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| Washington Post writer Sally Quinn |
Why does the military, Quinn would like to know, seem to be unable — or unwilling — to ferret out and prosecute the miscreants who commit these heinous crimes? The writer seeks that there be "people ... going to jail" and "a court-martial in every case, and more people in power ... not just sputtering with outrage, but acting out of outrage."
| Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh |
But she sneers at a claim made by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, in a hearing before Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and the Senate Armed Services Committee, that "roughly 20 percent of the young women who come into the Department of Defense and Air Force report they were sexually assaulted in some way before they came into the military. So they come in from a society where this occurs. Some of it is the hook-up mentality of junior high, even, and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”
Quinn is wrong to sneer. According to Wikipedia, "In the United States, several studies since 1987 have shown that one in four college women have survived rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime ... It has been estimated that one in six American women has been or will be sexually assaulted during her life." Yes, the military culture can and does magnify the problem of sexual assaults and rapes, and yes, it also has means of investigating, prosecuting and punishing such crimes that do not apply in civilian affairs. But the underlying problem is society-wide, and just focusing on the situation in the military misses that.
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| Poet/social critic Robert Bly |
Robert Bly would say that the perpetrators of sexual assaults and rapes remain "half-adults," most of them. They, like the huge numbers of young people who do not commit such crimes, share the attribute of not being fully brought to maturity by the time they are nominally all grown up. That happens in part because our society has come to disparage the initiation rituals of old, the ones that were once associated with our world's primary religions, ancient mythologies, traditional folk customs, and the like.
According to author Mark Gerzon's review of The Sibling Society in The Los Angeles Times:
The "sibling society" is Bly's metaphor for a world where "adults regress toward adolescence" and "adolescents . . . have no desire to become adults"; where admiration for elders has disappeared, tradition has eroded, ancestors have been forgotten; where the family is being destroyed everywhere, by everyone; where children's brains are addled by day-care and TV; where adolescents, lost and self-destructive, dwell in bastions of boredom called high schools; where parents, particularly fathers, have abdicated their archetypal roles; where mass culture provides not elders but movies about infantile "grumpy old men"; and where respect for ancient myths and tribal ritual has been replaced by the cynical self-centeredness of "do your own thing."
A "kingdom without a king," as Gerzon puts it, is a recipe for chaos, in Bly's view. I would add that it is also a recipe for "anything goes" when it comes to how half-adult men treat girls and women.
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| Michael Gerzon, author of A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America’s Soul |
Never mind that I fully agree with Gerzon that:
By the time Bly reaches his epilogue, he seems to sense the one-sided quality of his argument. He allows himself to muse that perhaps there is "some good" or a "gift" buried in this flattening of hierarchy and questioning of authority. If so, he never finds it. Instead, he portrays everything through the same bitter, despairing lens.
Bly's book is a flawed vessel for an important idea: we need to reinvent the faith-based, spiritual, religious wisdom that can form us properly as human beings, so to head off the various sorts of misbehavior that boil over, in the military and outside it, as sexual assaults and rapes.
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