Bringing the war home

A rash of murders in military families highlights the weaknesses of the armed services' well-meaning domestic-abuse program.

By Amy Benfer

Sept. 23, 2002 | CAMP PENDLETON MARINE BASE, San Diego County -- Many theories have been offered to explain the recent wave of domestic homicides on American military bases this summer -- four murders in seven weeks at Fort Bragg, followed by an alleged attempted murder-suicide in Virginia just last week. There is the perennial lament about military training creating a propensity for violence at home, as well as more exotic claims -- given that three of the four men had recently returned from Afghanistan -- about post-traumatic stress and psychotic reactions to malarial drugs.

But the most likely explanation for the serial killings is more mundane, very logical and perhaps even more frightening: The military's domestic violence program -- the largest domestic violence intervention and treatment program in the world -- is failing its neediest victims by being both too harsh and too lenient, driving battered spouses underground and allowing some of the most sophisticated batterers to escape appropriate penalties.

Men who batter their partners do so most often out of a pathological need to exercise control over every aspect of their victims' lives. In the armed forces, it is the object of the military command to control every aspect of a soldier's life. The need for control is absolutely crucial and completely pervasive -- and it is manifested in every aspect of the military's domestic violence program.

This is how it works -- and, say its critics, how it fails: The victim of domestic violence who seeks help from the military's family advocacy center immediately gives up all expectation of privacy and confidentiality. Not only will her husband be notified of the allegations (and sometimes even brought in for joint counseling, a practice which is never done in the civilian community), but within 24 hours, the counselors at the family advocacy center will call the alleged abuser's boss, the commanding officer of his unit. (References here are to male abusers, since they are the most common in and outside of the military.)

From that point on, the commanding officer, who is unlikely to have any training in handling domestic violence cases, oversees the entire process -- from the issuance of protective orders to counseling to "sentencing." He acts as prosecutor, defense attorney and ultimately as judge. He can choose to issue warnings, to remove a soldier from his home, to order counseling or a court-martial. And no matter what he decides to do, the commander's actions are likely to inflame or exacerbate the classic paranoia of the abuser, whose violence very often escalates under the threat of being discovered.

In addition, both the commanding officer and the victim operate with the knowledge that a conviction for domestic violence can effectively end a soldier's career. In 1999, Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment, which prohibited anyone convicted of domestic assault from owning or operating a firearm, which is an absolute job requirement for pretty much anyone in the military or law enforcement.

Many say that passage of this law has had the unintended consequence of driving domestic violence underground, making victims more reluctant to report their abuse for fear of ending their husbands' careers, which, in the military, means the end of family income, housing and health insurance. At the same time, military commanders notified of abuse can be reluctant to substantiate the charges because a soldier who cannot carry a firearm is essentially useless.

In the civilian world, this approach is the equivalent of a machinist getting a domestic violence citation at midnight, and returning to his factory at noon to find that his foreman will be handling the case. It is an approach that has been highly praised for its effectiveness in early intervention, but roundly condemned for its apparent failure to stop determined or sophisticated abusers. And it may go far to explain the extreme violence of this summer.

Anna Finn (not her real name), herself a soldier, was beaten by her officer husband for years. But when she and her husband went in for marital counseling on the base, she says, they made a pact not to mention the violence, for fear of what it would do to his career. When she found out that her husband had also abused her young son, Finn finally decided to report the abuse. "Everyone knows now," she says.

Finn is still furious with military authorities for their failure to protect her and her family once they were aware of the violence. "I'm considered government property," she says. "I can get in trouble for getting a sunburn, for cutting my hair the wrong way, or for getting pierced. But when my husband was battering my body, they didn't want to get involved."

Next page: The DOD issued a "zero tolerance" policy for domestic violence, but it is unclear what that means