The case with the USMA girl was discussed this week very candidly. I will say that this young lady is probably going to be quite embarrassed if and when the facts are heard in court.
I was surprised that the most anger over the case and the TV report came from female cadets.
Scout, I think a great deal of the anger that comes from females at the Academy is the stigma that gets placed on all females based on cases like this. We're told that we're equal to the guys here and responsible for our actions, but the way the administration handles us is completely different than how our male counterparts are dealt with. For example, at the beginning of this year, they came out with this brilliant idea that all females whose roommates were gone would have to collapse into another girls' room for the night so that they weren't spending the night alone in their room. This despite the fact that doors have to be locked anyways at taps. At the initial upperclass outrage, they scaled it back to female plebes.
Now, few sensing sessions later and a lot of resentment, all plebes are required to do so, but its that kind of attitude where the administration treats the women as the victims first and creates policies to prevent the "victims" actions versus targeting the actual perpertrator's actions that causes a lot of hostility and cynicism to arise over things like this. I'm all for trying to make things safer and all that, but if you don't treat both genders equally with an equal sense of responsibility, you're setting women up with the mindset that they are not strong enough or smart enough to make decisions that will help them in their future as officers and dealing with the real world.
I struggle myself to not be cynical when it comes to the issue of sexual assault here. There is no excuse for rape and it can't ever get placed on the victim as being their fault. There have definitly been instances here which needed to be harshly dealt with.
What I think a lot of females here get made about though is the poor decisions that some of our fellow cadets make which make them more vulnerable to something serious actually happening. As soon as you add alcohol, bad things occur. On top of that, there's the stigma of how the majority of cases actually reported are fake and women trying to get men into trouble. This attitude makes a lot of the cadets here cynical and more prone to disbelief, creating that culture where reporting anything seriously would be hard.
To be honest, I'm not sure how you would fix something like this. The regulations are in place that if people followed them, a lot of the situations which occurred would never occur, but people aren't going to follow regs all the time and its not up to the Academy to constantly babysit us 24/7 if they expect us to be efficient leaders when we graduate who can deal with the real world. Changing the culture here is going to be hard. Hopefully it can happen. This particular case I don't think is necessarily going to gain the support of the Corps in that endeavour though just from its background. I admittedly have only heard things hearsay, but from what I've heard, its been enough to give some explanation why a lot of the guys don't take it seriously and see it as CNN targeting the Academy.
Also, quick aside, ChristCorps, I know that you may disagree, and I also think the way that CNN portrays both academys as a whole is not accurate, but it is quite possible to be existing in a culture which is much more boys' club (aka West Point) while still having opportunities for women coming out. Women here deal with boys being boys here all the time, be it from the sexual and other inappropriate comments, to the emphasis on how awesome the infantry is (to the point where even guys who don't want to go infantry can get looked down on) and the quick aside comments about how women aren't nearly as capable as men.
I've had seen some insanely hot debates where there are still people here who don't believe women should be serving in the military and their place is home back in the kitchen. Kind of an eye opening moment for me, but it just means that you have to grow a tougher skin and get over it. For every idiotic guy, there's another guy here who is willing to put aside gender and just serve with you as his teammate if you can pull your own weight. So while I think the academies have definitly found a lot of improvement since they were first opened, I still can understand the feeling that this place isn't necessarily the most embracing of women. That said, I think that's going to continue to change and I don't regret coming here at all. Its going to set me up nicely for my future.
