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Harassment is a Leadership Issue
Rosemarie Skaine


Often improper behavior is rooted in inequality in the structure
of the military


The charges of rape and sexual harassment against military
trainers at the Army Ordnance Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground,
Md., focus the nation's attention once again on sexual harassment
in the military, even as the effects of the charges that arose
from the Navy's Tailhook Convention in 1991 still reverberates
throughout the military.

The more than a dozen female soldiers in their second eight weeks
of training at Aberdeen are just the latest victims.

The military is not above the law, but military personnel are
subject to a different set of “laws,” the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. There are strict rules against fraternization
that prohibit improper behavior such as undue familiarity between
junior and senior ranks, whether male or female. Fairly enforcing
these rules is important.

Important to fairly enforcing rules is the command climate. A
commander I heard speak told the young audience, “If you tell
your guys to respect women, they will.” So sexual harassment is a
leadership issue; a “commander’s challenge.”

Deborah Lee, assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs,
called the training environment one where if the commander is
abusing his absolute power, the result is the creation of
absolute fear and intimidation. The drill sergeant is the single
most important person responsible for a recruit’s transformation
from a scared kid to a soldier. If the drill sergeant abuses his
power, the transformation is more difficult to complete and in
some cases impossible. This scenario, then, is not the female
recruit’s responsibility, but the drill sergeant’s. The drill
sergeant has the most power.

It is not easy to go forward in the military. In researching the
book I am writing on women in combat, one woman told me, “I would
think long and hard before I exposed sexual harassment. There are
sanctions in the military that are not in civilian life that
never go away. Every one loses.”

The young woman’s statement confirms interviews I had during my
research of Tailhook ‘91. However, some officers felt the pilots
were being set up in that the disciplinary letters written to the
aviators truly signified the end of their career.

Retired commanders have told me that once a male is accused, “It
just won’t go away.” One commander believes that the zero defect
policy is bad because as a leader he questions how to get
something out in the open and deal with it if you can’t admit
anything is wrong to begin with. This may very well be true if
one looks at the difficulty in resolving the Tailhook ‘91
episode. Aviators accused of sexually abusing females wouldn’t
talk.

In the case of Tailhook `91, Rear Admiral John E. Gordon,
believed enforcing policy was part of the problem. He says it is
overstated to say the predominant response of attendees was
closing ranks or engaging in a conspiracy. The aviators were not
protecting each other as much as they were protecting themselves.
Gordon says, "Once an officer admitted seeing misconduct, he or
she would be held accountable for not reporting it earlier and
careers would be in jeopardy. I believe individuals ‘couldn't
remember' to protect themselves."

We need to view the military with compassion, but not without
common sense. It is sometimes difficult for the civilian to view
the military with compassion. We hold our military in high regard
and expect high moral behavior. Often improper behavior is rooted
in inequality in the structure of the military. If we as a
country believe it makes us a higher society to insure equality,
then we have to look at the hierarchical position of women in the
military.

The position of females, though changing, is not yet on par with
males. It takes time to train a woman or a man for command. We
have to give the military credit for their “beginning,” but some
parts of the military are slower to change than others. In my
interviews with military women and men, many feel that if a
female is viewed as “a soldier is a soldier,” we will not hear of
gender issues. We have not yet reached that point.

Sexual harassment is based in a context of unequal power
structure. The military is hierarchical by nature. It is just
beginning to change. It will take time to change enough for women
to be commanders, for men to view them as colleagues and,
therefore, decrease the possibility of sexual harassment.

c1996 The Des Moines Register, Inc.

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