How could women do that?
Female soldiers were supposed to be a civilizing influence on the military. Then came Abu Ghraib.
By Cathy Hong
May 7, 2004 | Of all the shocking photos to come out of Abu Ghraib, some of the most harrowing feature not a male but a female soldier, Lynndie England, an apple-cheeked 21-year-old from Fort Ashby, W.Va.
England has quickly become infamous for the photos in which she appears: There's the one of her jeering at hooded Iraqi prisoners standing in line, cigarette dangling from her mouth, pointing at the prisoners' genitalia. And there's the one that appeared yesterday, in which she's dragging a prisoner around by a leash attached to his neck.
She is now detained at Fort Bragg, N.C., where she has reportedly been denied legal counsel. (England, the only one of the accused to be dismissed from duty, is pregnant.) According to news stories, her family contends that she was a "paper-pusher" who wasn't trained to interrogate prisoners and was only "in the wrong place at the wrong time." Perhaps. But that doesn't change the global reaction to the photos: How could American soldiers gleefully torture other human beings? And then: How could a woman do this?
When the subject of women in combat was a hot topic in the 1980s, proponents argued that female soldiers would humanize the hypermasculinized machinations of the military -- perhaps even help prevent scandals like Abu Ghraib from happening. But the terrifying reports from the past week have thrown a major wrench into that theory. For centuries, women have been the casualties of mass rape and sexual torture during wartime, but for the first time in American history, women are accused of being perpetrators of sexual humiliation against male prisoners of war. Besides England, two other of the six soldiers who face court-martial for abusing Iraqi prisoners are women (Spc. Megan Ambuhl and Spc. Sabrina Harman). And, of course, there's former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, who oversaw Abu Ghraib and two other large jails until she was relieved of her position.
Linda DePauw, a retired professor of history at George Washington University and head of Pasadena, Md.'s Minerva Center, a nonprofit educational foundation that studies women in the military and in combat, says, "The military took women because of militaristic necessity in the '70s. Men stopped signing up in the Vietnam War. Women were good troops because they were less likely to cause disciplinary problems. This idea that women will make the military kinder and gentler is counterintuitive -- we don't want a gentler military. You join the Red Cross or Greenpeace to be kind and peaceful -- not the military."
Cynthia Enloe, a government professor at Clark University who specializes in the sexual politics of the military, believes that Abu Ghraib's scandal was a result of gender dynamics not only between reservists, but between the higher-ranking military intelligence and the lower-ranking brigade: "Did the military intelligence wield masculinity over the reservists? In the midst, woman reservists are under a lot of pressure to fit into a highly sexualized, masculine culture."
Despite efforts to blame the abuse completely on the six low-level reservists in the 372nd Military Police Company who participated, high-ranking military intelligence may have approved and perhaps even engineered the abuse as a way to "soften up" the prisoners. Experts interviewed for this article all agree that the problem does not lie with a few errant soldiers, but with the chain of command -- a view that's gaining popularity in Washington as well. The question is, if the higher-ups pushed for such abuse to extract information, was it their intention to play on the prisoners' fears of emasculation -- to exploit strict Islamic sexual codes -- to dehumanize them?