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(More customer reviews)This is a timely topic. Despite publicized campaigns against sexual assault in the military, the problem is not going away. Women soldiers are especially in danger in Iraq. Commanders routinely warn them not to visit the latrine without another woman for protection; three women who died from dehydration had reportedly stopped drinking fluids in the afternoons out of fear of being raped while walking to the latrine. As a young female soldier who carried a knife for protection from fellow soldiers told an interviewer: "There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke.... In Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don't have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead." (The full article is available at Salon's website.)
In this volume, Mic Hunter has synopsized an impressive volume of research literature spanning many decades on the topics of rape, sexual harassment, hazing, homophobia, hypermasculinity, domestic violence, and their interconnections. The book offers a helpful introduction to readers who are ignorant about these topics. Unfortunately, Dr. Hunter's treatment of the current situation in the U.S. military is poorly grounded, offering a simplistic analysis and broad generalities. He often lumps together all time periods and all branches of the military. More seriously, he fails to address recent efforts to curtail military sexual assault. What are these efforts? Are they having any positive impact? Are they mere window dressing? Dr. Hunter is silent on these questions. Nor does he seem aware of some of the practical limitations inherent in efforts to court martial suspected sexual abusers. With just a few exceptions, such as his recommendation of eliminating the "Feres Doctrine" that prohibits soldiers from suing the government, he gives little in the way of practical advice.
As a researcher, I found his loose use of data troubling. For example, he cites an unpublished web source to claim that 45% of untreated sex offenders reoffend - a substantially higher proportion than that found in authoritative, published studies. Without adequately referencing such in the text, he cites data that are sometimes many decades old to support his contentions about today's situation. He also uses seemingly discrepant statistics to make different arguments in different sections. For example, on p. 168 he states that "in civilian courts, only 2% of those charged with sexual assault are convicted and imprisoned." Just 20 pages later he asserts that "in the civilian criminal justice system, four out of five of those arrested for sexual assault are prosecuted." While both claims could be technically accurate, his purpose in introducing these statistics seems blatantly polemical. The book contains no index and the referencing system is laborious, so it takes a great deal of effort to figure out where he is getting his information, in order to evaluate the validity of the sources.
As important as this topic is, I fear that some of these weaknesses will make the book ring false to the very audience that most needs it - those who are intimately involved with the military and who are working to reduce sexual abuse within its ranks.
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In Honor Betrayed, Dr. Mic Hunter probes beyond the headlines to reveal the reality of sexual abuse in the military. The culture of the military's training is to turn recruits into those who follow orders without question.Honor Betrayed describes in detail the gross realities of the hostile, uber-masculine, dehumanizing environment our young men and women confront. Most vulnerable to sexual abuse are minorities-particularly women and homosexuals. Included are first-person accounts from American servicewomen and men who were sexually abused by their comrades, including one woman whose case was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunter also explores the tacit acceptance of these incidents in the military to the recent prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.
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