The Cadet Life for Many Women: Sexual Ordeals and Internal Rage

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

The Cadet Life for Many Women: Sexual Ordeals and Internal Rage

March 16, 2003
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY with DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

, March 14 - Like other women accepted into the
United States Air Force Academy, Sharon Fullilove was a
star of her high school graduating class. Her academy
application in 1999 included letters of commendation from
President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

But in November 1999, six months after entering the
academy, she quit - devastated, she says, from being raped
by a fellow cadet and convinced that she would find no help
in the academy's male-dominated culture.

The daughter of an Air Force colonel, Ms. Fullilove said
she believed that a majority of women in the academy are
raped or molested, and that most choose not to report it
because they fear an official investigation would expose
them to shame, ridicule and retribution, if not dismissal.
About 18 percent of the 4,200-member cadet corps are women.


"During the school year, you talk to people it has happened
to, even upperclassmen, and they all say the same thing,"
Ms. Fullilove, 23, said in an interview here, where she is
attending the University of Arizona. "They tell you to
expect getting raped, and if it doesn't happen to you,
you're one of the rare ones. They say if you want a chance
to stay here, if you want to graduate, you don't tell. You
just deal with it."

Ms. Fullilove's views are shared by dozens of other women
who have left the academy before graduating, saying they
were victims of rape and other sexual attacks. Many have
come forward in recent months, recounting their ordeals and
expressing their outrage, as Ms. Fullilove did, about an
environment that they say favors men and protects them
against complaints of sexual assault. She said that long
after her rape, she learned that her assailant worked at
the time as a counselor who answered the academy's hot line
for women who want to report a rape or other sexual
attacks. 

The Air Force acknowledges that at least 56 cases of rape
or other sexual assaults at the academy have been
investigated in the last 10 years, though only one male
cadet has faced a court-martial as a result of any
accusation, in 1995. He was acquitted. Eight other male
cadets have been expelled in sexual attacks since 1996. The
academy concedes that it has no records of sexual assaults
in the first 20 years of women's admission, starting in
1976. 

Now, with the academy facing growing Congressional pressure
over the issue, Secretary James G. Roche of the Air Force,
and the chief of staff, Gen. John P. Jumper, have promised
that an investigation into past cases and the failures of a
system that was designed to prevent them will lead to major
changes. So far, Air Force officials have said they will
establish living areas for men and women at opposite ends
of halls and provide counselors for women who bring their
complaints forward. Just today, the Air Force inspector
general announced that the Pentagon had set up a
confidential phone line for victims of sexual assaults.

The full list of proposed changes is expected by the end of
the month. 

Mr. Roche said in an interview today that perceptions of
Ms. Fullilove and other women who are victims "just sicken
me," asserting that the Air Force was ill-served by an
academy culture that would appear to condone aggressive
behavior by men, leaving women to feel intimidated,
inferior and overwhelmed. Changing that culture, he said,
is the focus of the current investigation.

"This subject just drives me up a tree," he said of the
threatening atmosphere women describe. "It's the worst of
any of this. I don't want young women to feel that they
have to make that kind of humiliating sacrifice to become
officers." 

He added, "That's why we're going to look at the whole
place." 

Many of the women who have come forward say they had
dreamed of becoming fighter pilots and officers. But their
ordeals, they say, convinced them that the cards were
always stacked against them.

Sometimes the message is all too easy to see. Ms.
Fullilove's mother, Col. Michaela Shafer, a 20-year Air
Force veteran who serves as commander of in-patient and
emergency room services at the academy hospital, said in an
interview that dozens of commanders and teachers, some as
highly ranked as colonel, often wear canary-yellow baseball
hats bearing the black letters "LCWB." She said these
initials were commonly known on campus to evoke a vulgar
phrase celebrating the graduating class of 1979, the last
class with men only.

Colonel Shafer said the same letters are visible on license
plates and at pep rallies for academy football games. At
one rally, she said she complained to men holding a sign
bearing the letters, only to be told, "Tough. Deal with
it."

<snip>

It took Ms. Fullilove, who once dreamed of being an F-15
fighter pilot, more than a year to tell anyone about her
rape, and by last March she and her mother informed academy
officials of what happened, filing a report with
investigators. It was not until this week that they heard
back. Colonel Shafer said she received a call from an
investigator, who told her the file had mysteriously been
destroyed. 

"My daughter was ready to die for the United States,"
Colonel Shafer said. "She knew she could have been captured
by an enemy, raped and pillaged in war. She did not expect
to be raped and pillaged at the United States Air Force
Academy. It's just unbelievable how she was taken advantage
of. It makes me sick."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/national/16CADE.html?ex=1048755536&ei=1&en
=990c8138c18ccbdc


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