ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, November 25, 1996 TAG: 9611250067
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELINE MORRIS
RECENT REPORTS of alleged sex crimes by soldiers at the U.S. Army military proving ground in Aberdeen, Md., raise the question - as did Tailhook and the rape on Okinawa - whether persistent incidents of sexual misconduct represent the tip of an iceberg and reflect, as some claim, an underlying defect in military culture.
Does the U.S. military have a rape problem? A careful examination of the facts reveals that the answer is both yes and no. Statistical analyses conducted at Duke Law School, based on crime data provided by the FBI and the four military services, reveal cogent facts. The rates of violent crime by military personnel in all four services are much lower than the rates of violent crime by civilians, controlling for age and gender. In other words, the male military population has far lower violent-crime rates, including rape rates, than does the male civilian population of comparable age.
But the military is not completely off the hook. Military rape rates, while lower than civilian rates, are not reduced nearly as substantially from civilian rates as are military rates of other violent crimes.
For example, while the U.S. Air Force rate of homicide and aggravated assault - I'll call these ``other'' violent crimes - for the period of 1987 to 1992 was 2 percent of the civilian rate for those crimes (controlling, always, for age and gender), the Air Force rape rate was 20 percent of the civilian rate. The Marine Corps' rate of ``other'' violent crime was 5 percent of the civilian rate, but the Marine Corps' rape rate was 27 percent of the civilian rate. The Navy's ``other'' violent crime rate was 4 percent of the civilian rate, but its rape rate was 19 percent of the civilian rate. And in the Army, the rate of ``other'' violent crime was 18 percent of the civilian rate, but the Army's rape rate was almost half of the rate of rape committed by civilians.
So the good news is that our military personnel commit little violent crime, at least compared with our violent civilian population.
But the bad news is that there is a rape differential: Military rape rates are not reduced nearly as much as military rates of ``other'' violent crime, relative to civilian rates.
In trying to determine why this is so, one additional fact needs to be taken into account: that the military rape differential appears not only in peacetime but also in war. The rape differential observed in the peacetime data (1987-1992 data were controlled to exclude the Gulf War period) also appears in crime data on American soldiers in World War II Europe. There, in the peak crime periods - the breakouts across France in 1944 and Germany in 1945 - American soldiers' rates of ``other'' violent crimes hovered just below or just above American civilian levels, while their rape rates rose to three to four times that of civilian rates.
Several potential explanations for why there should be a military rape differential both in peace and in war fall short. The magnitude of the differential, together with qualitative data about reporting patterns, largely rules out reporting differences as the answer. Differences in military and civilian criminal law do not appear to provide an explanation, though differences in military and civilian enforcement practices may contribute to the answer.
Demographic factors other than age and gender also appear in preliminary analyses to lack explanatory force. Attempts to explain the military rape differential by a self-selection theory (that the men who choose to join the military share some predisposition toward rape) also must fail, since such theories would not explain the existence of the rape differential in the conscripted army of World War II. Other efforts at explanation - based on psychoanalysis, sociobiology, etc. - produce similarly unsatisfactory results.
Perhaps the explanation does lie in some rape-conducive aspect of military culture, as some have suggested.
Ultimately, we have reason to be pleased and to be proud of the low rates of violent crime among U.S. military personnel. But we would do well to confront candidly and to analyze the meaning of the rape differential if we want to truly understand the persistence of incidents like Tailhook and to minimize the chance of future tragedies like the ones at Aberdeen and on Okinawa.
Madeline Morris is a law professor at Duke University and a specialist on sex crimes in the military.
- The Washington Post
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