In my headline, I repeat something I said in the Thursday Virtual Front Page.
Here’s what I mean by that…
Wednesday morning, Drudge put out three Tweets in a row, all within a minute, as follows:
- Teen hangs self after school rape… drudge.tw/14bNnWr
- Tourist in India jumps from hotel balcony to escape sex assault… drudge.tw/14bNnWo
- Woman filing for divorce gang-raped inside lawyer’s chamber… drudge.tw/14bNnG7
Yeah, I know there are a lot of people over there, but to have three stories like that coming out at once? Here’s part of the BBC story on the second item, which happened in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal:
The Foreign Office recently updated its advice for women visiting India, saying they should use caution and avoid travelling alone on public transport, or in taxis or auto-rickshaws, especially at night.
It added that reported cases of sexual assault against women and young girls were increasing and recent sexual attacks against female visitors in tourist areas and cities showed that foreign women were also at risk.
Police arrested six people following an alleged gang rape of a Swiss tourist in Madhya Pradesh state last week.
So apparently things have gotten worse there since the horrific beating-rape that so infamously led to a young woman’s death a couple of months ago.
No nation is immune to this sort of thing, unless there’s one where men and women never come into contact. There’s evil everywhere. But I wonder why things are, according to accounts, getting worse in India?
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I have to be careful how I say this… I have spent the better part of the last decade working on projects comprised of at least 75% Indians. There are obvious cultural differences between Americans and Indians in the way we treat women in business environments. I have found Indian women to be grateful (maybe not the best word) when someone treats them with respect as they do not seem to get that same respect from their male Indian counterparts.
A female Indian computer science PhD candidate who studies in India we got to know this summer in Germany backs you up, Doug. Female students here and in Europe do not feel that way.
I don’t know that things are getting worse or merely being more publicized….
Just back from some weeks in India. A lot of factors flow into this problem, but always interesting to me how, by and large, Christian influence works for the positive in this environment. Good to see it happening, and I’m glad there is freedom for Christians to a large extent. The economic and perhaps even political future of our world lies in Asia.
Before we get all “American Exceptionilsm” on this subject let’s remember that the incidence of rape in the US military is extremely high right now. Perhaps it’s worse in India but we need to clean up our own house before we start throwing stones. A quick google search showed zillions of articles on this subject. Here’s one from the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/oct/29/rape-military-shocking-truth
That would sort of go under my catchall of “wherever there are both men and women together,” there will be a certain number of rapes. I would expect, for instance, there to be far more rapes in the military than a generation ago because men and women are thrown together far more than in the past.
That’s no excuse for the situation, and rapists need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of military justice, but it is a factual reason why it happens. A certain percentage of men (fortunately, a small percentage) are going to take advantage of such situations.
By the way, figuring out what to do to stop rape in the military is more critical than ever, in light of this: “As Qualified Men Dwindle, Military Looks For A Few Good Women.”
Very few men — maybe 2 percent of the population — can “kill without remorse.” Even when it’s justified and sanctioned. PTSD owes a huge part of its cause to the psychological distress that a killer feels.
The percentage is probably higher than 2 percent in the military, since it’s self-selected nowadays. But most soldiers would still not be able to “kill without remorse.”
Now, to put it another way… Men in the military tend to be young and healthy, and therefore have higher testosterone levels than the population of men at large. Furthermore, they are trained to be aggressors. I think that’s what you were driving at.
But even there, you’re reckoning without the constraints that are placed upon that aggression from Day One of their training. They are taught to be aggressive within certain rules, and under a very strict code of discipline. That should reduce the tendency to commit rapes, and in fact probably does to some extent. Without military discipline, the problem would probably be worse.
Bond. Silence Bond.
Based on the news reports I have seen, the rapes and sexual harassment seem to occur very frequently among the higher ranking members o the military. Combine the perceived power of an male officer with a female underling looking to make a career in the military and you have a high potential for abuse. Sure, it happens in the private sector as well, but women in those situations normally can leave and go somewhere else. A female in the military does not have the same freedom of movement.
Are there as many rapes within the ranks of police officers as there are in the military?
I hadn’t heard that about officers. If there’s a problem between male officers and enlisted females, then there’s one quick way to address it — if the military enforces the basic principle of no fraternization, there will be no opportunities for that to happen.
That would still leave a dangerous situation between senior male officers and junior female officers.
Back in the day when the only women in uniform that men were likely to encounter were nurses, fraternization with enlisted men and noncoms was prevented by making all the nurses officers. But they weren’t off-limits to male officers, of course, which gave the ranks something else to resent officers for…
Are there more rapes in the military than occur in a typical business environment with a higher percentage of females?
I’d say culture plays a big part in it (both in India and the military). A person who can kill without remorse probably is a little more likely to treat women as objects. Not all, but surely more than the general public.
Doug – The military is a special situation:
It’s different than a typical business environment. You have a lot of single people living in dormitories. Married folks tend to live in houses on or off base. Overseas you have a lot of people living, socializing and working in very close quarters without much privacy or opportunities to meet non-military members of the opposite sex. It’s like a college campus, but you never leave campus. Business doesn’t have this issue, cause at the end of the day you go home to a separate group of folks, not continue hanging out with the same folks. You also have people separated from their spouses for a long time, either stateside or overseas due to unaccompanied tours. Soldiers/Airmen that behave normally in the US get deployed to Korea and get wild and crazy with drinking and partying.
Also, you have a broad mix of people. Say, age 19-40 pretty much, with the older folks typically in positions of authority, either as NCOs or officers. I’m not saying that all or even many folks abuse this authority, but some do.
I wonder if the sex-selective abortion of female babies in India leading to very high ratios of males to females isn’t partially responsible for this trend. If so, it’s only going to get worse in the next couple of decades. In some Indian states the ratio is as high as 125:100 for young people today.
Rapes occur more often in male-dominated fields. A more balanced ethos leads to better treatment of the “other” aka women.
I’m not sure what you mean, saying “ethos.” If you mean culture, I get what you’re saying. I saw the culture of newspapers shift during my career. As women played a more prominent role in the running of newsrooms, those workplaces became a lot more… I don’t know. Like the way you act around women, instead of around a bunch of guys. You could say more civilized.
If by “balanced ethos,” though, you’re talking about what Doug was getting at with his stuff about “killing without remorse,” then what sort of balance would you like to see in, say, an infantry unit?
Something struck me in reading the blow-by-blow account of the killing of bin Laden. Something about the way the shooter told the story. His ways of expressing himself seemed… anachronistic. Like the way guys talked in locker rooms, way back when I was in high school. (Even though it’s not the actual shooter’s voice, you can hear it especially in this video.) It occurred to me that this guy lives in a world without women, one of the very few such workplaces (although he describes interacting a couple of times with the woman called “Maya” in “Zero Dark Thirty”). And of course, he is one of the 2 percent. He’s a man who kills without remorse. (In the video at one point, he says of his routine in Iraq and Afghanistan, “If we only killed five or six guys a night, we were wasting our time.”) Which is kind of what we want him to do, when face-to-face with a bin Laden.
What sort of “balanced ethos” do we want to prevail on SEAL Team Six? I’m not saying I have the answer to that question; I’m just posing it…
You do the same things they did to ensure that soldiers of color were treated as equals. You do not use epithets that equate femaleness with something bad or disdainful….etc.
I don’t think rapes happen because men think women are bad or hold them in disdain. And I don’t buy into the feminist idea that rape isn’t sexual, that it’s just about power.
Here’s what I think rape is: I think it’s what happens when a man’s humanity fails, and something pre-human, or at least inhuman, takes over.
I can see that there’s something hateful in it, because it’s a particularly abhorrent form of violence — no worse form of violence, unless it’s aimed at children — but nothing so bloodless as a political concept of “power.” I think it’s way darker than that; way worse.
When you disdain someone, because she is a woman, you fail to respect her right to physical autonomy. You take without regard for her feelings.
Without military discipline, the problem would probably be worse.
-Brad
Any evidence to support that ridiculous assertion? Seriously this is exactly the reason why our military should be the absolute smallest it can be in order to do the job of defending the nation. The military is something of a necessary evil so let’s keep it small.
There’s nothing at all ridiculous in what I said. Your utter dismissal of it, however, has an element of absurdity about it. It fits in the “Is not!” category of argument…
Until you provide evidence then “is so – is not” is all we have. You accept it as an article of faith; I say not so fast. Besides it is not germane to this subject anyway. We have a rape problem that needs to be dealt with. Let’s not minimize that problem by bringing up the non-sequetor of how virtuous military discipline is. That just reveals you as a military appologist. If the military does something wrong then damn it just acknowledge it without all this constant glorifying of the organization.
If there was a sudden rash of rapes by plumbers would anyone for one minute suggest the discipline of the plumbing trade has kept the number of rapes to a minumum and expect others to buy that? Of course not. So why bring that up for the military?
It’s pretty simple. Discipline is a defining characteristic, if not THE defining characteristic, of the military. Rape only occurs within the context of a breakdown of that discipline.
I believe that many subjugated societies throughout history would disagree with you on that point, Brad.
Rape is its own problem. Military discipline or a breakdown in discipline is irrelevent to the discussion. Or maybe rape is more appropriately linked to the personalities and outlooks of BOTH the 2% who can, as you say aim and pull the trigger, and the ones most susceptible to discipline problems – the loosers who are themselves powerless to actively control their own lives?
bud – If you replace “the military” with “the federal government” I will agree with you.
And that would be just as absurd as what Bud said…
bud – Should we start by kicking your kid out of the Navy? It’s your idea. Maybe he can find a job at McDonalds.
Why should the federal government be bigger than it needs to be?
It shouldn’t. Nor should it be one bit smaller than it, as you say, “needs to be.” What I object to is the ideological prejudice toward one or the other end of that spectrum.
Brad you’re just jealous because your kids won’t allow you to wear a baseball cap 6 sizes too big for your head.
Justin Bieber – The Leif Garrett of this decade. But I don’t know if Leif thought as highly of himself as ol’ Justin does.
Blog-wallah!
War on Men is more like it:: here’s an example of a song lyric that would be very controversial if a man sang/rapped it about a woman:
“Justin.. Bieber, you know Imma hit ’em with the ether
Buns out, weiner, but I gotta keep an eye out for Selena”
Nikki Minaj raps that in the duet that she released with Justin Bieber, titled “Beauty and the Beat:”.
It sounds like she’s saying she is going to drug him and then sexually assault or rape him. That’s not appropriate, and it plays on 104.7 and XM’s “Radio Disney” a station targeted at tweens and children all the time. It’s an outrage.
You mean it’s an outrage that it’s about Justin Bieber?
I tell you, if he’s a sex object — for heterosexual females, that is — then there has been a war on manhood, and manhood lost.
Also, apparently, a war on the English language. I could not tell WHAT those lyrics you quoted were trying to say.
Brad – Agreed about our side’s defeat in the war on manhood. Agreed that we are losing the English language war as well. I’ll translate the lyrics for you:
Nicki Minaj is going to use ether to knock out Justin Bieber. She’s then going to pull down his trousers, thus exposing his hindquarters and his phallus. Presumably so that she can molest him while he’s incapacitated. As she is doing this, she is going to make sure that his (now former) girlfriend, Selena Gomez does not arrive on the scene.
Oh, I thought they were going to share a hot dog on the sly so that his vegetarian girlfriend Selena Gomez would not know about it. Get you mind out of the gutter, Silence! Fo’ shizzle.
Perhaps that’s all it is, Doug. My apologies to the lovely and talented Miss Minaj.