Being An Air Force Wife

This is the second post in my series of domestic abuse in the military. Part one can be found here.

The military has a domestic violence problem—or, as the Army calls it, a “spousal aggression issue.” Sometimes, when soldiers have just returned from a war zone the media speculates that post-traumatic stress may be to blame. This seems somewhat specious. The Defense Department doesn’t break down pre- and post-deployment figures, but the fact is that rates of domestic violence in the military have been high for years—two to five times higher than among civilians. In the 1990s, the military quietly watched as its domestic violence rates shot up from 19 per 1,000 soldiers in 1990 to 26 per 1,000 soldiers in 1996. After three soldiers stationed at Kentucky’s Fort Campbell were charged with killing their wives or girlfriends, an alarmed Congress appointed a task force to investigate and make recommendations. Last year, according to DoD figures, there were 16,400 cases of domestic violence reported, with 9,450 of them substantiated. That’s still a rate of 14 cases for every 1,000 couples, compared with 3 per 1,000 among civilians. And consider that many soldiers spent all or part of last year deployed and thus physically separated from their spouses.

The military admits it has a problem but points out that its population is disproportionately young and poor—and, statistically, domestic violence is higher among such civilians, too. (Whether that’s because the young and poor—more likely to come into contact with the system via shelters, social services, and the courts—are just over-counted is hotly contested among experts.)

Meanwhile, domestic violence advocates assert that the military’s numbers are even higher than the DoD says. If military spouses live off-post—as 60 percent do—and call the local cops or shelter for help, they might not show up in the military’s statistics. Further, the military defines domestic violence narrowly: It has only counted incidents against a current, legal spouse—and half the 1.5 million enlisted soldiers are unmarried, divorced, living with girlfriends, dating, or busy “not asking or telling.”

Twenty years ago when the military did its domestic violence training, it was not unusual to call it a “relationship issue” and hand it over to therapists to sort out. Even today, batterers in the military are typically ordered into anger-management classes and couples counseling—both considered largely ineffective by most civilian experts.

According to Deborah Tucker, who heads the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence in Austin, Texas, and co-chaired the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence, the military is making progress on the issue. In 2003, it agreed to adopt 194 of the task force’s 200 recommendations to improve services for victims and beef up offender accountability. Still, two years later many have yet to be implemented and that troubles her, though she adds that “some argue that what’s been done already is much faster than usual for the military.”

Meanwhile, the military faces new scandals over sexual harassment in its ranks, rape at the Air Force Academy, and reports on the high numbers of sexual assaults against its female soldiers. These are behaviors that exist on a continuum with domestic violence, explains Tucker. “To eradicate domestic violence in the military—and the United States of America—will take a cultural shift that condemns violence as criminal behavior and does not excuse it because of the comportment of the victim, the alcohol or drug abuse of the offender, the stress the offender is under, or even how sorry the offender is afterwards,” says Tucker. She insists that military brass must lead the charge if change is to trickle down from the base commanders to the recruiters trawling the local mall.

military, domestic abuse