The Invisible War

     Since watching The Invisible War I have had a torrent of emotions flow through me, ranging from anger and frustration to broken -heartedness and admiration. Though each one of the survivors interviewed throughput the film brought me to tears with their stories, they also lifted my spirit through their tenacity to function as survivors and their courage to tell their stories so that others could be exposed to the truth about rape culture in the military.
     I think the most shockingly repulsive issue I became aware of via the film was the "fun fact" of the Uniform Code of Military Justice listing rape as an "occupational hazard." This is disgusting in every sense of the word. Women or no women in the military, how could rape ever be looked at in a light other than sickening? As a woman who is also of color it makes me more than weary of the field I'm going into and the organizational culture I'll be forced to acclimate into.
See, the military has "tried" to step its sexual awareness game up through initiating programs like SAPR and SHARP, but the fact of the matter is that these programs are a joke. Why? Because they are basically parody renditions of preliminary scenes to sexual assault or harassment. No one can take these videos seriously because they're corny and as The Invisible War pointed out, they promote victim blaming and are centered around rape avoidance, rather than prevention by actually stopping and persecuting offenders. Though I have done NROTC for the past four years of college and I've been out into the fleet twice, once for a month in San Diego and the second time for a two week stay in Everett, I didn't understand the way in which the rape culture of our military thrives off of a hyper-masculine tone until watching the film then experiencing a conflict with a male NROTC peer this past weekend.
     Here's a little background information. I am one of five minority women in our battalion. There are two Black women and three Hispanic women and due to us all naturally receiving unfair treatment vs our white female counterparts (I won't even mention the disparity in treatment of us and that of our white male peers) we all hang out together within the unit. Now Saturday morning while we were having breakfast before the drill meet began, Zabala, who is Colombian dropped an orange peel on the floor, however before she went to pick it up she was thrown off by the comment of: "Eat it off the ground like the pig you are." This comment was made by Bartkus. Now Bartkus is a red headed white male, with an ingenuous mouth and someone who lost their Marine Corps scholarship due to rape claims.....yet, he picked up a Navy one......hmmm. Anyway, once Zabala, who is more senior than Bartkus due to the billet she holds, heard this she immediately told him to standby for the way in which she would handle is inappropriate comment. Zabala then proceeded to tell another senior Midshipman, Tortorich, about the comment in which he responds: "Maybe he was just joking." Because Zabala took offense to the comment and thought it was racially sparked, she proceeded to myself and the other minority women about, in which we then told her to tell our Lieutenants immediately. Now because I totally disagreed with the way in which Tortorich handled the situation I pulled him aside and asked him if he knew what happened and asked him how he responded, and why he responded in a way that invalidated Zabala's claim. He of course got defensive and began, sadly enough trying to discredit Zabala by saying: "Come on Jackson, you know how Zabala is and you know how Bartkus is." It was in that moment that I realized the cyclical nature of victim blaming and the way in which hyper-masculinity worked in this military culture. Though its not on the same level as sexual assault its this type of behavior on lower level issues that creates for that type of blow-back on cases such as rape and how they are handled.
     Nevertheless, once Zabala reported the issue to our lieutenants they said they will be dealing with the matter on the upper level because this isn't the first issue they've had with Bartkus's inappropriate mouth after his rape incident. So, we'll see if the military is really changing or if they are continuing the same tradition of sweeping problems under the rug.