NYTimes article has the story and goes into graphic details.
alas it is behind a pay wall.
The numbers are up: but in the past few reported the attacks, and many other reports were ignored.
Many survivors ended up alcoholics etc. (one of my friends in AA said most of the men in her AA meeting had been abused either by relatives or in the notorious "residential schools")/
USAToday article from May 2019 is mainly about women:
Based on the survey for 2018:
- Sexual assault rate for women was at the highest level, 6%, since 2006. The rate ranged from 4% in the Air Force to 11% in the Marine Corps.
- The odds of a woman experiencing a sexual assault were highest for the youngest women – from 17 to 20 years old. Those odds were 1 in 8.
- In 96% of the cases the alleged offender was a man. The offender most often was one person (64%), a military member (89%) and a friend or acquaintance (62%).
- Nearly 1 in 4 of all women experienced an “unhealthy climate” because of sexual harassment, which was up in the survey. About 16% of all women faced an "unhealthy climate" because of gender discrimination, also up.
PBSFrontline in 2013 noted half of assaults reported in the military were of men. they gave 13 000 cases a year for men.
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but now it is being recognized that male rape occurs too: This is why the military traditionally refused to allow sexually active openly gay men to serve.
And it's not new: my mother told me the joke about not bending over in the shower to pick up your soap and that was a joke going around during World War II.
here is the NYT article cited above that I found at another site: I post it part of it here because it may disappear from the internet.
SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE MILITARY is a problem widely recognized but poorly understood. Elected officials and Pentagon leaders have tended to focus on the thousands of women who have been preyed upon while in uniform. But over the years, more of the victims have been men.
On average, about 10,000 men are sexually assaulted in the American military each year, according to Pentagon statistics. Overwhelmingly, the victims are young and low-ranking. Many struggle afterward, are kicked out of the military and have trouble finding their footing in civilian life.
For decades, the fallout from the vast majority of male sexual assaults in uniform was silence: Silence of victims too humiliated to report the crime, silence of authorities unequipped to pursue it, silence of commands that believed no problem existed, and silence of families too ashamed to protest.
Women face a much higher rate of sexual assault in the military — about seven times that of men. But there are so many more men than women in the ranks that the total numbers of male and female victims in recent years have been roughly similar, according to Pentagon statistics — about 10,000 a year. And before women were fully integrated into the armed services, the bulk of the victims were men.
For generations, the military wasn’t looking for male sexual assault victims, so it failed to see them, according to Nathan W. Galbreath, deputy director of the Defense Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. Only in 2006, after the office began surveying service members, he said, did the military learn that at least as many men as women were being assaulted.
“That was surprising to senior leadership,” Mr. Galbreath said. “Everyone was so sure the problem was a women’s issue.”
A report published in May indicates that while the share of male victims who come forward has been rising recently, an estimated four out of five still do not report the attack.
For tens of thousands of veterans who were assaulted in the past, the progress made in recent years offers little comfort. The damage has already been done. Many have seen their lives buckle under the weight of loathing and bitterness, and have seen decades pass before what happened to them was acknowledged by anyone — including themselves.
Here are the stories of six of those men. The Department of Veterans Affairs has reviewed each man’s case and formally recognized him as a victim of service-connected sexual assault. The military branches in which each man served were asked to comment for this article, but declined to discuss specific cases.
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If you came forward and said you were raped, people would have thought you were a queer or a child molester — you were treated like it was your fault,” said Mr. Williams, who now lives in Everett, Wash.
After the attack, Mr. Williams said, he did all that he felt he could do. He took a shower and went back to bed.
The sergeant raped him twice more during basic training, he said. Each time, Mr. Williams stayed quiet, determined to make it through boot camp.
But as soon as Mr. Williams graduated, he reported what had happened to Air Force authorities, expecting them to jail his attacker and start an investigation.
The anger still trembles in his voice decades later when he describes the Air Force’s response.
“No investigator ever called me,” he said. “Nothing was ever done.”Instead, his chain of command began to complain about his performance, he said, because the rapes had left him with damaged kidneys and a torn rectum, and because he was missing too much training in order to get treatment. He was soon forced out of the Air Force for being medically unfit, his service record shows.
Today, veterans like Mr. Williams are coming forward in growing numbers to demand that the Department of Veterans Affairs provide treatment and compensation for the harm done to them. Some 61,000 veterans, including Mr. Williams, are now formally recognized by the department as having been sexually traumatized during their service, and the number of claims filed each year has surged by 70 percent since 2010.
A monthly check is poor compensation, though, for decades spent in limbo.
“I had a future, I wanted to serve my country, and I was good at what I did,” Mr. Williams said. “That was all taken away from me.”
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Paul Lloyd was pushing a cart through the supermarket near his home in Salt Lake City, looking for light bulbs, when he stopped to sniff a variety of scented candles on a nearby shelf. Suddenly his hands were over his face, and he sank to the floor, sobbing.
One candle smelled just like the shampoo he had been using in the shower at Army basic training in 2007, when he was beaten and raped by another recruit.
“Some little thing can happen, and you’re back in that little 3-by-3 square shower,” he said later. “It’s hell, and there’s no escape from it.”
Mr. Lloyd joined the Army National Guard at 17. When he was assaulted in the shower one night after everyone else had gone to bed, he said, he told no one. Even when he ended up in the hospital the next day with internal bleeding and a torn rectum, and doctors asked him what had happened, Mr. Lloyd, who was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said he simply shrugged.
“I felt like I couldn’t say anything,” he said. “I would look like a total failure — to my family, to my platoon, to myself.”During the years when Mr. Lloyd was in the Army, only 3 percent of male victims reported sexual assaults, according to Defense Department estimates. The percentage has increased nearly sixfold since then, but the vast majority of men who are sexually assaulted still never report it.
Mr. Lloyd earned top scores in marksmanship and physical fitness, and wanted a career in the military, but he said a sense of betrayal and disgust at being raped started to gnaw at him. When he was given leave for Christmas, he decided not to return. He hid out at his sister’s house for a month before the National Guard found him. He was taken back to boot camp and eventually discharged for misconduct. He was later able to upgrade his discharge to honorable.
At home, he told no one about the attack. He stopped going to church, he said, fell into drinking and struggled to hold a job. He questioned his own sexuality. His family wondered why he couldn’t keep his act together.It took five years for him to decide to tell them what had happened.
“They saw me as broken for a long time,” he said. “When I told them I’d been raped, they said, ‘Finally, it all makes sense.’”
Bill Minnix was too ashamed to tell his family why he was kicked out of the Air Force in 1973, and they were too ashamed to ask. What would people at church say? What would the neighbors think?
He didn’t speak a word to anyone about having been raped, he said — not for the next 40 years.
He had enlisted at 17, and was a few weeks into radar technician school when a group of older enlisted men and officers took some new recruits to an off-base resort. In a private bungalow, after a round of drinking, Mr. Minnix said, the older men told the recruits it was time for their initiation.
“At first there was laughing and nervous joking, and then there was silence,” Mr. Minnix said. “I was scared to death. And we got forced into sex acts none of us wanted.” He said the teenagers were made to perform oral sex or were sodomized. “What an awful thing, when you go back to the base the next day and you are facing these people,” he said.Mr. Minnix struggled to make sense of what had happened in the bungalow. Real men don’t get raped, he told himself, they fight back. He found he was unable to concentrate on his work, and started to do poorly in radar school. He was desperate to get out of the Air Force.
“I couldn’t stand being there,” said Mr. Minnix, who lives in Bend, Ore. “I didn’t feel I could report it to anyone. The best thing to do was run.”
He sighed and added, “I’ve essentially been running for most of my life since then.”
Mr. Minnix deserted, was caught a week later, and then deserted again. The Air Force put him in jail and threatened to prosecute him if he didn’t agree to leave the service voluntarily with a less-than-honorable discharge. He took the discharge.
Mr. Minnix joined the Oregon Band of Brothers, a veterans’ organization, and participated in his first Veterans Day parade in 2018.
Mr. Minnix with his wife, Georgie, right, and his mother-in-law, Verla Holton, at Ms. Holton’s home in Pacific City, Ore. He didn’t tell anyone for 40 years that he had been raped.
Once he was out, he spent most of his adult life in what he calls “a black box,” shut off from the world by anger and shame. He burned through jobs and two marriages, drinking to numb his own loathing.
His parents never spoke to him again. They died not knowing the truth.
In recent years, through counseling provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Mr. Minnix has been able to come to terms with what happened. He has remarried and has joined a local veterans’ group called the Oregon Band of Brothers. He drove his Jeep in the local Veterans Day parade in 2018.
“That filled a big void for me,” he said. “I had military service taken away from me. For years, when I heard the anthem or saw the parades, I would cry. I can feel like a veteran now.”
------------The few years Billy Joe Capshaw spent in the Army were the worst years of his life, he said, but to this day he wears an Army veteran baseball cap. He said it deflects unwanted questions from strangers about the marks on his face.
“It explains the scars,” he said. “They don’t ask.”
In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and confessed to raping and killing 17 young men and boys, some of whom he then dismembered and ate. The news media soon learned that Mr. Capshaw had been Mr. Dahmer’s roommate in the Army, and descended on Hot Springs, Ark., where Mr. Capshaw lives.
At a news conference before a bank of reporters, Mr. Capshaw described the heavy-metal posters Mr. Dahmer decorated their room with, and the W.C. Fields jokes Mr. Dahmer liked to tell.
But he did not mention the vials of lorazepam and ketamine that he said Mr. Dahmer often used to sedate him. Or the metal bar he said Mr. Dahmer used to beat him, or the motor-pool rope to tie him down, or the scars, still visible on Mr. Capshaw’s cheeks after nearly 40 years, from Mr. Dahmer trying to muffle his screams with a clenched hand
“I couldn’t,” Mr. Capshaw recalled, shaking his head, in an interview this spring. “You say you’ve been raped by another man, people blame you, they shame you. They just don’t get how something like this can happen.”
Mr. Capshaw joined the Army at 17 and was stationed at Baumholder Army Garrison in Germany in 1980 when he was assigned to share a room with Mr. Dahmer, who was then an Army medic.
Within days, he said, Mr. Dahmer was beating him, drugging him and keeping him locked in their room. At one point, Mr. Capshaw jumped from the second-story window to escape, and ended up in the hospital with a cracked pelvis. But he never said a word about what was going on, even to the doctor who examined him.
“It developed into a Stockholm syndrome-type situation,” Mr. Capshaw said. “He totally controlled me. He didn’t let me leave the room. He would beat me and rape me. But we would also play chess, he would buy me books and suture up my wounds. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Mr. Dahmer was discharged from the military in 1981 for alcohol abuse. Mr. Capshaw was discharged a few months later, his military record shows.
For five years after his discharge, Mr. Capshaw said, he didn’t leave his mother’s house. He stayed awake for days at a time trying to stave off nightmares, so tense that he could barely swallow solid food. He didn’t tell his family what had happened. In a small town, he worried, he’d never be able to get out from under the whisperings if word got out.
“For a long time, the only person I ever told was my best friend, and his response was, ‘I’ll never tell anybody,’” Mr. Capshaw said. “He didn’t, neither. That’s a pretty good friend — he knew it would hurt me, it would get around.”
After years of therapy, Mr. Capshaw decided in 2010 that hiding what happened would not help him. With the assistance of his psychiatrist, he created a website
to tell the story of what he had gone through and how he had begun to heal.
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I'D POST MORE BUT AM TOO NAUSEATED TO DO SO.
i've seen this type of sexual abuse happen right here in our business compound: And the one doing it to this day insists it was consensual and okay, even though in at least one case the young man was asleep when the assault happened, and later became alcoholic, suicidal, and got in a lot of fights. Another fled home to his home island, only to have the perpetrator follow him to ask him to come back.
In all the cases, it was with employees who of course risked being fired if they said no.Most were heterosexual, since the perpetrator preferred "normal" guys who he could manipulate, not effeminate types.
A few were not "harmed" since they were cynical and decided to take the money and run, (i.e. lots of gifts, usually from my husband's band account, )
but never mind: Luckily for my husband he married an independely rich wife so I could afford to bury him decently when he died and I found the band accounts had lost 100 000 pesos (2000 dollars which was enough to bury him) in the last 3 months of his life, not to mention two million pesos that had been in an account that was supposed to be split among my husband's daughters, but was spent on "projects" over the last 2 years when my husband was too sick to stop him from building things we didn't need (he hired his boys and then had them to party with on weekends).
Given the high rate of unemployment here, you can see how this harmed the victim and his family.
This is one reason we now have two organic rice companies: His wife refused to put up with what was going on... and decent folks refuse to work for him, of course, so lots of stuff gets stolen, and at least one farmer fled when he heard the anti drug vigilantes were after him. (He had been selling shabu/meth to the farmers).
Sigh.
I have no status here: A premarital agreement means I cannot interfere with my husband 's property etc. that went to his son.
And the only reason I can stay here is because a Filipino law doesn't allow a widow to be thrown out of her house, even if the surviving spouse is not a citizen.
Sigh.
Labels: abuse
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