Are Soldiers Role Models and Heroes?
January 20, 2012
According to a new report, a U.S soldier committed a violent sex crime every six hours and 40 minutes in 2011. This rise in violent sex crimes was accompanied by a rise in child abuse (43%), domestic violence (30%), and alcohol-related offenses (54%). Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says that nearly 3,200 sexual assaults were reported by service members in 2011, but that the military’s actual estimate was closer to 19,000 because such assaults are “a very underreported crime.”
This is not just one bad apple or even a hundred bad apples. Yet, we are continually told that soldiers are role models and heroes.
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The Free Society; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest book is The U.S. Proxy War in Ukraine.
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