On June 25, the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held the third in a series of hearings on sexual assault in the military: “Context and Causes.”
Psychologist Veronique Valliere testified about the “concept of sexual offending” and explained that certain environments provide offenders with “character pathology” opportunities to commit sexual assault: “The character pathway explains offense behavior that occurs in a particular context or opportunity. An offender who has a personality replete with criminality, egocentricity, callousness towards others, thrill-seeking, a lack of remorse or empathy, arrogance, or entitlement can act sexually assaultive or victimizing in the right environment and not be primarily motivated by sexual deviance. Instead, because the offender has certain traits and lacks internal barriers to offending, the risk of the offender becoming a rapist or sexual offender increases in a particular environment or with particular opportunities provided by circumstance, culture, or subculture.” Dr. Valliere continued, “An example of this would be a highly criminal, antisocial person who rapes in prison. This offender may not be sexually aroused to same sex partners or not be sexually aroused specifically by anger or power needs. However, due to the environment, the character pathology of the offender and the issues that impact the victim, a particular type of person can engage in rape behavior for sexual gratification, domination, humiliation, or oppression (or all of the above) because he has a callous, entitled, remorseless character who has no reason (internally) not to rape. The environment or context contributes to an external environment that promotes or is not inhibitory towards rape. So, the offender with few internal barriers to sexual aggression, placed into an environment that provides few external barriers to sexual aggression, can contribute to a situation that enhances the risk of sexual assault.”
Elizabeth Hillman of the University of California Hastings College of Law stated that, in spite of continued efforts to reduce military sexual violence, it “occurs with astonishing frequency” because it is inextricably linked to military law itself. “I believe that military sexual violence has been, and continues to be, so central to military legal precedent that it has both shaped the substance of military law and strengthened through repetition the image of some men as sexually violent predators and women as sexual victims. Because of the dramatic and well-publicized extent of military-on-military sexual violence, it has become normalized in military culture, even as changes in military demographics, law, and policy have raised awareness of, and punishments for, military sexual violence. Sexual violence has, in short, become a primary context for military law; most landmark opinions in the annals of military justice involve crimes of sexual violence. These cases of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence have had profound collateral consequences as well as direct implications for substantive military law. They have created an impression of female vulnerability and male dominance, lessened the standards of accountability to which service members are held, and reinscribed racist assumptions about sexual predators. In short, legal narratives of sexual violence have become an increasingly prominent discourse through which military norms of gender relations, power dynamics, and individual vulnerability are articulated.”
Helen Benedict, professor of journalism at Columbia University and author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, explained how an all-volunteer military contributes to the prevalence of sexual assault: “The economic reasons behind enlistment are well understood: the military is the primary path out of poverty and dead end jobs for the poor of America. What is less often discussed is how many soldiers also enlist to escape troubled or violent homes. Two well-respected studies of Army and Marine recruits, conducted in 1996 and 2005 respectively and published in the journal Military Medicine, found that half the male enlistees had been physically abused in childhood, one sixth had been sexually abused, and 11 percent had experienced both.13 This is significant because, as psychologists have long known, childhood abuse often turns men into abusers…Nobody has yet proven that abusive men like this seek out the military because it gives them a violent, misogynistic culture in which they are free to rape, but the likelihood that the military attracts violent men is so obvious one hardly needs a study to prove it. Still, for the doubters…Elizabeth L. Hillman, author of a forthcoming study on sexual violence in the military, has found that sexist and violent men are indeed volunteering for the military. Worse, the military has been exacerbating the problem by applying an increasing number of “moral waivers” to its recruits since 9/11, which means taking men with records of domestic and sexual violence, according to the DoD’s [Department of Defense] own reports.”
Fred Berlin, associate professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, also testified.
