Deserted: The U.S. Military's Sexual Assault Crisis as a Cost of War

Paper

Political geographer Jennifer Greenburg (Assistant Professor, University of Sheffield) notes that, over the past decade, the U.S. military has implemented policies to promote gender equality, notably lifting the ban on women in combat roles in 2013 and opening all military jobs to women by 2016. Yet, Dr. Greenburg shows, even as U.S. military policy reforms during the “War on Terror” appear to reflect greater equality, violent patterns of abuse and misogyny continued within military workplaces.

Dr. Greenburg found that sexual assault prevalence in the military is likely two to four times higher than official government estimations. Based on a comparison of available data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense to independent data, Dr. Greenburg's research estimates there were 75,569 cases of sexual assault in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023. On average, over the course of the war in Afghanistan, 24 percent of active-duty women and 1.9 percent of active-duty men experienced sexual assault. The report highlights how experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of racism and sexism and are one of the fastest-growing populations within the military. Independent data also confirm queer and trans service members’ disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault.

Dr. Greenburg notes that during the post-9/11 wars, the prioritization of force readiness above all else allowed the problem of sexual assault to fester, papering over internal violence and gender inequalities within military institutions.

Author

Jennifer Greenburg

Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield

j.greenburg@sheffield.ac.uk

Website

Jennifer Greenburg is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She is a feminist political geographer working on areas of war, gender, and humanitarianism. Her first book, At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023), reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. Another dimension of her work is grounded in Haiti, where she is concerned with the violence and securitized legacy of humanitarian interventions. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley and has held fellowships at Stanford University and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is a contributor to the Costs of War project and her recent publications appear in Antipode, Critical Military Studies, Development and Change, and Gender, Place, and Culture.