I mean, I was there and know and work with these people, and you don’t so, I’m sure you’re view point is the correct one.
But yes, I’ve seen men touch other men to get their attention with no resulting HR contact or fisticuffs.
If we are headed to a world in which any interaction between two individuals that isn’t 100% satisfactory to both parties results in a call to HR or the police 100% of the time, God help us. For most complaints of a lesser nature, the first step is supposed to be resolution between the two parties. You and others clearly would advocate blowing though that step.
This will be my last post going down this rabbit hole.
If this is the attitude you take when talking about the subject amongst your peers, then there may be a very good reason why you never hear about problems.
Yeah, it does seem like other women would react negatively to your “Act like a professional” response to someone complaining about unwanted touching and would be reluctant to mention that they, too, do not like unwanted touching.
Not surprisingly, the people that had most issue with this were the women.
What most in our office (senior in grade, middle age) expected her to do was to go to him and tell him that she had a issue with it. That is way it’s supposed to work in the Federal government, at least here in DoD. It was not sexual, and was viewed by all that discussed it with me as very, very minor at best. Knowing him, he would have apologized and said that it would never happen again. He had no history of this at all. She had only been in her job for about a year, he has been here for a decade or more. If he had blown her off or if the issue had been repeated, no one would have had issue with going to HR.
To the two women who came to me, they said that it made it appear that women couldn’t handle this on their own their own and they had to go to “daddy” (their words) to make it right. And they just thought it as chicken s***. They both said that they wish they had known what she was doing and they would have counseled her to do things differently.
I obviously don’t know where you all work, but I’m really flabbergasted that most don’t think that there is some (any?) individual responsibility for peer-to-peer resolution of minor concerns. Do you think anything should be resolved without HR being involved?
Sure, it would be cool if she felt comfortable about going to the guy and telling him. But maybe she didn’t? Maybe she had a bad experience in the past going directly to a guy that touched her?
I was in the AF for 22 years. And yes, people could go to their supervisor, or chaplain, or commander if they had an issue. But some things are set up specifically so if a person doesn’t feel comfortable, they can go right to agencies that are there precisely for that reason. EEO, HR, Sexual Assault coordinator. That’s why they exist. Making fun of someone or thinking less of them for utilizing resources that are there for that very reason seems troubling to me.
Edited to add: And it seems to me that is the very reason many people are reluctant to do so, since they are feeling degraded by their coworkers for doing so.
If someone touched your wrist and you went to HR, then your co-workers are well within their rights to laugh at you. Plus, absent other circumstances, it means maybe military life is not for you.
Which makes me think, there was a lot more to the story than “touched on the wrist”.
Do you know for sure that she hadn’t spoken to him previously in private on another occasion?
Do you know for sure that she hadn’t tried previously to take other people aside and discuss similar issues with them, and had poor results from that technique? (I don’t, actually, even see how you could know this.)
– wait a minute, I’ve got a third: do you know whether other people had spoken to the touchy person previously about it, and had told the complainant this?
<history professor’s hat firmly on>
In Viking law, you could get outlawed for tugging on a woman’s sleeve.
And outlawing was a big fucking deal back then - it meant, literally, that the laws didn’t apply to you any more. You were, in fact, outside of the laws. Including any law that said things like “If you steal from…” or “If you take an axe to…”. You basically became a meat-based free-for-all.
So it seems like a disproportionate punishment for the “crime”, right ? On the surface, yes. But while it isn’t explicitly stated in the laws or lore, the consensus is that the Vikings reasoned that if a given woman was so utterly pissed off at you that merely tugging at her sleeve was abhorrent enough to her that she’d take you to court and condemn you to death in so many words ; well, maybe you did some shit to her before that. It simply was easier for her to prove that you’d tugged at her sleeve (in public, with witnesses), and admitting to having her sleeve tugged at was less damaging to her reputation and future than whatever shit you *really *pulled that got her worked up.
Now, this was of course back in the day when community and personal reputation meant something, and they lived in small towns where everyone knows everything about everyone, and before the era of “anything for that paycheck” American Dream-ish. But still - patriarchy is enough of a thing that I really, but really don’t buy the MRA trope of women falsely accusing men for fun, fame or profit. When even virtous whistleblowing gets one fired and blacklisted and hounded for the rest of your days… yeah.
So touching a woman’s wrist should be severely punished, because that means you might have done something much worse but the woman can’t prove it. Is that what you meant?
OK, that’s twice in a week from you “he’s right !” people. What the hell ? Where’s the catch ? What’s even going on ? I need you fucks to know I’m **on **to you lot.
It’s important to frame the problem correctly. The UPI coverage compared to more than just one previous survey.
The general trend had been down before a significant bump back closer to where we’d been before. Reporting rates stayed up, and are still about quadruple what they were in 2005 when DOD starting making a concerted effort. That’s an area where we didn’t lose ground. Acting Secretary Shanahan described the problem as “persistent.” Rear Adm Ann Burkhart, director of DOD’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office referred to the change as a “bounceback.” To explain what happened we’re looking for areas where things changed or efforts weren’t persistent.
We started integrating the combat arms. That’s one pretty big change. Ground forces make up the majority of US military personnel; they are personnel heavy because of the nature of their missions. The Army alone is a majority of the US military. Both the Marine Corps and Army adapted a leader first approach to integration of the combat arms to try and minimize issues. The Army only retracted combat exclusion in December of 2015 to let leaders start filtering in. The first female junior enlisted graduated from One Station Unit Training as infantry in May 2017. In the 2016 survey, the young, female, junior enlisted troops that showed an increase in sexual assault rates were still excluded from combat arms units. That’s a big change.
Those combat arms units are not places where “don’t touch people without permission” makes sense. As a retired Armor officer contact is both an incidental condition of being crammed so closely together and something that does need to happen without always asking first. “It’s okay to firmly grab PFC Jones’ upper thigh or butt without asking when we stack up for room clearing but not when we’re drunk off duty in the billets” isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. It’s a challenge that doesn’t exist in civilian workforces, though. It doesn’t get fixed with unfeasible notions like not touching without permission. We’re seeing more of those types of challenges in 2018 than we were in 2016 due to integration. That change needs to be addressed.*
Turnover is high in the military. Leaders in the active duty force covered by this survey move often. For Army officers a PCS (permanent change of station) is the norm every two years. For non-commissioned officers it’s every three years. Climates of units are in constant flux as leaders move in and out. The junior enlisted that are the primary victims and perpetrators make up the majority of the Army. Many of them only do an initial term of service before leaving. Even those that reenlist age out of the areas of most concern in the latest survey. That argues pretty strongly for fixes to be persistent to be effective.
In late summer of 2013 there was a major one time push in the Army on top of all the recurring stuff related to the Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention program. Part of the requirements was commanders sitting down with their entire units in small groups. That was called leader engagement training. There was some supporting videos to choose from but no prepackaged Powerpoint presentation. The intent was discussion and a chance to get that small group face time between leaders and led. It seemed to work based on the numbers that followed. Five years later it’s not even in the memory of many troops. The junior enlisted who went through that process aren’t part of the problem demographic anymore. They’ve left the service or been promoted and aged out of the problem demographics. It was a short term but not a persistent fix.
As a field grade officer I was part of a survey about how to integrate my branch when DA was looking at integration of women. I was seriously concerned about how to manage this transition phase in an environment where such close contact is the norm. I’m glad we went with the leader first approach to try and mitigate the risks. I had a real fear things would be even worse than this survey shows.
I didn’t address this till I had a chance to read all the way through the latest report. There’s some real differences that don’t fit common themes for the US civilian population.
The large number of males assaulted is pretty easy to explain because of the strong gender bias in the group. For offenders though there’s a real difference. “Military women indicated that offenders were most often military men whom they considered to be a friend or acquaintance, acting alone.” That’s what we’d generally expect to see in the civilian population. Male service members though reported something that might surprise most people - “just over half of men indicated their offender was male, 30 percent indicated their offender was female, and 13 percent indicated their offenders were a mix of men and women acting together.”
Female sex offenders in the military are part of the problem in a way that they just aren’t in civilian life. That part didn’t change so it’s not relevant to answer the question from the OP or your assertion. It’s an important part of the military trying to address the broader issue though.
No one is forgetting that female offenders exist (maybe in this post), but overall, we are aware there is an issue - similar to male victim-survivors. We know they are very under-reported.
One interesting note is that evening the cases of male victim-survivors, the offender is often still male. Many incidences of male sexual assault fall into the “hazing” category (including one unit that had a ritual where new members ran naked in the woods and the rest of the unit had to “hunt” them. The “hunt” was over when the new members were found, and bitten hard enough to draw blood).
I do take issue with one point made way back at the start - the “attractiveness” of the victim-survivor does not play a role. Sexual assault is not about attraction. If I clobbered you with a spade, I would not call it gardening. Sexual assault is about power and violence.
Wrist touch - Finally - I HATE it when people say “Well, why didn’t she just confront him herself first?” That seems easy, until you are victimized. It can be very, very hard to speak up for yourself. If it had been a non-issue, then HR would have not responded the way they did.
This was not incidental “I am jumping into this shell scrape because we are under fire so sorry because I am rolling my entire body over you”…this could be seen as an intimate touch, and a way to physically assert yourself. He would not have done this to another man (although you can try to convince me), so it becomes about gender or dominance.
Either way, out of line in a professional environment, period.
The double dilemma is this: If they don’t go to HR there isn’t any record, so there must not be any real problem, is there? If they go to HR, then it shows that they are too weak for military life.