How Congress will cure the military’s sexual crimes problem
So we’ve been reading lately how Congress thinks they know more about preventing sexual harassment and rapes in the military. They want to remove commanders from the process, because Congress knows better than military. Yeah, Congressmen like former Congressman, Bob Filner currently the Democrat mayor of San Diego who has been buried in sexual harassment charges from 13 women so far. At least three of those women had connections to the military.
Nurse Michelle Tyler on Tuesday charged that she approached Filner in June to ask for assistance dealing with the Veterans Affairs Department on behalf of her patient Katherine Ragazzino, an Iraq war veteran. Filner “made it very clear to me that his expectation was that his help for Katherine depended on my willingness to go to dinner with him, spend personal time with him and be seen in public with him,” Tyler said…
[…]
Air Force veteran Eldonna Fernandez and Army veteran Gerri Tindley — also came forward with stories of unwanted advances from Filner. Both Fernandez and Tindley are survivors of sexual assault in the military and members of the National Women’s Veterans Association of America (NWVAA) in San Diego. The NWVAA’s president Tara Jones told CNN that she’s spoken to seven or eight women in the organization who had uncomfortable encounters with Filner.
Fernandez and Tindley were both speaking at events to educate the public about military sexual assault when Filner began harassing them. But, even though he mistreats women, he still has his supporters, you know, because the overall agenda is more important than a few distraught women;
Seven community leaders sent an open letter to the NAACP, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, urging the organization to help Filner. Noting that Filner was a part of the 1960’s civil rights movement and has a record of fighting for social justice, they said he’s being “assailed by economic and political forces” in San Diego.
“We do not condone sexual harassment,” they wrote. “We do recognize that Bob Filner’s fight is our fight for the greater good of humanity.”
Yeah, so these are the people who want to scold the military and consider the military an inappropriate place to try sexual crimes.
Thanks to BinhTuy66 for nudging me on this one.
Category: Congress sucks
Because, you know, those on the Left have such PRESSING social justice issues that they can be forgiven their few peccadilloes.
But if a conservative politician/public figure were to do THE VERY SAME THINGS – OH MY, THE SKY IS FALLING, IT’S THE END OF CIVILIZATION, and this poor rat bastard MUST be hung by his testicles to punish him/her/it/them.
/sarc off
Look. Congress has remedied the economy, unemployment, the housing market, health care, terrorism, not to mention the wars in the ME, and many, many other pressing issues. Of course Congress can eradicate sexual assault in the military!
I think Congress has a plan for sexual mistreatment/harassment/assault. They’ll declare it a small business and tax it out of existence.
Filner is an absolute raunchy piece of shit. I really wish one of the women he pulled that shit on had known MMA and snapped his fingers.
The reasonable thing to do with a sexual assault ( not harrassment) case, one that would protect women, the unit and the rights of the accused would be an immediate transfer of the victim to another unit, and have the investigation conducted by PMO. At a minumum rape or sexual assault should be decided by a Special Courtmartial.
I know that there are going to be those who fabricate tales to get transfered out of deploying units,but there also needs to be severe punishment for false accusations.
I want to know when women forgot how to claw, kick, and bite. Filner would have found out my “willingness” would have extended just far enough to put him in the hospital — even if I had to go to jail for it.
Civis in Congress will “heal” sexual harassment in the military the same way the tried to “solve” the abortion issue with 12 men discussing about pregnancy:
Say stuff you don´t have an exact clue about, in an inappropriate way and fashion, on an unfortunate location.
Gotta love your politics, America!
Typical political meddling: offer an extremely expensive solution to what they declare to be a problem. It is best if there is no actual evidence of the “problem” existing. And, it is even better if the pols refuse to address how they themselves are engaged in the “problem” that they declare others to have.
In this particular instance, they get to further erode the effectiveness of the military while forcing silly rules upon it to “control” a behavior which no one believes actually occurs within the military nearly as frequently as in the general population of the country and not nearly as frequently as it does in the Congress.
You know how to solve this problem once and for all? Throw the women out of combat and front line troops and stop with the co-ed barracks.
Oh, that’s stupid? You mean as stupid as blaming a gun when there is a shooting instead of the guy pulling the trigger?
The seven “community leaders”, “Hey, Filner might have harassed and groped the women, but his creds are such that that behavior can be overlooked. Because he’s a liberal Dem.”
@5 – that’s what I was wondering! Why the heck didn’t ANY of these women report his behavior earlier? One woman was actually put in a choke hold in front of two staffers who were off-duty cops! At the very least he would have had some broken fingers from me and probably wouldn’t have had continued use of his junk either. Plus a sexual harassment complaint and an assault charge.
Women have been taught what to do about sexual harassment in the workplace for decades. Most companies and governments have training sessions, not just documentation. What were all of these women thinking? What happened to ‘I am woman hear me roar’?
@8….are you saying that the men in these units are incapable of resisting the presence of women in their area, and as such, you should remove the women ? I just want to be clear on your statement.
@ #11: Often the easiest solution is the best solution. Co-ed dorms make no sense at all. So, removing the women (the fewer number) from them certainly would be the cheapest and easiest thing to do.
Never in my military career was I forced to share sleeping quarters with the opposite sex. Didn’t want to then and would still not want to. By the time it became the thing to do I had sufficient rank that it was never an issue.
Nope, no need whatever to share bathroom space. Of course, now it may be moot, what with having to contend with same sex assaults.
I know it’s a foregone conclusion that most of America’s sexual deviants and rapists are in the US military. Just the same, but for a number of sensational stories regarding adulterous general officers and some EMs who think that every woman under 80 is hankering for them, I see no RELIABLE numbers whatsoever that a serious problem exists, let alone a crisis. I wouldn’t give a red cent for the anonymous survey. Hey, maybe next year the FBI will take the civilian lead, chuck the hard data, and just conduct and report crime surveys.
Eh, I know a woman that went through the system only to have CID screw it up and kick her case to the trash bin. OTH, a higher “jurisdiction” has the case now, several agents are sporting egg on their faces. We shall see…
Waht the hell happened to ‘stomp on his instep’, ‘knee him in the nuts’ and my personal favorite ‘no means NO!’?
What happened to that? Where did that go? Is this because little girls are being told they have to be nice and not raise their voices in protest?
Or is it becuase all that stuff that we learned to do to protect ourselves from this kind of crap (and men were supposed to learn it, too) is no longer politically correct?
@12, Merely removing them from the proximity of the barracks building isn’t going to “solve” the issue. The previous poster said that and removing them from the front line units would “solve” the problem. The problem is that the males fail to put themselves in check when around females. I’ve lived in and around females for most of my 30 year military career and have not once been even remotely accused of any type of inappropriate behavior. I simply never allowed myself to get into the position where that could be an issue. We had co-ed barracks at my first duty station with NO barracks watch. Men and women came and went as they pleased through the barracks and no one seemed to have any problem.
No, we weren’t infantry units or even considered combat arms. Are we trying to say that these men are somehow different because they’re in an combat unit and shouldn’t be expected to maintain some type of self control when encountering females? I think you’d be insulting all the guys who DON’T have that issue instead of realizing that these individuals would be doing that whether they were military or civilian, combat or combat support/REMF personnel. If they’re truly guilty of this type of behavior, it’s in their personality, not what unit they’re assigned to.
In themselves, anecdotes of victimization or anonymous surveys don’t support any conclusion of ramapant sexual abuse. Why in the wide, wide world of sports would anyone trust either the sensationalizing media on this or any of the knuckleheads in the administration. Tearing traditional institutions down is JOB #a of obamaman and many (far too many) members of congress. Where sexual abuse exists, hang the offender by his scrotum but impugning the US military as an institution is just ridiculous.
@11
I don’t think he was serious. And if I’m wrong, I apologize Jon, but it looks to me like when he says the following.
Oh, that’s stupid? You mean as stupid as blaming a gun when there is a shooting instead of the guy pulling the trigger?
If I’m understanding him a-right, he’s saying, just as you wouldn’t blame a gun for killing someone, but the person pulling the trigger, you don’t punish the woman who was assaulted, but the one who did it.
I heard A. Weiner has decided to enlist as a Ranger since he’s not going to be mayor of NYC. It’s a shoe in! He has those rare skills of how to ambush the Taliban. His method is simple. He sends e-mail pics of his “mighty weapon” To the Taliban women and they won’t be able to resist meeting with him. Including their jealous tali husbands who will be forced to follow to protect their honor. Wow, taliban destroyed within a month!
His condition of straight into ranger enlistment is: he gets to select, soon to be former mayor, filmer as his battle buddy. That way he has someone to take better pics of his formidable weapon, perhaps cleaning it too.
What really concerns me about this fail proof scenario is: when wiener goes to the range to qualify, the huge recoil from that mean looking black M-16 will snap his little pencil neck.
On the other hand should the taliban capture him, a small Swiss Army pocket knife would do. New York would be better off!
Former Senators Dodd and Kennedy could not break away from their waitress sandwich long enough to comment.
But WHY should we even bother to think or decide for ourselves when we have Congress to do that for us? “The Fifty-two’ers” sure thought so in 2008 & 2012, or was it those precincts with 100+% voter turnouts ALL for B. Hussein 0bama?
C’mon, Filner did two months in jail as a Freedom Rider.
(OK, 2 days for being a Freedom Rider, the balance for groping the sheriff’s wife…)