“I’ve never met one victim who was able to report the crime and still retain their military career,” she says. “Not one.”

As the Steubenville rape trial coverage sparks a national conversation about rape, it is important that we connect the dots between what happened in Steubenville and what is happening throughout our culture. This week National Public Radio is reporting on the rape of men and women in the US military. And the evidence of a systemic rape culture is damning.

When I reported [the rape], it was a very small part of my life. But by making that choice, my reporting of it took over my life, ruined my career and wound up, ultimately, getting me kicked out of the Army. – Myla Haider, former Army criminal investigator

The Department of Defense is estimating there are 19,000 sexual assaults each year in the military. About 9,000 of these are women. When you compare the overall size of the two enlisted populations you see a dramatic difference.

While men face about the same risk of rape in the civilian population as they do in the military, the risk of a woman being raped is much higher in the armed forces than in the civilian population; about one in four. But it’s not just the number of assaults that is outrageous, it is the way rape victims, male and female, are treated when they file complaints about sexual assault.

NPR tells the story of Myla Haider, an agent in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, or CID. She is also an intelligence analyst and a combat veteran. She is also a victim of rape. Her story is powerful and compelling. In part because she understood the implications of reporting rape and chose not to do so initially.

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NPR reports:

Before she ever went to war, during CID training, Haider was raped. With some experience already with the military’s attitude toward rape, she decided not to report the attack. “I’ve never met one victim who was able to report the crime and still retain their military career,” she says. “Not one.”

Eventually though she was called in to investigate a serial rapist. It was the same man who raped her.

NPR reports:

But the past wouldn’t stay buried. A few years later, after she’d become a CID agent, Haider got a phone call from an officer who was investigating a possible serial rapist — the soldier who raped her. It was a moral dilemma, with an obvious course. “All of the other women who were involved in the case had been attacked after I was attacked,” Haider says. “So I thought the only right thing for me to do was to be involved.”

She joined the other women who filed complaints and reported her rape. Doing so destroyed her career.

Steubenville may have brought the issue of rape back to center stage, but rape in the military is a window into how systemic rape culture functions at its most heinous. In the military, if you are a rape victim, male or female, your chances at getting justice are nearly zero.

Take fifteen minutes and listen to NPR’s two recent reports on rape in the military linked below. It is some of the most important news reporting in recent memory.

The second NPR news story above includes quotes like this:

Red tape held up Rangel’s paychecks, and when she got called in to her command sergeant major’s office, she thought he was going to help her solve the problem. “He let me know that if I would meet up with him in a hotel he would give me money. And I was like, ‘No, I just need my paycheck,’ ” she says. “Then I had a mission that I had to go on, and this command sergeant major was there,” Rangel says. “He and another sergeant major outright told me that we were going to have sex.” She reported the rape to her superiors, including a female officer, and was told to keep quiet. Other officers started hinting that they knew about the rape. Another sergeant major asked her for sex.

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