As a student of military history one of my (many) interests is the relationship between militaries and the societies they protect and serve. As a rape survivor, I am compelled to understand the power dynamic that shapes not only the occurrence of rape, but also the way in which victims are doubly punished while rapists are often not punished at all in this life. As it happens, the question of rape between militaries and the civilian population of nations is one of those unpleasant subjects that happens to combine two of my own more grim interests, allowing a study of power from a historical subject on one of the more unpleasant realities of human existence.

My post today was prompted by a post on Asian Correspondent, one of my frequently read online newspapers for life in Southeast and East Asia, which commented on a case that is racing through the Korean justice system [1], something that is strikingly unusual for Korea, which tends not to take the issue of rape between American soldiers and local girls all that seriously sometimes [2]. Though, in fairness to South Korea, it’s not as if the West does a better job. The basic summary of the story is this: an enlisted American soldier reportedly got drunk in the town of Dongducheon, entered a goshitel (a small student dorm [3]) and raped and robbed a high school student studying for her examinations while brandishing a weapon. He was arrested and indicted very quickly by Korean standards, and since he was off-duty he was not subject to the usual agreements that are necessary for American troops to be tried by local courts. The fact that the courts are moving strongly means one of two things–either the case is solid (i.e. there are eyewitnesses and large amounts of corroborating DNA evidence) or the local D.A. is looking to make a strong statement against American servicemen committing crimes in South Korean towns. Or both.

There are two contexts we must remember when it comes to dealing with crimes such as these. We must remember that they are both incidents, with their own immediate context (especially a rape like this which seems to be a crime of opportunity rather than a target against a specific victim; that is not always the case) as well as a larger cultural context. There is a larger problem with “rape culture” that also tends to attack the victim (in this case a young lady who was studying for tests and presumably up late to cram as is the fashion of students all over the world) and to excuse the alleged criminal (who in this case was severely drunk but who appears to have targeted a place where he knew, even in his drunkenness, that there were young women, which suggests a high degree of cunning and some degree of planning). While the facts and arguments will play themselves out in a court of law, let us at least provide some what has come out so far.

For one, we have a drunk serviceman engaged in an act of brutal violence against a young woman. Rapes are generally crimes where there is a severe asymmetry of power. We have vulnerable women and children, the threat or presence of violence to enforce unwanted sexual advances, and often the use of alcohol or drugs on the part of either assailant or victim (or both) to heighten desire or diminish resistance. Added to the general asymmetry of power between men and women (where men are assumed to be more powerful, though there are some exceptions, such as would be the case of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, where she held more power as the master’s wife than he held as a slave, whatever the disparity in physical strength, or in the problem of female teachers assaulting younger male students) is often a stark difference in power because of age (older men assaulting boys or girls) as well as in positional power (soldier against citizen in this case). Often there is a combination of such contexts. Here we have an armed representative of an imperial power in a small town seeking the fulfillment of his wants and needs by taking advantage of an unarmed young woman, adding a geopolitical context of oppression of small nations by larger ones (for the rape culture is not only personal, but also political and geopolitical in nature), that adds further hostility to the issue, as South Korean citizens might be expected in general to feel hostile about the presence of American servicemen who could feel as if they are ‘above the law.’

And ultimately, it is such larger concerns that make the specific problem difficult to deal with on an impartial manner. There are a lot of interlocking parts here. We have an individual man and girl added to problems of alcohol abuse along with the deep problem of imperialism. We have people who without knowing anything about the story are likely to pick sides based on either their desire to support American troops (or because they share an interest in supporting the powerful and lack sensitivity for the plight of the oppressed) or because they are hostile to America anyway and simply seek an excuse to vent their irrational hatred whenever the occasion presents itself. Those of us who at least try to maintain some sort of objective interest in the facts have a lot of cross-currents to face in a situation like this.

So, let us attempt to do so by stepping back from the particulars of this situation (in which the legal process has to take its course, and in which certainty about what exactly happened is lacking) and examine some of the larger problems that situations like this reveal. After all, the key element here is that we have an American soldier and a South Korean young woman. The situation is not reversed–we do not hear of American young women being raped by South Korean soldiers based nearby, but we do hear of Okinowan or South Korean young women being so treated by American soldiers. This is because the United States is an imperial power. Other nations do not send their troops into our nation at this time to “protect” us. We are not at this time the not entirely willing subjects of an imperial power with feel some degree of resentment towards. Within this context, an explosive context that was shared between the Jews of Palestine and their Roman occupiers during the time of Christ, hostility and abuses can very easily magnify into a causus belli. Imperialism itself is a form of rape, where a stronger nation forces its will on a weaker nation, making every proud and patriotic citizen of that weaker region or nation a vengeful and embittered survivor, holding to their lost causes and seeking an opportunity to avenge themselves on their oppressors.

The problem of alcohol and loneliness are endemic in armies. To give but one example, Ulysses S. Grant was forced by his commanding officer to resign from the United States army because of his own inability to handle the bottle [4], and Grant’s drinking was almost certainly influenced by his intense loneliness at not being able to hire, even on a captain’s salary, to house his wife and children while on occupation duty in California. Imperialist armies throughout history have largely been made up of unmarried young men, not paid well enough to settle down with a wife but paid enough to buy some booze and rent some whores while off duty. Not surprisingly, in light of this rather cold and intentional treatment of soldiers by their own military planners, both alcohol and women of easy virtue tend to be found wherever soldiers are congregated. Many armies (including that of Imperial Rome) explicitly forbade soldiers from marrying while on active duty because of concerns that this might blunt their fighting power. The combination of lonely young men, alcohol, weapons, and the assumption that the women around are lacking in virtue and available for sex is tragic whenever civilians of decent moral virtue are present, because it makes very likely a conflict between the desire of locals to preserve the virtue of their daughters and sisters (and future wives) with the desires of soldiers to ease the loneliness of distant occupation duty.

In light of these larger considerations, people who oppose drug abuse and sexual immorality among soldiers (to say nothing of rape) generally ought to oppose imperialism in general. After all, it is deliberate policy that places young women in their own towns and hostels in harms’ way by bringing lonely young men, filling them with a hypermasculine ethos of domination and control and refusal to back down from anyone else, and then turning them loose on an ambivalent local population that might appreciate protection but has their own interests and virtues that they are willing to defend by whatever means possible. Without imperialism there is no need for large defense budgets, tens or hundreds of thousands of troops abroad on dubious ventures without a proper understanding of how to respect and treat civilians, how to control one’s urges, and how to be able to live a godly and upstanding life. But when one is an active (if not perhaps entirely aware) participant in imperialism and rape on the geopolitical scale, it is perhaps difficult to remain morally sensitive enough to keep one’s hands clean on the personal level. Try as we might, we cannot entirely compartmentalize our lives or our morality.

And so we see a connection between rape on the personal level and on the larger scale. For militaries intentionally place weapons in the hands of young men (and occasionally women, though mostly men), train them how to be extremely masculine about how they behave and think, and then turn them loose on local populations they are supposedly protecting (it is far worse when they are turned loose on enemy populations). The rape culture of militaries where soldiers cross the line is but part of a larger problem of domination and oppression in the world at large. We cannot rid ourselves of the smaller evil without seeking to tackle the larger one that is the source and wellspring of the smaller evils we see, lament, and fight. For the problem is in ourselves long before it is a problem in little South Korean towns. For not only actions, but a state of mind is involved, and the state of mind, the feeling of dominance and the lack of respect for others is a far more common problem than the action of rape itself, and necessary to it happening in the first plate. For if we loved others as we loved ourselves, and gave the same respect and honor to others that we demanded, we would not ever rape or abuse anyone else, because we would not be of that mindset–but we would neither be exploiters of the poor or imperialists either, because they spring from the same mindset.

[1] http://asiancorrespondent.com/66283/us-soldier-accused-of-raping-korean-teen/

[2] http://asiancorrespondent.com/22408/korean-cops-raped-not-our-job/

[3] http://seoulberry.blogspot.com/2009/03/goshitel.html

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant