The Problem That Won’t Go Away

Exposes of sexual harassment in the military have become a journalistic staple, generating an emotionally charged lexicon--Tailhook, Aberdeen, the Citadel--that future historians will no doubt use to assess the state of gender relations in the 1990s. But the problem is hardly new, sadly, nor is the armed services’ response to it: “blame the victim.”

Military leaders have tried to portray the “discovery” of rampant sexual harassment in the 1990s as an unwelcome surprise. In 1991, Tailhook provided a wake-up call that they certainly have taken to heart. The aggressive prosecution of Sergeant Major of the Army Gene C. McKinney, on charges of sexual misconduct and the recent recommendations of a special Pentagon panel to separate men and women in basic and advanced training are cases in point.

Yet, the military’s recent “discovery” of sexual harassment is misleading. During the Carter administration, the military had ample occasion to learn how pervasive sexual harassment had already become in the All Volunteer Force (AVF). After some initial hand- wringing in 1981, however, it did little except hope the problem would go away.

During the late 1970s, as the numbers of women in the military increased sharply, the armed forces at first addressed the problem of sexual harassment within the context of the military prohibition against “fraternization,” which presumes that intimate relationships are entirely consensual. The Army, for example, prosecuted several drill instructors under the rubric of fraternization at Ft. Jackson in 1976 and 1977. But the services prosecuted only the most serious cases of fraternization.

The early months of 1980 marked an important shift in this approach, after the Equal Opportunity Commission published the first regulations prohibiting sexual harassment in public employment. Their applicability to the military became clear after the Baltimore Sun published, in December 1979, an expose of sexual harassment at Ft. Meade. “There was sexual harassment at other places [I’ve worked],” said one woman soldier, “but at least they were discreet about it. At Ft. Meade, they might just as well advertise.”

Televised congressional hearings followed in 1981. Especially distressing were the reasons why the women never before had reported harassment. Some had been advised by men in the chain of command and in the inspector general’s office, too, not to “make waves.” Others had received threats from NCOs warning them not to report harassment.

The Ft. Meade scandal raised profound doubts about the widely-celebrated success of the AVF. The Army officially responded to the revelations of sexual misconduct with an investigation by the inspector general’s office and an order to the 100 highest-ranking Army officers, declaring that “sexual harassment of women soldiers is a matter of deep and Michael Neiberg and Steven Schlossman teach history at Carnegie Mellon University. Neiberg is completing a book on the history of the ROTC, 1916-1980. Schlossman is co-author of the forthcoming “Foxholes and Color Lines: Desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces.”

personal concern. . . .”

Soon after the congressional hearings, the Army handed down its first-ever conviction of a soldier on the basis of sexual harassment rather than fraternization. The court martial occurred in the Army’s European command, consistent with a general view that harassment was more of a problem overseas.

But continuing allegations of harassment on U.S. bases undermined the “over there” theory. At Ft. Dix, two female trainees alleged that they had been raped, one by her drill instructor, the other by a peer. Eight drill instructors from Ft. McClellan were suspended from duty for having sex with trainees. The Washington Post described a “macho heaven” at Ft. Benning that fostered constant harassment ranging from “verbal abuse to physical attacks.” Numerous military women told People magazine that reports of sexual misconduct to the chain of command were either not taken seriously (“When I complained, my superior called me a crybaby”) or were turned back against them (she was “probably asking for it,” said one woman’s commanding officer). The magazine also reported that the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds had experienced an “unprecedented” number of rapes (five) in 1979, although one female NCO put the number at closer to 50.

In 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger issued a directive stating that sexual harassment was “unacceptable conduct” throughout the Defense Department. But once the Reagan administration got involved, it spent more energy on challenging the very notion of a gender-integrated military than on dealing with sexual harassment in the military. Although small-scale internal studies continued to document the prevalence of harassment during the 1980s, the military either generally ignored the subject or trumpeted its ability to conquer a problem that bedeviled the larger society. To be sure, military authorities during the Reagan years had little motivation to reveal the prevalence of sexual harassment.

More troublesome, if understandable, is that leading feminists also remained silent on the issue. During the first Reagan administration, many high-profile battles were waged over the “feminist agenda.” At the national level, the political mood remained anti-feminist. Following the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, President Ronald Reagan sought to reverse the momentum generated by the Carter administration toward opening up military specialties to women that would place them nearer to combat. Even before Reagan came into office, service leaders, especially in the Army, had organized to plan “womanpause,” an unpublicized review designed to reduce the numbers of military women.

In this demoralizing context, feminist leaders focused on the immediate problem: halting the erosion of recent occupational gains by military women. In so doing, they became less involved with issues of sexual harassment. To dwell on sexual harassment was to highlight women’s vulnerabilities and the overall difficulties of gender integration at a time when many service leaders were openly euphoric about reducing the gains that women had made and were seriously contemplating the end of the AVF in favor of a male-only draft. The key, symbolic fight for feminist leadership was to demonstrate women’s “toughness,” their ability to function in new job assignments that only recently had been opened to them.

Thus, sexual harassment in the military ended up on no one’s political agenda. Although new evidence began to surface toward the end of the ‘80s that was harder to ignore--especially three confidential investigations of military women overseas, one of which was leaked to the press, that revealed sexual license and harassment beyond anything publicized before--the subject was far less a public concern at the end than at the beginning of the 1980s.

The temptation to bury sexual harassment as a serious problem in the military remains as attractive today as it was in 1981. The Department of Defense and the service branches seem as uncertain as ever about how to eliminate harassment without undermining masculine attitudes and behaviors that many still consider essential to maintaining esprit de corps and combat readiness.

It is thus not too early to be concerned about a general backlash against military women. As the allegations against Sgt. Maj. McKinney move toward court martial, Congress and the Department of Defense seem increasingly frustrated and ready to hold military women at least partly responsible for fostering gender and racial discord, self-doubt and unfair sexual temptation. Two recent proposals ostensibly designed to get at the root of the harassment problem--one, to resegregate basic training by gender, and two, to equalize physical-fitness standards for military women--point clearly in that direction.

In the early 1980s, repeated exposes of sexual harassment led to a concerted effort by the Reagan administration to reduce the numbers and percentage of women in the military. Military policy makers today should not use a new series of sexual harassment scandals to justify a new “womanpause.”