Sexual harassment in the armed forces - 22 November 1996

"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints." Rudyard Kipling's old line must be so familiar to so many generations that most of us who were not in the military have thought, ah, how true, and then never given it a second thought.

Yet for new recruits it's a warning and for military leaders everywhere, at any time, has had the force of a battle order, at least a forewarning of a situation about which something has to be done. It's not a pleasant subject and throughout the 19th century and indeed most of this one, it's suggested a phrase too indelicate to mention in print or in public.

I have looked through the memoirs of the First and Second World Wars by Churchill, Lloyd George, Montgomery, Bradley, Eisenhower, de Gaulle, several other military histories, and only in Eisenhower's index is there a single mention of the unmentionable. He's writing about the ways in which a field commander can maintain morale, being sure, for instance, not to keep men in prolonged combat, to make a point of visiting resting troops most days, and, he writes:

"The need to visit hospital and camp facilities and say an encouraging word to those suffering from self-inflicted wounds, from hysteria and a psychoneurosis," – in the first war they call that shell shock – "and from venereal disease, sometimes, according to the doctors, deliberately contracted".

There, the word is out. But even then it merely glances at a subject, a condition which all commanders must provide for even at the beginning of service when men are hoarded into barracks. What is provided for is what in different countries is differently and euphemistically called "recreational relief", what the Americans in the First World War called "horizontal refreshment" and the Japanese in the Second War designated as "comfort facilities".

Incidentally, the Japanese have just announced they will pay millions in compensation to old women in their once occupied countries, who, as young girls, were forced into prostitution for the convenience of the Japanese troops.

I suppose everybody over the age of ten, today knows that one of the first lectures given to new recruits of any nation, is a lecture – once done with slides, now with motion pictures and grisly anatomical shots – a lecture on the dangers of casual sexual relationships off-base with the local villagers near a battlefield, or with the available young women in a town close to a camp. This has been going on forever. But everywhere and at all times, the lectures were based on an assumption, on all sides, that the men, some men would inevitably spend some of their time off-base having sex. In the Korean War the American M.A.S.H. unit commanders made this assumption most explicit by prescribing daily examinations of what were called "service girls on the line".

Well this you'll be relieved to hear, is not a talk about disease or the new graver threat of Aids, about which in many countries, younger people than any soldiers are being taught these days. It's about what happens to that basic assumption that soldiers will not stay chaste and perhaps less so now that military, naval and air forces in many counties have come to be mixed. I think the Israelis were the first to have young women in actual combat, but today more and more young women in this country certainly are volunteering for a career in all branches of the armed services.

This has been going on much longer than most of us know. I remember going up the Hudson River – and I see it was sixteen years ago – to lecture to the United States Military Academy at the grey fortress rising on the west bank of the river, West Point, which is the American Sandhurst or Saint-Cyr. The big surprise came when I walked with the commanding officer, who was known as the superintendent, out onto the stage of the great auditorium and the whole body of the corps sprang – and I do mean sprang – to rigid attention. This has not happened to me since.

It was the composition of the corps that was the surprise. I suppose if I'd been tapped I would have said in a general way, yes, I knew that today the corps was mixed. But it turned out that something more than 25 per cent, one recruit in four, was a young woman. And talking with the officers afterwards about what then was a fairly new practice it was the superintendent who said the best line. He was old enough to use, like me, the new forbidden, delightful word "girls" instead of the compulsory glum word "women." "The girls," he said, "keep them civilised." And that I thought was not only believable, but splendid.

And frankly I'd not thought much more about it until five years ago when the navy exploded in a squalid scandal at an annual dinner, after which it was established, with only brief denials that in a drunken ceremony several navy women had been mauled, sexually handled and generally grossly embarrassed. A top navy admiral who was practically in the next room and was judged present for all disciplinary purposes was discharged. Several men were, after much argument and cover-up, accused before court-martial.

Well the navy has barely recovered from the flaming publicity of this episode. For some time now, a year or more though, there's been talk and rumour and protests from young women who left the services that sexual harassment is rife in the services.

The rumour was strong enough and enough positive evidence here and there, especially about drill sergeants, that the army office of the Pentagon decided to do something about it. They progressed from the usual sex lecture to a motion picture made for television, showing how a drill sergeant watched a young female recruit failing a course, an obstacle course, telling her to stay behind after the platoon was dismissed and then putting it fairly bluntly on the line. It wouldn't do, would it, for her to fail the course? On the other hand she could pass easily on his say so and there would be, he plainly indicated, a price to pay.

The film didn't end there. It showed that the army knew enough about this situation to have the young woman talk things over with another recruit and wonder whether she would give into the drill sergeant or refuse him and leave herself open to more challenges, more bargains, more harassment. Finally she reported him.

The making of this film at an army base in Maryland was of course much talked about by the men and women, especially, stationed there. By an excruciating irony, indeed the making of the film inspired one young woman private at that base to report her own rather hair-raising experiences to a national television network. The private is seventeen years old and says ten different men have made unpleasant and uninvited sexual advances to her. To one drill sergeant – she named him – she eventually gave in because she was frightened by what she called a very mean person and an extremely aggressive one.

The nerve or courage of this seventeen year old was infectious to the point that other young women dared to go to the top and report their own maltreatment. So by now there are at that one base, 19 women who claim to have been victimised, embarrassed, one or two actually raped.

Well this seventeen year old has lit a firestorm of shock and denunciation across the country. And the Pentagon having nothing to gain from any further denial or even the pretence, which they'd kept up for several years that sexual harassment was a sometime aberration, The Defense Department has put out the result of a survey it made only last year, a rather elaborate mea culpa naming eleven bases or stations in the United States where sexual harassment is most common, and grimly publishing the percentages of women recruits who have been harassed.

Before I quote the rather shocking statistics, I think it's a good time to remind you that Americans love surveys and statistical studies of everything. I wonder if there's another nation that would ever begin a statistical survey throughout its armed forces of the number of young women who have been whistled at.

Anyway, here are the figures. Percentage of women asserting sexual harassment from mild to violent. In the army 61 per cent, navy 53 per cent, air force 49 per cent, marines 64 per cent.

The types of harassment are listed as eight. So 23 per cent complain of being whistled at, 44 per cent being the object of teasing, 37 interpreting dubious looks or gestures. In all it comes out that about 85 per cent accuse their brothers in arms of whistling or teasing or giving suggestive looks.

Of the prime, the near-criminal category which is called: "actual or attempted rape or assault", four per cent. I'm sure I'm alone in thinking that this reveals an armed force where 96 per cent of the men show remarkable restraint. If I'd been in this country's army or navy I doubt I would have escaped the charge of teasing or a sidelong look, or even, in an off moment, a gesture so gross as whistling.

I may also be singular in feeling sorry for the top brass at the Pentagon. The story of the abused women is resounding throughout the land. I hope when it dies down the hullabaloo will settle where it should – into the martial or the criminal courts. The men who are found guilty of forcible harassment and worse should pay the price any other criminal pays in civilian life. In the meantimef the Pentagon is republishing its very strict rules, and the males in the forces are strongly reminded not to joke or tease or whistle at nubile young recruits.

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