Falling Up, Part 2: We Can Make Change Happen

I was at a dinner party with a bunch of friends not long ago when the subject of rape in the military came up.

- Dana Liesegang

“It doesn’t happen,” said one guest, a National Guardsman, who was sitting next to me. I’d met this gentleman for the first time that night, and he knew I’d been in the Navy but didn’t know the reason why I was in a wheelchair.

His words and dismissive tone made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention, like Jack’s do when he senses danger. I was about to rattle offa list of horrifying statistics and stories for this guy when I saw my hostess’s worried face. So I quietly replied, “You and I, sir, should not have this conversation.”

It was shocking to me that after so many tragic stories and information had surfaced in the news in recent years about sexual abuse in the military, there were still people—even those inside the military—who denied that it happens or refused to see it. Or they attempted to downplay or make excuses somehow.

“Marines don’t rape one of our own,” one member of the Corps said to me a few years ago. “Sure, we’ll rape a whore in another country. But not here, and not one of our people.” As if being on a foreign land with a stranger makes it okay?

“Rape is not an occupational hazard,” I told this Marine. Yet no matter how hard I tried to convince him of how inhumane and irrational his thinking was, he couldn’t get it through his thick skull that it’s never okay to rape: not if the victim is a prostitute or dressed “sexy,” not if you or she are drunk at a party, and not if you are in the military where they make up their own rules . . . never.

I’ve talked to hundreds of women in the military about this, and to meet an enlisted woman who has not been sexually assaulted in some way is a rarity.