NathanielPenn

In an environment that limits personal freedom, abuses of power are more likely, I think. Senior personnel have fewer checks on their authority. If an recruit finds the conditions humiliating, he may be tempted, because it can make him feel more powerful, to visit that same humiliation on a peer. Finally, because the culture so discourages the reporting of sexual assault, perpetrators have a pretty good idea that they're going to get away with it.

This was the aspect of the story that worried me the most when I began working on it. No journalists had ever attempted to speak with as many survivors as my editor and I were hoping to speak with, and most of the articles on the subject featured the same handful of outspoken men. I wasn't sure any other men would be as brave as those men--people like Brian Lewis, Heath Phillips, and Trent Smith--had been.

I made inquiries with various not-for-profits that work with sexual assault and military sexual assault survivors. Those organizations were extremely helpful in putting me in touch with men who were willing to speak with me; the organizations were thrilled that GQ was covering this issue. Some of those men in turn put me in touch with other men. One clinician I spoke with was generous and trusting enough to let some of her clients know about the story; a number of them got in touch with me. A couple of men decided at the last minute that they weren't ready to talk about their experiences.

I also posted announcements about the story on several websites for military veterans. People cheered me on, but as far as I'm aware, nobody I spoke with came to me via one of those announcements.

I was warned repeatedly that all of the survivors had good days and bad, and that I should be prepared for at least a few difficult or confused or unusable interviews. Except in one case, that didn't happen. The men were amazingly and movingly determined to tell me their stories.

Yes, in a number of cases men were victimized repeatedly by different people at different times. Even more than the survivors of single assaults, these men were plagued by the feeling that something about them, something they weren't in control of, was announcing itself to predators. They suffered tremendous anxiety about their sexual orientation. They came to feel that they existed, as one man told me, to be used by other people.

The issues could be recurring in another sense as well: As I mentioned in responding to TheLiberalMedia0's question, above, a number of the men had been sexually molested as kids.

I was pretty surprised to find that--as the clinicians I spoke with told me--the likelihood of being sexually assaulted as an adult is significantly higher if you've been sexually assaulted as a child. (The number of servicemen who fit that description is significant: In a 2001 study of Navy recruits, 12% reported they'd been molested before age 14.) The thought here is that the sense of not being in charge of your own body can persist into adulthood and may flourish in an environment in which you're stripped of power. The clinicians also talked in a less scientific way about the eerie and awful ability of sexual predators to identify men or women who've had previous experiences of sexual assault and molestation.

You just named it.

Thanks for this.