it's the women

it's always the women (and children). they usually don't fight back. they are easy targets. you hurt a woman and  you hurt her entire family. this time it's in africa. it has happened everywhere though. it IS happening everywhere though. skin color has nothing to do with this. it's greed and it's evil and it's power hungry and it's madness. it's the evil that men do

In a Guinea Seized by Violence, Women as Prey
By ADAM NOSSITER
CONAKRY, Guinea — Cellphone snapshots, ugly and hard to refute, are circulating here and feeding rage: they show that women were the particular targets of the Guinean soldiers who suppressed a political demonstration at a stadium here last week, with victims and witnesses describing rapes, beatings and acts of intentional humiliation.

“I can’t sleep at night, after what I saw,” said one middle-aged woman from an established family here, who said she had been beaten and sexually molested. “And I am afraid. I saw lots of women raped, and lots of dead.”

One photograph shows a naked woman lying on muddy ground, her legs up in the air, a man in military fatigues in front of her. In a second picture a soldier in a red beret is pulling the clothes off a distraught-looking woman half-lying, half-sitting on muddy ground. In a third a mostly nude woman lying on the ground is pulling on her trousers...........

i refuse to believe this

i absolutely believe when sarevil was mayor of wasilla, women had to pay for their rape kits. THAT i believe

i cannot believe or i will NOT believe the military charges for them (off base BUT that should not matter)

please, i beg you, tell me someone got their information wrong (although i know they didn't)

Raped in the Military? You'll Have to Pay for Your Own Forensic Exam Kit
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet.

Sarah Palin's decision not to pay for rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was an issue in the campaign for the White House. But allow me to introduce the large pink elephant that has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room: TRICARE, the Pentagon's Military Health System that covers active duty members, doesn't pay for off-base rape kits, either.

Spec. Patricia McCann, who served in Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard from 2003 to 2004, raised the issue at the Winter Soldier Investigation in March. McCann read a memo issued to all MEDCOM commanders clarifying that "SAD kits" -- which are forensic rape kits -- "are not included in TRICARE coverage." *

That would put Alaska and the military in a very special category.

Women in the military are twice as likely to be raped as their civilian counterparts. In fact, "women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq," Congresswoman Jane Harman, D-Calif., told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs in May.

Harman said, "The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Health Center where I met female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military, and 29 percent said they were raped during their military service."

In July, a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing subpoenaed Kaye Whitley, director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), to explain what the department is doing to stop the escalating sexual violence in the military. Her boss, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, ordered her not to appear..................

because women are less than nothing

(the men some may say fared worse by being killed, i'm not sure i agree with that)

because women are used as battering rams and shields and targets and worse.

because this MUST STOP

because one evil devil has been arrested doesn't mean this is going to stop. there are many more evil devils out there in jasmina's country and every where else.

Sex slave: 'Every day we were raped'

By Rachel Clarke
CNN
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- The outbreak of war seemed like a joke to Jasmina, then just 19 years old. She dreamed of being an economist and says she played with her toddler son and baby daughter as if they were toys.

But in April 1992, the Serb soldiers took over her city of Bijeljina, in northeast Bosnia near the border with Serbia, and began to kill, torture and terrorize the Muslims there in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.

"Whole families were disappearing during the night. Sometimes we could see their bodies in the gardens, sometimes not even that," Jasmina said.

"The men from my family were beaten up the first day. ... My mother just disappeared. I never found out what happened."

Paramilitaries loyal to Arkan, the Serbian ultranationalist later indicted for crimes against humanity, came to the home Jasmina shared with her husband and extended family to search for valuables and weapons. When they found no guns they started beating her husband, said Jasmina who asked CNN not to use her last name to protect her children.

"Then they started torturing me. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was totally naked and covered in blood, and my sister-in-law was also naked and covered in blood. ... I knew I had been raped, and my sister-in-law, too." In a corner, she saw her mother-in-law, holding her children and crying..............

the greatest silence

debuts on hbo tonight

The Brutal Truth
A Filmmaker Confronts the Rapists of the Congo and Finds No Remorse (note: she didn't find remorse in the congo and if she got a chance to talk to rapists ANYWHERE, she most likely wouldn't get ANY remorse from THEM either)

By DeNeen L. BrownWashington Post Staff Writer

Six rapists in the lush forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo: One in a green hood, another in a red baseball cap, another in military fatigues and a camouflage hat, another in black sunglasses. Their guns are pointed down. Smoking cigarettes, they swagger. They hold up their fingers, counting the number of women they have raped, violated, damned. Sexual terror as a weapon of war, perpetrated sometimes with sticks, knives, tree limbs.
The men seem unafraid to confess. They are bragging to an American filmmaker who holds a camera, recording their words.
"Ask him to tell me what he did," says Lisa F. Jackson, whose chilling documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," debuts tonight on HBO. In a 10-year-old conflict that has left some 5 million people dead, the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been systematically raped and mutilated by an array of combatants are the silent victims among the living, Jackson tells us. What makes her documentary more stunning: She goes into the forest and confronts the rapists.
"I slept with some women," says the rapist, a gray sweater wrapping his head, the sleeves tied around his neck...............

these are startling figures

they are probably UNDER reported too - as in civilian life. what is the answer? kick women out of the military some would say. i would say, PUNISH THE RAPISTS - just like in civilian life. women are NOT objects. no is no here there and everywhere. no is no to your next door neighber, to your fellow soldiers AND to your commanding officer or your doctor.

let's let congress continue to investigate steroids in mlb and ignore rape in the military.

Rapists in the ranks
Sexual assaults are frequent, and frequently ignored, in the armed services
By Jane Harman
The stories are shocking in their simplicity and brutality: A female military recruit is pinned down at knifepoint and raped repeatedly in her own barracks. Her attackers hid their faces but she identified them by their uniforms; they were her fellow soldiers. During a routine gynecological exam, a female soldier is attacked and raped by her military physician. Yet another young soldier, still adapting to life in a war zone, is raped by her commanding officer. Afraid for her standing in her unit, she feels she has nowhere to turn.These are true stories, and, sadly, not isolated incidents. Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq. The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.Numbers reported by the Department of Defense show a sickening pattern. In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported -- 73% more than in 2004. The DOD's newest report, released this month, indicates that 2,688 reports were made in 2007, but a recent shift from calendar-year reporting to fiscal-year reporting makes comparisons with data from previous years much more difficult. ..........

rape in the military

and what isn't being done (lots). we all know it's ALWAYS the women's fault right? it's ESPECIALLY so in the military. the article is long, but worth the read

Raped and Silenced in the Barracks
By Jessica Pupovac, In These Times
When military sexual assault survivors call Susan Avila-Smith, she advises them to keep their mouths shut while she works on getting them home.
“It breaks my heart to do that,” she says, “but I want to get them out alive and that’s my main goal.”
Since she left the Army in 1995, Avila-Smith estimates that she has helped about 1,200 rape survivors separate from the U.S. Armed Forces and claim their Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits. As founder of Women Organizing Women, an online support group for survivors of military sexual trauma (MST), Avila-Smith has heard it all. But lately, she’s been more sensitive than usual.
“Maria’s case has triggered something in me,” she says. “I imagine the VAs are filling up right now with women who never even stepped foot in there before.”
“Maria” is 20-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, who disappeared from Camp Lejeune, outside of Jacksonville, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2007, one month before she was expected to give birth. As the local police enlisted the press to help reach out to Lauterbach and solicit information from the local community, it was soon reported that she had recently accused a superior at Camp Lejeune of rape.
Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Paul Ciccarelli attempted to quell suspicions that the two might be linked, assuring the Associated Press that the “sexual encounter” was “not criminal.” On Jan. 10, the Marine Corps Times, a weekly newspaper serving military personnel, bolstered this claim, speculating that she may have fled to avoid charges for “making false statements.”
That same day, Lauterbach’s accused assailant, Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean, was scheduled to appear at the Onslow County Sheriff’s office for questioning. He never showed up. On Jan. 11, Laurean, who had reported for duty for a full month after Lauterbach’s disappearance, failed to do so. His wife told investigators that she believed he had left for Mexico and gave investigators a note written by Laurean that said Lauterbach had slit her own throat with a knife, and he then buried her. Detectives have rejected that claim, and an autopsy found that Lauterbach died of a blunt force trauma to the head..........