Sexual Abuse and Harassment

Rape and War

Rape has an enduring association with war. Long dreaded as a consequence of failure and celebrated as a right of victory, rape remained an acknowledged part of warfare in the 20th century. Two of the most notorious modern incidents of wartime rape took place during World War II: the rape of more than 100,000 German women by Allied troops in Berlin (a conservative estimate; some claim nearly two million German women were raped by the Red Army troops of the Soviet Union alone), and the mass rape of thousands of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers in the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937. The Serbs’ genocidal mass rape in the Bosnia–Herzegovina war (1992–95) focused attention on rape as an international war crime. Many of the worst cases of soldiers raping during war have involved sexual violence across lines of race and ethnicity.

American troops have not escaped the modern soldier's propensity to rape. From the Civil War to the wars in Iraq in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, advancing and occupying U.S. servicemen have participated in individual and group sexual assaults. The military justice system prosecuted some of these incidents, but many went unpunished because of commanders’ reluctance to spend scarce resources gathering evidence to try crimes committed in the heat of battle.

While soldiers undoubtedly rape more often and with greater impunity during war, rape has also been a problem for the U.S. military during times of relative peace, especially in the vast draft-generated military of the Cold War years. Incidents of military rape, some also involving other types of sexual harassment, were widely reported by the news media after the late 1970s. Front-page stories of sexual assaults reported a series of rapes at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1979; the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa in 1995; the rape of trainees by drill sergeants at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, in 1996; and sexual assaults by male cadets against female cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado in 2003. These incidents had political repercussions and often prompted policy revisions. For example, after the rape in Okinawa in 1995 by U.S. marines, outrage in the local community almost forced U.S. marines to leave the island; after the Denver Post's reports of rapes at the Air Force Academy in 2003, the Office of the General Counsel of the Air Force convened a group to investigate better ways to deter and respond to sexual assaults.

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