A pregnant female Army nurse, 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, disappeared last week after her home was set ablaze, shortly after seeking protection against her Marine husband, who allegedly held a gun to her head and threatened suicide. Last weekend, police found her charred body hidden in a shallow grave. This incident follows on the heels of two similar disappearances/murders in the past year: Lance Corporal Maria Frances Lauterbach and Army Spc. Megan Touma.
Robert Paul Reyes at SOP asks:
"Who is responsible for the murder of female soldiers stationed in America? It`s not jihadists who are murdering our women soldiers in the homeland, but jealous lovers or perhaps a serial killer... These murders have some obvious similarities, a special task force should be created to investigate these three cases."Good idea. Let's look at this in context, though, and not limit the activity of a task force to violence that fits the description of serial criminal activity. Women serving the US military have much to fear from their male compatriots in the field as well. Recall reports in 2006 that female soldiers in Iraq were dying of dehydration. The cause: they refused to drink adequate water in order to avoid using latrines, where they had learned to expect rape and assault by male soldiers. But worse, the US military may be covering up this pattern of abuse. CommonDreams reported in April that the military routinely characterizes female deaths after rape in the military as 'non-combat related injuries' or 'suicide.' In 2007, Helen Benedict published an op-ed in Salon entitled "The Private War on Women Soldiers," in which she quotes a 21-year-old female National Guardsman who had taken to carrying a knife at all times:
"'The knife wasn't for the Iraqis,' she told me. 'It was for the guys on my own side.'"Half the problem, in other words, is an assumption that "our soldiers" treat women with respect, while it "they" are likely to victimize "our" women. Instead, the media should be reporting on these events in context. International institutions need a comprehensive understanding of gender, militarism, and violence that goes beyond the kind of simplistic assumptions in last month's Security Council resolution. And the US military needs to go beyond launching a serious investigation of these patterns, and also reconsider things like base architecture, waivers for recruits with criminal and violent records, definitions of and rules on reporting assault, and the way it disaggregates its casualty data, in order to realize its goal of a gender integrated military.
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