When a superior ordered maleMarines not to curse in front of female Marines — as if the women were too delicate to take it — she spit an expletive his way. When other women selected the skinniest male Marines to carry on their shoulders during training, as if from the battlefield, she instead picked the heavy ones.
But the memory that has haunted her was her failure to push back against a commander who told her not to report a young female recruit who said she was raped by a male Marine, who, Ms. Lucas said, went on to assault two more women.
“I was too weak to stand up to my commanding officer,” said Ms. Lucas, who served in the Marines for 11 years, including in Falluja, Iraq, in 2006 and 2007. “I really wish I had done something. If I could go back in time, I would stand up for her.”
In Oceanside, a scrappy beach town 10 miles south of Camp Pendleton, the Marine base that sprawls for 125,000 acres along the Southern California coastline, almost everyone who has served has a story to tell about sexual misconduct in the military. Some were harassed or assaulted themselves, while others worked among men and women who were victims of abuse.
But in more than a dozen long interviews, veterans and active-duty military personnel here sounded a consistent theme: they believe commanders in charge of deciding which cases to prosecute conceal far too much out of fear that the cases will taint their careers.
“It’s a huge problem, mainly because of the fact it goes unreported,” said Jimmy Coats, who served in the Navy for eight years and was raped, he said, by a man he had been dating.
“My supervisor told me not to tell my commanding officer,” Mr. Coats added. “I worked in a clinic, and in quite a few instances there were people who didn’t want to talk about it. When a report was made, they tried to keep it as quiet as possible.”
San Diego County has the highest concentration of active-duty military personnel in the country, where veterans from every service branch can be found on Oceanside’s pier and in its plywood-floor bars, surplus stores and tattoo parlors. It remains a military-proud town, where people say there is disappointment that the Pentagon has not been better at tackling the problem of sexual assault. A recent Pentagon survey found that an estimated 26,000 people in the armed forces were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010.
“A lot of people around here worry about this,” said Dennis Martinez, who served in the Marines in Vietnam. “They worry that when these things happen, it doesn’t always get handled the right way. This is something that has been happening for many years.”
Congress, led in part by women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is trying to grapple with the issue in a series of legislative proposals that are intended to crack down on offenders and keep commanders from reversing guilty verdicts in sexual assault convictions, which happens very rarely. Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, proposed a measure that would give military prosecutors, rather than commanders, the power to decide which sexual assault cases to try, with the goal of increasing the number of people who report crimes without fear of retaliation.
The idea of removing these powers from commanders has been met with stiff resistance both throughout the Pentagon and among some fellow lawmakers. The measure was rejected by the committee, but Ms. Gillibrand has said she will try to revive it later this year on the Senate floor.
Ms. Lucas, 34, who was the only woman in her unit, oversaw a large group of trainees, including a 22-year-old woman who liked to go out drinking, Ms. Lucas said. After an overnight trip outside Reno, Nev., the trainee told Ms. Lucas she had been raped by a male Marine with a stellar training record. Ms. Lucas, appalled, went to her commanding officer to get an investigation started.
“I was told not to file a complaint,” Ms. Lucas said, adding that she suspected it was because her commanding officer did not want such an event recorded on his own performance evaluation. “He felt the girl was promiscuous,” Ms. Lucas said of her commanding officer. “She drank.”
Her commanding officer told her, she said, that the male Marine was great in every other aspect. “I said, ‘That’s not the point.’ I really wish I had done more. She was depressed, and he went on to assault two women in Japan. Nothing good came of it.”
While there are disagreements among veterans and active-duty military personnel about whether commanders should have power over prosecutions, there is broad agreement that the system does not always function in a way that best serves victims or the accused.
“We heard about it all the time,” said Jeff Edgington, 23, who just finished five years in the Marines. “You heard about older guys getting with the new girls. There are such huge biases that these cases don’t get investigated as well as they could.”
Victims have long said that they fear retaliation if they report sex crimes to commanders, and that their careers could suffer. President Obama himself joined the debate in May when he proclaimed at the White House that those who commit sexual assault in the military should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged — period.” The president said he had ordered Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel “to step up our game exponentially” to prevent sex crimes.
“The system is not built to effectively resolve allegations or help actual victims,” said Eric S. Montalvo, a lawyer who has represented defendants in such cases and a former judge advocate general. “I have been in the middle of proceedings where victims did not get justice because the system did not work properly.”
The focus will remain on the issue in places like Oceanside, particularly at a time when the Pentagon is moving more women into combat positions previously closed to them.
“This has always been part of the culture,” said Howard Buford, 88, who served in the Air Force for 20 years. “The women always kept their mouths shut because people didn’t pay attention to them. But I think there is enough pressure now that the generals and colonels will start acting like they know what’s going on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/us/in-a-military-town-calls-grow-to-lift-the-voices-of-sexual-assault-victims.html?hp&_r=0
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