Battleland

Two Sides…

  • Share
  • Read Later
Scott Olson / Getty Images

Female Marines in training.

One of the confounding things about sexual assault in the military is that is some corners it is tolerated, winked at, and/or laughed about. Yet elsewhere inside the same institution, the military goes to extraordinary lengths to see that justice is done. Exhibit A: this 15-year old case in on which the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals recently ruled.

Another against-the-grain take comes from Rosa Brooks, who served as a counselor to U.S. defense undersecretary for policy Michèle Flournoy from 2009-2011. “Sexual assault in the military is a genuine and serious problem, but the frantic rhetoric may be doing more harm than good,” she writes over at Foreign Policy. “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.”

Then again, you can click on the official United States Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response training page and be told “This page is under construction”.