Rape Nation
By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet.
From prisons to barracks and from Iraq to Tennessee, military sexual abuse is running rampant.


As a new officer in the Air Force who trusted the institution and the men she worked with, Dorothy Mackey didn't think she would ever be sexually assaulted by her fellow servicemen. She was wrong.

When a military ob-gyn did things during an examination that didn't seem right, soon after she joined the service in 1983, she tried to rationalize her disturbing thoughts away. When she had another bad experience with a military ob-gyn in 1986, at the Spangcahlem Air Force base in Germany where she was stationed, it was harder to look the other way.

"He sodomized me," she said. "I started looking into what happens in a normal ob-gyn examination, and that is definitely not supposed to be part of it."

But when she was violated again about a year later, it was clear. Her group was on a training mission in Spain, passing some downtime by playing volleyball. By this time she was a sergeant, in charge of many of the enlisted men there.