(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[soldiers] When visiting the US Army, one can easily be led to believe that it has come a long way in its work on gender equality. More than 160.000 women have so far served in the war on terror. As of March 2007, 71 women have died in Iraq. This figure surpasses total female casualties in Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War. Female soldiers make up 15 per cent of the combatants – a percentage many times higher than in the gender equality country Norway. If we are to believe the journalist Helen Benedict, people do not understand how different the Iraq war is from all other wars, seen from a women's perspective.
The increasing proportion of women has a dark back. With the dramatic increase in women in uniform, combined with the comfortless existence in the military camps in Iraq, sexual assaults against female soldiers have exploded. The dark numbers here are naturally huge. Given the problems women report in rape in civilian meetings, it doesn't take much imagination to imagine what the situation is like in the military. In addition to the danger of suspicion, abused women must fight for status as a whistleblower or whistleblower. Breaking the silence of the abuses is breaking the military loyalty code.
Abuse of female soldiers in the US defense is not a new phenomenon. According to expert Helen Benedict (who writes a book on the phenomenon), a 2003 survey showed that 30 percent of Vietnamese female soldiers up to and including the first Gulf War had been raped. Another study found that 90 percent had been subjected to some form of sexual harassment in the military.
The story of Suzanne Swift is both exceptional and symptomatic. During the Iraq service, Swift was forced to have sex with a superior, and abused by two more men. Swift leaked about the assaults and was treated as traitor by fellow soldiers. After suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome in the aftermath, Swift refused to attend the next Iraq deployment and was granted deserter status. She spent months in prison, and still has two years left of contract with the army. The men who abused her received reprimand letters.
The grossest story is also the most debated. Janis Karpinski was an American brigadier and responsible for several prisons in the country, including Abu Ghraib. Following the torture scandal, she was demoted to colonel. It is well known that Karpinski has accused the Pentagon's political leadership of concealing her involvement and turning her into a scapegoat. Less well known, and even more shocking, is her story of three female Iraqi soldiers from 2003.
According to Karpinski, the case is this: Three female American soldiers are reported dead. From the military they are called Non-Hostile Fatalties, without further explanation. It turns out that the three soldiers have died as a result of dehydration in the heat in Iraq. The women did not drink water in the afternoon, for fear of having to go to the toilet after dark. Latrines are considered to be the biggest risk area for being sexually abused. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him [the doctor] not to say anything about it because it would raise awareness about the problem," Karpinski told Benedict. In other words, the fear of being raped caused their death. A new and gloomy front has opened in the war in Iraq.
