"So why does military sexual violence persist? One explanation offered by The Invisible War
is that the US military includes a higher percentage of “sexual
predators” than civilian society. Also, some military commanders not
only tolerate sexual assault, they are also complicit in covering up
these incidents, punishing victims, and exonerating perpetrators or, at
most, giving them a “boys-will-be-boys” slap on the wrist.
A weakness of the current debate is its narrow focus on US military
women. Cynthia Enloe, a leading feminist scholar of international
relations, recently noted the importance of looking to “those who are pushed to the margins” in order to learn about the big picture.
To locate the root of the problem means looking beyond the assaults
on US military women — appalling as they are — to the routine incidents
of military violence against civilians in combat situations and outside
the fences surrounding US bases overseas. Given their mission, soldiers
are trained to kill. This means seeing “others” as foreign or
less-than-human. Gender and masculinity are at play; so too are racism
and national chauvinism"
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