Here are excerpts from my latest AlterNet.org article about Suzanne Swift and sexual assault in the military.
Tomorrow marks a national day of action to call for Swift’s honorable discharge. Protests will occur at the gates of Fort Lewis at noon, followed by a press conference at 3 pm. A separate protest will be held at the Federal Building in Eugene, OR at noon. Supporters are also encouraged to sign a petition calling for an honorable discharge.
Please email me if you know of any soldiers who would be willing to talk about this issue. I’m now working on a story about men who are raped in the military.
U.S. Army Specialist Suzanne Swift will spend her 22nd birthday tomorrow confined to the Fort Lewis base in Washington, where she is awaiting the outcome of an investigation into allegations that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three sergeants in Iraq.
Swift says the sergeants propositioned her for sex shortly after arriving for her first tour of duty in February 2004. She remained in Iraq until February 2005. “When you are over there, you are lower than dirt, you are expendable as a soldier in general, and as a woman, it’s worse,” said Swift in a recent interview with the Guardian.
When Swift’s unit redeployed to Iraq in January 2006, she refused to go and instead stayed with her mother in Eugene, Oregon. She was eventually listed as AWOL, arrested at her mother’s home on June 11, sent to county jail, and transferred to Fort Lewis.
“She’s miserable and isolated,” says Sara Rich, Swift’s mother. “It’s not good to have an idle mind while you’re dealing with PTSD and sexual trauma. I want them to release her so I can get her the care she needs. I’m tired of waiting.”
Suzanne Swift is not the first woman to go AWOL because of sexual assault, according to the Miles Foundation. The problem is, most women are too afraid to speak out publicly.
Since the fall of 2003, the Miles Foundation has documented 518 cases of sexual assault on women who have served or are serving in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain and Qatar. The foundation has counselors on staff around the clock and often receives midnight phone calls from service members or their family members. After counselors and attorneys help the women access medical care and explain the reporting process, they try to transport them to a safe place for care and treatment.
“Because they’re in a combat situation, we’ve had to develop protocols. We can’t just send a chopper in there for them. We have to get their permission to contact military authorities to get them moved,” says Sanchez. “If you were at Fort Drum, we wouldn’t have to tell anybody, but if we need to move you out of Baghdad or Kuwait, then we have to get your permission to contact the military and say, ‘We need to move Joanna Jones because this has transpired.'”
Sanchez says a counselor recently received a call in the middle of the night from a young woman who was raped in the Green Zone in Baghdad. “She said, ‘I was raped and I’ve only got 10 minutes on my phone card. What do I do?'” The woman was helicoptered out of the Green Zone, sent to Kuwait and then Germany, and eventually returned to the U.S.
Another recent case involved a young American woman who was raped by a Coalition partner in a rural area. Sanchez says it took two weeks to get to a one-room medical facility in Kabul. “They had no facilities to do a rape testing, so they couldn’t test for pregnancy or HIV. An American doctor literally handed her high dose antibiotics and told her, ‘This will kill anything you’ve come in contact with.'” The young woman is now recovering in the states.
Sanchez says another woman was told she would receive the morning-after pill a few days after she was raped, but received birth control pills instead.
Click here to read the rest of the article.