape to her army superiors, only to be charged with adultery, even though it was her assailant who was married; Lieutenant Elle Helmer, whose case against her commanding officer at the Marine barracks in Washington DC, was closed owing to “lack of evidence” before a new case was opened charging Helmer with conduct unbecoming of an officer and public intoxication.

Ziering was instrumental in getting the women to open up about their horrific experiences. She readily agrees that her gender invariably played a role: “I became very emotionally involved in the victims’ stories, it was what drove me, and I wanted the film to have that heart and passion,” she says.

Ziering finds the documentary world “more welcoming and equitable” for women than Hollywood. “There is absolutely no balance in the movie world. It is so bleak there are so few women directors, it’s still very much an all boys club. It’s just horrible,” she says, though she notes the “big star” directors in documentaries still tend to be men. Dick and Ziering’s film has already had a far-reaching impact: offers of financial donations and support for victims have been made after almost every screening and when US secretary of defense Leon Panetta watched the film earlier this year he ordered military commanders to hand over all sexual-assault investigations to a higher-ranking colonel, and announce the creation of a special victims unit in each branch of the armed forces.

Ziering reveals that some commanders are using the film as a training tool, showing it to new recruits. “My real hope is that in 10 years’ time there is not another film made about this. We’re going to keep the pressure on – this can’t just be allowed to blow over.”

Bully: Documentary Film

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Bullying, Children, documentary, film, parents, suicide

More info:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlo-thomas/bully_b_1382354.html?ref=uk

I’m not a movie reviewer, but I strongly recommend that you take your child by the hand this weekend — or several children — to see the new documentary film, Bully. The only problem is, you might not be able to find the film at your neighborhood cineplex. That’s because the Motion Picture Association of America has stamped the film “Unrated,” after a long and noisy battle over its original R-rating. So now it is up to the individual theatre owners to decide whether or not they will exhibit Bully. I urge them to do so.

But make no mistake, even if you have to drive your kids across state lines to see the film, your kids need to be in the audience — because, whether you know it or not, they may be among the 13 million American children affected by bullying every year. For them, this is more than just a movie. It is real life.

And in this real life, parents have been all but invisible — invisible in the school cafeteria, invisible on the playground, invisible on the school bus and online — unwittingly abandoning their children to face this torment alone. The film makes this painfully clear, whether it’s the dad who confidently recites that timeworn rationalization about bullying — “Kids will be kids” — or the school administrator who blindly insists to a worried parent that her students are “good as gold on that school bus” — intercut with a clip of a small boy being choked on that very bus. We come away from Bully feeling defeated and enraged.

Interestingly, the MPAA’s controversial decision about the film’s rating — based on its use of profanity and other violent language — could end up working in the children’s favor. Research indicates that bullied kids are not comfortable revealing their dangerous predicaments to their parents. But now that the rating has forced kids to see the film with an adult, the movie can do the revealing for them. And children will at last feel their parents there, by their side, seeing and understanding what it’s like to leave their house and wander unprotected into a scary world.

Adults may be horrified by what they see in Bully, but the kids know this world all too well. Directed by Lee Hirsch, the film captures the wrenching drama of schoolyard bullying — the hitting and harassing, the tormenting and tears, the grave suffering — in unflinching detail, as it zooms in on the daily battles waged by five bullied children, two of whom ultimately commit suicide. But sitting through the film will be worth every harrowing minute, especially to the children, whose only hope against this ever deepening crisis is the visible and vocal support of the adults in their lives.

The MPAA’s decision has incited a storm of protest. When Bully was first given an R-rating, a 17-year-old Michigan high-schooler, Katy Butler — who has been bullied herself — posted a petition on Change.org, demanding that the MPAA change the rating. When such high-profile and conscientious activists as Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp joined in the protest, the MPAA was effectively arm-twisted into changing the movie’s rating to a still restrictive “Unrated.”

But while all of this debate continues, the sad fact is: children are still dying at the hands of bullying.

This is why I am urging all adults — parents, guardians, caregivers — to take your kids to see Bully this weekend. I also encourage educators and school administrators to arrange school-wide field trips. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned since launching our anti-bullying campaign last year — with the Ad Council, the Department of Education and funders like AOL, Facebook, the Waitt Family Foundation and the Free To Be Foundation (who have been major funders of the Bully Project) — it’s that, if we are ever to eradicate this deadly, modern-day scourge, we need to face the problem head-on — and together.

It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world

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abortion, Children, culture, daughters, documentary, economy, education, family, femicide, film, foeticide, gender, girls, infanticide, mothers, parents, poverty, women

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/16/it%E2%80%99s-a-girl-the-three-deadliest-words-in-the-world/

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughters, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.