The terrifying trend that is terrifying everybody, with real terror

Image by Nightmare Soldier at DeviantArt.

I wanted to get in on the big scandal rocking the US military and found something totally astonishing, but let me build up to it first.

Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force weighs in on possible reasons for the increase in unwanted sexual contact in our armed services, from 4.4% of women in active duty in 2010 to 6.1% last year (don't even ask about the men).

“Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it,” Gen. Mark A. Welsh III said at a Senate hearing on the issue.

You think that might be it? Nasty public-school kids infecting the services with their nasty civilian behavior? Or maybe not, because when 4.4% of women in active duty were [jump]
getting assaulted in 2010, the rate for women in the general population ages 18-34 was 0.37%, which even David Brooks would recognize is probably quite a lot less.

Commenter theoracle at RawStory suggests the difference between military and civilian life is religion:

is it a coincidence that all these sexual assaults seem to have only increased in frequency in the U.S. military as it has been commandeered and commanded by a bunch of misogynistic religious fundamentalists? U.S. Air Force Academy, religious fundamentalists accosting military personnel on campus, proselytizing their ears off, while a significant increase in rapes occurred.

Tempting: but it turns out Air Force levels of assault are the lowest of the four branches, so it can't be about religion. (I also found some statistics that service personnel are generally somewhat less religiously identified than the general population, but that was from back in 2002.)

So what was the one super interesting thing I discovered in the research for this post? The percentage of women in active duty suffering unwanted sexual contact in 2006 was 6.8%, or rather more than in 2012, so that—oops! Maybe there isn't any trend after all. Or it's retroactionary, getting worse as you travel backward in time. Or...

Never mind.

Yes, this shocking story that has us all out of our wits is apparently not there. Or at least a little better than it was six years ago.*

*In all seriousness: My friend Sonya, a psychotherapist, told me back in 2003 that the illegal and unjustifiable war in Iraq was going to lead to all sorts of brutalization of our nation. Could it be that it hit its peak around 2006 and is getting better, just a more slowly than we'd hope, like the economy?