UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Michael D’Antonio
Criticized for years for their handling of rape in the services, top officials in the United States military were ordered to increase their efforts after the secretary of defense viewed the landmark documentary Invisible War in April 2012. Now, a year later, a new report shows the problem is getting worse. The data comes just days after Jeffrey Krusinski, the officer in charge of preventing sex crimes in the Air Force was, himself, arrested for sexual battery.
Officials frustrated by the persistent problem of rape in the military and outraged by the spectacle of Krusinski’s arrest have focused mainly on the need for better training and policies. Senator Kirstin Gillibrand of New York recently suggested soldiers and officers don’t understand “what sexual assault is, and how corrosive and damaging it is to good order and discipline.”
Education is good, but the spike in reported crimes occurred even as the services changed their training programs to increase awareness across the services. What hasn’t changed is the system of military justice, which still invests all the real power over investigations, trials, sentencing, and clemency in the chain of command. Rank still rules, even in the military justice system. And this fact explains why the Department of Defense can’t seem to get control of this problem.
For a true understanding of how a sexual assault crisis can resist resolution, it helps to consider how another huge, rank-based institution has suffered through an almost identical, slow-motion disaster. For decades the Catholic Church has tried and failed to end the worldwide scandal caused by priests who rape and molest minors. After more than 6,000 cases involving tens of thousands of victims — in the United States alone — the problem still defies the all-male hierachy who promise “zero tolerance” and implement new policies and education programs.
In both the church and the military, policies and programs fail because they do not address the root issue of male-only, hierachical power. The leaders of official Catholicism maintain and practice the belief that at the moment a man is ordained he becomes ontologically superior to laypeople. From this first on the ladder above the masses he may then climb to monsignor, bishop, archbishop, cardinal and even pope. With each step he gains both authority and respect as a higher order being whose judgment and moral standing are assumed to be simply better.
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