Where US troops go, sexual assaults and drug charges follow. Look out Cairns!
Around the world, in the Philippines, Japan and many other locations, US bases have become the centre of major social problems. The Governor of Okinawa has said the US bases on his island brought a major increase in levels of prostitution, drugs, alcoholism, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and abuse of women and children.
The Australian experience is similar.
An Anglican Church report from Hobart details frequent sexual assaults on juvenile men and women by US service people.
There have been many other incidents of misbehaviour such as US MPs assaulting Aborigines in an Ipswich pub during the 1997 Tandem Thrust war games and a February 2004 court case in Darwin when two US servicemen were tried for rape.
US-Australian war games have a hidden cost. Young women and men pay with their bodies and minds for the 'rest and recreation' of military personnel. Services for rape counselling and trauma repair also pay a price. These costs are not acknowledged and the media rarely mention them for fear of being branded 'anti-American'.
Things are pretty bad within the US military too. In 2007 seven US female soldiers died of self-imposed dehydration in Iraq, too afraid to need the latrines during the night. In a recent article in The Nation, Helen Benedict writes that women soldiers serving in Iraq were often not listened to by their male superiors. Benedict says that, "The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts. "
A support group for victims, the Miles Foundation, says that U.S. service members have reported 307 sexual assaults that allegedly took place while they were stationed in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan or Bahrain. Real figures are probably shockingly higher.Benedict writes, "In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed." In many cases perpetrators were rewarded with promotion, while victims of rape were punished for things like 'desertion' for refusing to redeploy with their rapists.
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