ABSTRACT
In 2004, Seymour M. Hersh and others broke the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story, releasing descriptions and photographs of military personnel delighting in the sexual torture of Iraqi men. While pundits and the public alike called for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and debated whether these abuses indicated an aberration from or the logical endpoint of military training, few were aware that the Department of Defense (DoD) was, at that very moment, in the process of crafting responses to ongoing relationship violence, sexual assault, and rape committed by US military personnel. Rather than dismiss the DoD’s focus on sexual violence as hypocritical, I argue that these responses serve as a way for the military to entrench its importance and credibility. I further claim that the military’s repertoire of responses should be interpreted in terms of how they shape how democracy is lived, understood, and practiced. I critique three specifi c areas in terms of how these efforts impact democratic life: (1) that they limit sociopolitical recognition rendering some people’s experiences of sexual violence invisible and unimportant; (2) they reinforce a private/public divide, by legitimizing the military’s public violence and dealing with the violence committed by military members through ‘separate’ rules and secrecy; and (3) they prevent dissent, by focusing on procedural mechanisms and circumscribing potentially critical discussions of militarization and its relationship to sexual violence.1
