Features » March 3, 2008

Silenced in the Barracks (cont’d)

“CID training does not focus on evidence collection for acquaintance rape situations,” Haider says. As a result, “CID agents tended not to take acquaintance rape seriously.”

CID spokesman Chris Grey says that since Haider left the command, it has begun “a very comprehensive Sexual Assault Sensitivity Training program.”

However, according to Haider, recent data call into question the effectiveness of that training.

According to the Pentagon’s “2006 Annual Report on Military Services Sexual Assault,” 18 percent of the cases reported in 2004 were thrown out for being unfounded, unsubstantiated or “lacking sufficient evidence,” prior to reaching a court martial.

In 2006, the first full year during which the training program had the opportunity to reap results, the proportion of cases thrown out on the same grounds more than doubled, to 37 percent.

Even when cases do result in commander action, that action is rarely ever a criminal justice response.

In 2006, only 292 cases (out of 2,974 reported) resulted in a court martial. Meanwhile, 488 cases resulted in an “administrative punishment,” such as a letter of reprimand, a discharge from the military, forced resignation or a reduction in pay or rank.

“The 2005 reforms have done nothing in terms of offender accountability,” Haider explains. “There are public service announcements and ad campaigns that say the military has zero tolerance for sexual assault, but the reality speaks a different truth.” She said she doesn’t believe there are many rapists in the military, but those that are sexual predators learn quickly that they can get away with it and will inevitably go on to attack again.

“They are sending women into combat zones, but not doing what it takes to protect them,” she says.

Avoidable tragedy

Protection, however, is not only a matter of deterring crime through punitive measures. It is also a matter of taking action to protect victims from their alleged assailants after a crime is reported. That responsibility rests in large part with commanders.

Thornton was allegedly left to live in the same barracks as her assailant for a full six months after her assault, despite repeated requests for a transfer.

Sara, a former Airman 1st Class who requested that her full name not be used, says that after her assault in late 2005, she was met with the same indifference.

“I was never granted a protective order, although I asked frequently,” she says. “It also took me three months to be granted a new room so that my attacker would not know where I lived. Then they moved me into a room that was closer to his room than the first.”

According to Mary Lauterbach, Maria’s mother, it’s that kind of negligence that may have cost her daughter her life.

Maria Lauterbach had obtained a military order of protection–a feat in itself–but was forced to stay on the same base as her alleged assailant and attend meetings and functions that he would inevitably be at, in spite of her protection order. She was on her way to one such event on Dec. 14, when she was last seen.

Maria’s mother is now urging the Marine Corps to take greater steps to remove victims from harms way and put distance between them and their accused assailants.

“We think the Marines could have done more to protect Maria when she made the report,” Chris Conard, Mary Lauterbach’s attorney, told NBC’s “The Today Show.” “We know everything was done to protect the accused–perfectly proper. But they could have transferred her to another base, another unit.”

“It was an avoidable tragedy,” his co-counsel, Merle Wilberding, says.

‘The second rape’

Leaving survivors in the same place to fend for themselves also leaves them open to the scorn of their fellow soldiers. Many survivors call it the “second rape”–the moment when they realize that not only their command but their platoon, as well, is going to desert them.

Lauterbach told her mother that Laurean was “very popular” on base, and that after filing charges against him, she was harassed and even punched by one of his friends. Someone even keyed her car.

According to Clark, the private from North Carolina, the hardest part of reporting her assault was losing the “spirit of brotherhood” that she previously enjoyed in the Army. “They all hated me and acted like I turned on them personally,” she says. “These are the people that if you go to war, you’re supposed to stand up and take a bullet for them. [Yet] they are the people that will turn their back on you and call you a whore when you are assaulted.”

Others were formally punished for making complaints, and hit with charges for “false reporting,” “lewd behavior” or “adultery.”

Airman 1st Class Cassandra Hernandez, 20, says three of her fellow airmen gang-raped her during a late-night party at Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, N.C., in May 2006. She says she reported the incident and sought all of the help available to her. Nonetheless, she wrote in a letter to the governor of Texas, her native state, “I felt like no one was looking out for my interests.”

Hernandez says she stopped cooperating with the investigation when charges were filed against her for “lewd behavior” and “underage drinking.” The three men accused of gang raping her were offered testimonial immunity in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution.

After much media scrutiny, however, her commander dropped the lewd behavior charge but still gave Hernandez an administrative punishment for underage drinking.

Independence needed

According to the Dorothy Mackey, founder of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel and a former U.S. Air Force captain and commander, the only way to address the epidemic of sexual assault in the military is by establishing an agency, completely independent of the Pentagon, that would be responsible for investigating and prosecuting rape within its ranks.

“The agency would be two-fold,” Mackey explains. “One part that deals with nothing but the victims, and another part that has prosecution authority.”

Although such an agency may be difficult to fund, she says, it would be in the interest not only of military personnel, but also the civilian world. “When assailants’ records are kept clean, they return to the civilian world with no record of violent crime and are kept out of the sex offender registry,” she says.

In the civilian world, that is significant. Nearly one in four veterans in state prisons nationwide were sex offenders, compared to one in 10 non-veterans, according to a 2004 Department of Justice report.

Mackey believes the military is incapable of policing itself because she says it glorifies violence and shuns individual rights. And she’s not alone in her thinking.

“We espouse violence as the means to all ends,” says former Maj. Tyler Boudreau, who resigned from the Marines last year after 18 years of military service, and became an avid blogger and war critic. “It is not curious when the individual soldier or Marine packs that brainwashing home with him to his wife or to the barracks where the females live.”

Although Boudreau says he preached the need to treat women with respect, the message was overwhelmed by the glorification of violence as a means to establish dominance, for both a man and a nation. That message, he says, transferred into an “intensely chauvinistic” atmosphere.

According to ex-CID agent Haider, the chauvinist culture might explain quite a bit. “Rape is not taken seriously enough in the military because it is a crime that affects primarily women–and women are still not taken seriously in the military,” she says. “There is a lot more sympathy if the victim is a man because most agents are male and they can relate to the violation. They are horrified by that. But when it’s a woman, it’s the opposite. Their attitude is almost contemptuous.”

But she hopes that will change.

So does former Pvt. Jessica Doe. “What happened to Maria Lauterbach was a worst-case scenario, but I know she wasn’t the first to lose her life like that,” she says. “I just hope that her loss will open more people’s eyes and help us to make a change.”

Maria Lauterbach was buried with full military honors on Feb. 2, with her dress blues placed in her casket. Her unborn son, whom she had decided to name Gabriel, was buried beside her in a small, silver casket.

Approximately 900 people attended the funeral service in Maria’s hometown of Vandalia, Ohio. Among them was Marine Lance Cpl. Robin Kahle, who drove 900 miles round trip to place her own Good Conduct Medal on Maria’s casket. She then paid her respects by reporting her own rape to a high-ranking Marine participating in the service.

“It was a very respectful service,” says Avila-Smith, who traveled from her home in Seattle to represent the thousands of military sexual trauma survivors moved by Maria’s story, “and a real wake up call.”