The Invisible War:
A Film on Rape,
Women and Combat
(A Review)
Horrifying . . . devastating . . . infuriating . . . saddening. These are the emotions I felt as I watched The Invisible War, a new film, written and directed by Kirby Dick, which opened nationally yesterday. To be sure, The Invisible War isn’t your typical war story. It’s a gripping docu-film that focuses on the “powerfully emotional stories of rape victims” within the U.S. military, and their “struggles to rebuild their lives and fight for justice.” Shining a spotlight on a world largely defined by masculinity, combat, force, sex, and concealment, this film unveils the following:
- 20% of women are assaulted while in the military
- Only 8% of the assailants are prosecuted, with only 2% facing conviction
- 80% of the victims do not report
- 25% of women do not report rape because the person responsible for receiving the report is oft times also the rapist
- 1% of men in the military, totaling 20,000, are victims of rape
- 15% of incoming military recruits acknowledge that they have attempted or committed a rape prior to entering the service
- 40% of homeless female veterans are victims of rape
- Of the 3,223 cases that are actually prosecuted, only 175 of the assailants would serve jail time (all numbers are from the film or related press)
- “The Veterans Administration spends approximately $10,880 on healthcare costs per military sexual assault survivor. Adjusting for inflation, this means that in 2011 alone, the VA spent almost $900 million on sexual assault‐related healthcare expenditures” (press packet).
The Invisible War paints a picture of injustice and sexism, and a culture of sexual violence that has reached epidemic proportions. However, it does more than offer disheartening and infuriating statistics. It provides a story, a story about women and men—those who are celebrated as heroes, who receive standing ovations at parades, whose service is lionized and celebrated over and over again—who have been raped while serving in the U.S. military. Irrespective of yellow ribbons and holidays, it is a story that illuminates rape culture and the ways that victims are multiply victimized within a culture of warfare, camouflage (or cover-up), and sexual violence.
The filmmakers interview roughly 70 survivors of military rape, women and men, who in the face of victimization by their assailants, their military community, and countless others, have decided to fight back. We learn the stories of women like Kori Cioca who was raped and physically beaten while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. We hear how her assailant, who was also her commanding officer, didn’t just rape her, but also broke her jaw during the attack. And, we learn how Cioca was reminded (over and over again) that her punishment for “lying” would be a court-martial, when attempting to report the assault to those in command.
The Invisible War elucidates a culture of rape and victimization as well as the continual cultivation of revictimization, wherein the military instigates an “in-house” society of violence—among comrades. Some victims were even charged with adultery due to the assailant being married! Moreover, of the five women from Marine Barracks Washington interviewed in the film, four were investigated and punished after reporting incidences of rape. They were told to “suck it up,” unfairly disciplined professionally, threatened with prosecution, and demonized publicly. And perhaps worse of all, they were often forced to face their assailants every step of the way.
From suicide attempts to physical pain, the film documents several consequences of rape, to include but not limited to rising costs, exacerbated by an “in-house” rape culture. We see this with Cioca. The physical pain resulting from her assault is endless. Because of her broken jaw, Cioca continues to live on a liquid diet, she cannot go outside when it is cold because of pain, and probably most dispiriting, Cioca’s assault remains with her both physically and emotionally. In fact, she often wakes up screaming. The dual agony of severe discomfort and traumatic recollection are unceasing. Unfortunately, this reality has been largely ignored by the VA, which refused to cover all of her medical expenses.
The power of The Invisible War rests with the elevation of the voices and experiences of the soldiers themselves and their families. The consequences of sexual violence can be felt in the physical and emotional anguish expressed throughout the production. However, though the film gives voice to victims of rape (and their families) within the military, therefore breaking the silence perpetuated by a complicit media, it misses a critical opportunity to expand the discussion to explore the effects and entwinement of militarism, patriarchy and misogyny in our broader socio-political context. At times, The Invisible War seems to even downplay how patriarchy and American institutions/ideology(ies) actually sanction and give life to rape culture(s). In short, in trying to spotlight the injustice facing men and women in the military, and the systematic camouflaging (pun intended) at each level in the chain of command, The Invisible War misses the opportunity to make some pretty significant connections.
A more efficient grasping of sexual violence within the military requires looking at its deployment of gendered language as well as the ways in which women are objectified within and without military culture. It also demands that we look at “base women,” the relationship between U.S. operations overseas and prostitution, as well as the ways that sexism infects U.S. policies. In addition, a more critical reading of sexual violence pushes us to explore the treatment of women within the U.S. military, particularly those serving in countries currently occupied by the U.S.
Feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her essay, “Wielding Masculinity inside Abu Ghraib: Making Feminist Sense of an American Military Scandal,” identifies misogyny and sexism as core values of militarism, thus pushing readers to think about their manifestation(s) both inside the U.S. military and without.
It is not as if the potency of ideas about masculinity and femininity had been totally absent from the U.S. military’s thinking. Between 1991 and 2004, there had been a string of military scandals that had compelled even those American senior officials who preferred to look the other way to face sexism straight on. The first stemmed from the September 1991, gathering of American navy aircraft carrier pilots at a Hilton hotel in Las Vegas. Male pilots (all officers), fresh from their victory in the first Gulf War, lined a hotel corridor and physically assaulted every woman who stepped off the elevator. They made the “mistake” of assaulting a woman navy helicopter pilot who was serving as an aide to an admiral. Within months members of Congress and the media were telling the public about “Tailhook” – why it happened and who tried to cover it up (Office of the Inspector General, 2003). Close on the heels of the Navy’s “Tailhook” scandal came the Army’s Aberdeen training base sexual harassment scandal, followed by other revelations of military gay bashing, sexual harassment and rapes by American male military personnel of their American female colleagues (Enloe, 1993; Enloe, 2000).
Enloe makes it clear that sexism, sexual violence, and misogyny are central components to militarism, thus representing the ideological foundation of a militarized culture that is consequentially exhaustively threatening to women and non-gender-conforming others. She highlights the level of violence in elucidating levels of sexual violence and misogyny surrounding U.S. bases:
Then in September 1995, the rape of a local school-girl by two American male marines and a sailor in Okinawa sparked public demonstrations, new Okinawan women’s organizing and more U.S. Congressional investigations. At the start of the twenty-first century American media began to notice the patterns of international trafficking in Eastern European and Filipina women around American bases in South Korea, prompting official embarrassment in Washington (an embarrassment which had not been demonstrated earlier when American base commanders turned a classic “blind eye” toward a prostitution industry financed by their own male soldiers because it employed “just” local South Korean women). And in 2003, three new American military sexism scandals caught Washington policy-makers’ attention: four American male soldiers returning from combat missions in Afghanistan murdered their female partners at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; a pattern of sexual harassment and rape by male cadets of female cadets – and superiors’ refusal to treat these acts seriously – was revealed at the U.S. Air Force Academy; and testimonies by at least sixty American women soldiers returning from tours of duty in Kuwait and Iraq described how they had been sexually assaulted by their male colleagues there – with, once again, senior officers choosing inaction, advising the American women soldiers to “get over it”(Jargon, 2003; Lutz and Elliston, 2004; The Miles Foundation, 2004; Moffeit and Herder, 2004).
All of this highlights the fact that it’s about time we move the conversation beyond the military itself (while of course maintaing our criticisms), and critically examine the myriad ways that sexual violence manifests itself in barracks, and in countless communities. This points to another shortcoming of the film: its privileging of whiteness. While illustrating the fact that sexual violence impacts women across communities, the film ultimately calls attention to the injustices faced by white women. It would have served the filmmakers well to give voice to the devastating circumstances surrounding the rape and death of LaVena Johnson (and others) whose death was officially ruled a suicide despite these facts:
The 5-foot tall, 100-pound woman had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument, probably a weapon. Her nose had been broken, and her teeth knocked back. There were bruises, teeth marks and scratches on the upper part of her body. Her back and right hand had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Her genital area was bruised and lacerated, and lye had been poured into her vagina. The debris found on her suggested her body had been dragged. And despite all this mutilation, she was fully clothed when her body was found in the tent, with a blood trail leading to the tent.
As with many of the cases documented within The Invisible War, the Army refused to investigate, thus stonewalling attempts to secure justice. Had The Invisible War engaged the experiences of women and men of color in the military, and the consequences of sexual violence when race and racism are involved, and had it looked at incidences of rape involving South Korean and Japanese women, its efforts to both summon and spotlight this horrific epidemic would have been much stronger, at minimum pioneering a cinematic discourse around the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nation.
Yet, The Invisible War does something very significant: it get’s us talking, thus (hopefully) influencing multiple conversations about the injurious intersections and force of sexual violence, sexism, patriarchy, militarism, racism, classism, homophobia, and misogyny within and outside of U.S. military culture. If nothing else, The Invisible War shows us that the very oxygen that allows for sexual violence to breathe, and society to turn a blind eye…is also wrapped up in those yellow ribbons, each of which must be untied immediately…at minimum to allow us to hear all the tongues violently struggling to speak their own truths, and to see the mountains of pain and injustice starring us right in the face…
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Movie Review:
The Invisible War
Shines Light on
Sexual Assault
in the Military
Kirby Dick is our most righteous “outer.” I don’t mean he likes to out gays, although he certainly targeted the more virulent right-wing homophobes in his eye-opening documentary Outrage. I mean that, for Dick, the world is full of dark closets packed not with skeletons but bloodsuckers who’d shrivel if someone would only shine a light in their direction.
He can’t quite do that in his galvanizing new documentary The Invisible War. The subject is the U.S. armed forces, the villains the alleged sexual predators who operate without restraint or punishment. To name names or venture onto bases for “ambush” interviews would open himself up to libel suits or worse. But he can do the next best thing. He interviews women who’ve emerged from those dark recesses, women who represent the 20 percent of female vets (that’s a low-ball estimate — we might be talking about half a million people) who’ve been sexually assaulted while serving. Using statistics compiled by the U.S. government itself, The Invisible War makes the case that this is not a “problem” but a bona fide plague.A lot of the film consists of women sitting in chairs telling the kinds of stories that make tears not drop but surge from their eyes —and our blood boil. After a while, their words blur together:
He was my superior …. Drinking buddies … drugged and raped … gonorrhea … pregnant … dislocated my jaw … locked in a hotel room … If I said anything they were going to kill me … “You’re meat on a slab”… He said, “I own all of this”…
The vet whose jaw was dislocated makes call after call (and one long-distance visit) to Veterans Administration, which puts off a decision on her injuries (physical and mental) for a year and a half before saying, essentially, “Not our problem.” Of course, the VA isn’t doing too well on the PR front in general, having just been scolded for neglect of every soldier’s PTSD. The real horror is how commanders respond to complaints of assault and rape.
they lost the rape kit … they investigated me for making false statements … they charged me with adultery and I wasn’t married, he was … they promoted him …
The problem, Dick reports, is that 15 percent of male recruits have had accusations made against them for rape and assault. So they’ve already got issues and here they are in a culture known for pervasive S & M rituals, alpha-male behaviors, and rampant alcohol abuse. Victims tell of being ordered to go out drinking and ordered to do shots — whereupon they were pounced on by their superiors and, after filing complaints, reprimanded for heavy drinking. It’s Kafkaesque.
The clueless civilian Bush appointee (she responds to many of Dick’s questions with blank stares) maintains that the answer is prevention, which here consists of advising women to walk around with buddies and screening films in which men are advised to “WAIT UNTIL SHE’S SOBER.” Her successor, who’s at least in uniform, takes a similar line. Both dismiss the notion that commanders who are in many cases drinking buddies of the accused (or who are the accused) should not have unfettered discretion when it comes to prosecuting accused predators. The message is, “That’s not a factor,” and “We’ll handle it.”
Late in The Invisible War, a group of victims goes to Congress and hear sympathetic noises from some of its members (Democratic and Republican). They also take their case to a civilian court, which finds against them on the grounds that “rape is an occupational hazard in the military.” I didn’t make that up. Nor did Dick make up any of the statistics that have made his case before he even turns his camera on women violated first by sexual predators and then by their institutional enablers. Given the ongoing revelations about the Catholic Church, New York’s Orthodox Jewish community, and the U.S. military, the best course of action seems to be not to join a club in which the leaders are males who are accountable only to themselves.
“What now?” you think, after a coda reporting that none of the accused rapists of the women (and one man) Dick has interviewed have been imprisoned — and that some have risen in the ranks. The answer comes quickly, in a coda to the coda that might be unprecedented: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta screened The Invisible War and promptly ordered authority for investigating accusations of sexual assault taken away from commanding officers. After watching the movie, notinvisble.org is where you should go to see the aftershocks in the halls of Congress and the barracks.
I can hardly wait to see which closet Dick will throw open next.
>via: http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/invisible-war-examines-military-sexual-assault...
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No one airs America’s dirty laundry on the big screen like director Kirby Dick. In This Film Is Not Yet Rated, he revealed the Motion Picture Association of America’s shady rating system; Twist of Faith uncovered systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. His latest documentary, The Invisible War, took home the esteemed Audience Award at Sundance this year for its startling investigation into the epidemic of rape in the U.S military. Dick recently spoke with Vulture about exposing sexual assault in the armed forces, his obsession with outsiders, and how YouTube stole his signature style.
In The Invisible War, you were able to draw out very raw testimonies from survivors of military sexual assault. Some were pretty hard to watch. How were you able to get your subjects to open up about such a difficult topic on-camera, especially when many of them were shamed into silence while they were serving?
When Amy [Ziering, producer] and I did this cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles over a ten-day period, we saw two to three people a day. I’d shoot and Amy would do the interview. It was a profound experience each time, because these are people that the Amy had spoken to perhaps for an hour on the phone, and we’re walking into their home and they’re telling us about the most traumatic experience of their lives, something that had really destroyed their lives to such an extent that they’re on numerous medications, they can’t work, they have no career, they really have no life. They carry guns wherever they go. And they would tell us these stories that, oftentimes, they hadn’t told the people who were the closest to them. For so long they’d been disbelieved or no one had understood what they’d gone through. For us to come in, authority figures, and say, “We want to tell your story to the world,” it meant a great deal for them.
It was clear that many of these women joined the military because they really wanted to make a difference, and they believed in this idea of “Be all that you can be.” It made sense that you opened the film with that montage of ads about women in the military.
The women talked about how those ads were one of the reasons they actually came into the military. Almost all these women had very excellent experiences in boot camp. It was very egalitarian, and it was really kind of a merit-based system, and they were looking forward to spending a career in that environment, which was much less misogynistic than society at large. Then to be disappointed — not only to be assaulted, but to have this whole system that they believe in betray them, was shattering.
What was it like to film at the Pentagon? How did you approach those interviews when some of the people you spoke with had everything to lose by being candid?
We came in very, very well prepared. In many ways, we knew our subject matter better than they did. We certainly had spoken with many, many more survivors than they had. In fact, Major General Mary Kay Hertog, the director of SAPRO [the military’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office], although she’d only been in the position a couple of months, we were still astounded when we asked her on-camera, “Have you ever spoken to one of these survivors?” and she said, "No."
That’s unbelievable.
Yeah, exactly. That’s transformative. You really only understand the situation by talking to these women and men, and I think that is the reason that the film has made such an impact in Washington, and particularly within the Department of Defense and within the military. So many of these higher-ranking officers were aware of this as an issue, but they weren’t aware of the nature of the experience of their soldiers.
Some of the most intense scenes were the ones in which your subjects filmed themselves. What’s the most shocking or surprising footage you’ve gotten when subjects control the camera?
It’s not so much shocking or surprising. I think it’s the level of intimacy that you can’t even get in the most insightful and intimate interview. There’s this quality of someone talking to everyone and no one. I had one subject in one film that I made — she was dying and talking about her experience of dying — and was sort of thanking this imaginary audience for listening, and at the same time saying she felt as she was talking to God in a way. It was called The End. We gave cameras to people who were dying in a hospice program, where people were dying in their homes, and then when they were too ill they passed the camera to their family members to continue the filming. It was extremely intense.
We’re seeing that sort of "everyone and no one" address a lot with YouTube now.
Yes! I’d used it in a film called Chain Camera, which I shot in 1999 and it came out in 2001 at Sundance. This was before YouTube. I always thought this is kind of one of my signature styles, right? I just remember sort of looking at YouTube for the first time and thinking, Well, now everyone is using it.
Like Twist of Faith and This Film Is Not Yet Rated, The Invisible War deals with shame, secrecy, and sexuality. Why do you think you’re drawn to these heavy themes again and again?
I look for stories that have a personal complexity to them as well as a social and political complexity. I find myself in pretty much all my work focusing on people whose experiences are as outsiders, and by focusing on that and their experience, it becomes a critique of some aspect of the mainstream. Even inChain Camera, you’re dealing with these urban high school students, which I always thought is sort of in opposition to the typical American image of the high school experience, which is the suburban white experience. In Twist of Faith,you’re focusing on men who’ve been abused by priests, and they’re still Catholic, but it’s obviously a very strong critique of the Catholic response to this.
Because your films do give such strong social critiques, do you ever find yourself going from being a filmmaker to being an advocate?
I think of myself as both. Within a few months, Invisible War was seen by the very highest levels of the military — certainly Secretary Panetta, and many other people in the administration and in Congress — and it’s made a very significant impact.
So what sort of response have you received from Congress and the Department of Defense?
The Army has been very receptive of the film. We’ve been contacted by people who want to use it in training with hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Did you ever imagine that it would receive this kind of response?
Sort of in our dreams, yeah. But we never imagined that it would be this quick, or this strong. I mean, there’s still a long way for the military to go. Our film argues very strongly that most of the officers in the military are horrified by this, and this is being caused by a small percentage of perpetrators that have been allowed to operate without impunity over and over again. One of the things the military has to do is go after this with the same seriousness and the same will that they fight a war.
>via: http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/kirby-dick-the-invisible-war-interview.html