Military Rape Victims Re-victimized

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Military rape victims are re-victimized by the military. Often military members are ostracized, punished by the chain-of-command of command, and eventually forced out of the military because they reporting being raped. My former shipmate Petty Officer Second Class (PO2) Rebecca Blumer chose to report her rape and suffered the consequences.
After reporting a rape, female service members are often ostracized by the individuals in their chain of command. This happened to Petty Officer (PO) Blumer even before her attack became public knowledge. She was drugged and raped after going out for drinks in 2010 (Erdely). PO Blumer was pulled over for driving without lights on and arrested for driving under the influence. After the master-at-arms picked her up at the jail, despite the fact that she told him that she needed to go to the hospital, he took her to the Judge Advocate General's offices (Erdely). Her Chain-of-command was waiting to punish her for a DUI (Erdely). She wrote her statement on what she thought had happened and how she needed urgent medical care (Erdely). She was told that she would be taken to the hospital, but only for a toxicology report, to see if there actually were date-rape drugs in her system (Erdely). "Whether you get a rape kit is up to you," the JAG told Blumer (Erdely). She was shaken by the Jag’s question later on: "Did you inflict your injuries yourself” (Erdely). The word around the command was that she had made up a rape to get out of a DUI. “"Literally, the day she went back to work, we heard about it here," says former Petty Officer 3rd Class Jennifer Kinnaird – Estrada, a linguist stationed at Blumer's previous command in San Antonio. "They were like, 'She's such a ho here, was she like that there?...

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... was discharged from the Navy 10 days later.”(Erdely).
The common story from victims who report being raped, according to a Military Rape Crisis Center worker, is that they were “met with disbelief and skepticism, blamed for the crime, and disposed of one way or another,” (Kitfield). Until the military stops re-victimizing the victims it will never be able to completely eradicate rape from the ranks.

Works Cited

Erdely, Sabrina Rubin. “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer: Inside the military's culture of sex abuse, denial and cover-up”. The Rolling Stones Magazine. 14 February 2013. Web. 4 November 2013 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rape-of-petty-officer-blumer-20130214 Kitfield, James. “The Enemy Within”. The National Journal. 13 September 2012. Web. 4 November 2013 http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-military-s-rape-problem-20120913

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