Female Soldiers Treated 'Lower Than Dirt'

By Rose Aguilar, AlterNet. Posted July 14, 2006.

U.S. Army Specialist Suzanne Swift will spend her 22nd birthday tomorrow confined to the Fort Lewis base in Washington, where she is awaiting the outcome of an investigation into allegations that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three sergeants in Iraq.

Swift says the sergeants propositioned her for sex shortly after arriving for her first tour of duty in February 2004. She remained in Iraq until February 2005. "When you are over there, you are lower than dirt; you are expendable as a soldier in general, and as a woman, it's worse," said Swift in a recent interview with the Guardian.

When Swift's unit redeployed to Iraq in January 2006, she refused to go and instead stayed with her mother in Eugene, Ore. She was eventually listed as AWOL, arrested at her mother's home on June 11, sent to county jail and transferred to Fort Lewis.

"She's miserable and isolated," says Sara Rich, Swift's mother. "It's not good to have an idle mind while you're dealing with PTSD and sexual trauma. I want them to release her so I can get her the care she needs. I'm tired of waiting."

A colonel outside of Swift's chain of command is investigating the case, but Rich says she has been given little information with no time frame. "I believe they're trying to break her down using fear and intimidation."

Midnight phone calls

While Swift's case has gotten a fair amount of national and international attention, the overall issue of sexual assault committed by military personnel in the Middle East has been largely ignored.

"Regrettably, Suzanne Swift is not the first," says Anita Sanchez, communications director of the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides services to victims of military violence. "There have been several young women who have been declared AWOL for seeking treatment due to sexual assault, but most of them are too scared to speak out."

Since the fall of 2003, the Miles Foundation has documented 518 cases of sexual assault on women who have served or are serving in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain and Qatar. The foundation has counselors on staff around the clock and often receives midnight phone calls from service members or their family members. After counselors and attorneys help the women access medical care and explain the reporting process, they try to transport them to a safe place for care and treatment.

"Because they're in a combat situation, we've had to develop protocols. We can't just send a chopper in there for them. We have to get their permission to contact military authorities to get them moved," says Sanchez. "If you were at Fort Drum, we wouldn't have to tell anybody, but if we need to move you out of Baghdad or Kuwait, then we have to get your permission to contact the military and say, 'We need to move Joanna Jones because this has transpired.'"

Sanchez says a counselor recently received a call in the middle of the night from a young woman who was raped in the Green Zone in Baghdad. "She said, 'I was raped, and I've only got 10 minutes on my phone card. What do I do?'" The woman was helicoptered out of the Green Zone, sent to Kuwait and then Germany, and eventually returned to the United States.

Another recent case involved a young American woman who was raped by a coalition partner in a rural area. Sanchez says it took two weeks to get to a one-room medical facility in Kabul. "They had no facilities to do a rape testing, so they couldn't test for pregnancy or HIV. An American doctor literally handed her high-dose antibiotics and told her, 'This will kill anything you've come in contact with.'" The young woman is now recovering in the states.

Sanchez says another woman was told she would receive the morning-after pill a few days after she was raped, but received birth control pills instead.

No official documentation

While these cases aren't officially documented with the government, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense both conduct general studies of sexual assault, but the findings can be difficult to obtain.

Last year, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., the ranking Democratic Member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, criticized the Bush administration for failing to release a Veterans Affairs study on military sexual trauma among the National Guard and Reserve. It found sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape is 60 percent among females and 27 percent among males. The estimated prevalence for rape among females is 11 percent and 1.2 percent among males.

The report, which was originally due by March 2001, was released last September. In a statement, Evans said, "The women and men who have suffered military sexual trauma deserve our respect, compassion and commitment to provide them with ready access to counseling and treatment. I am releasing the report, which I have obtained through other sources, to shine a light on a serious problem that the White House wants to hide in the shadows."

Rose Aguilar is a San Francisco-based journalist who is writing a book about her road trip through the "red states."

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