A Sergeant Pimped Out Female Soldiers. The Army's Going After a John. [View all]

[ismnotwasm]

(I knew about women prostituting themselves in the army from my daughter, when she was in. She didn't know about any organized pimping. I also wonder how Gay men suffered under DADT-- because the military is perfectly set up for sexual blackmail. This is just speculation on my part)

Yet again, a soldier employed by the U.S. military’s sexual assault and harassment program has been accused of being a sexual predator. And Sgt. 1st Class Gregory McQueen did his predecessors one better: He allegedly organized a prostitution ring of young servicewomen at the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, pressuring them to have sex with their male superiors. Details are trickling out from the trial of Master Sgt. Brad Grimes, a 17-year army veteran charged with conspiring to use the ring's services. “A young private told authorities McQueen had tried to recruit her to have sex with high-ranking soldiers and sexually assaulted her during what she termed an ‘interview,’” reported the Austin American-Statesman. Accusations that McQueen leveraged both social hierarchy and physical force to get what he wanted from female subordinates won’t surprise anyone who has followed the military’s sexual assault epidemic. But the story reveals another canker of military culture, too: the buddy-buddy refusal to report on a predatory peer.

Grimes denies the charges against him, claiming that there was no money involved, and that although he considered a rendezvous with a private, he never went through with it. But what's not up for debate is that Grimes knew about McQueen's scheme and did nothing to stop it; his defense attorney, Daniel Conway, has said Grimes also refused a plea deal that would have required him to testify against his colleague. Grimes's part in the drama raises the classic question: How much guilt do we assign to the bystander (if that, indeed, is what Grimes is)? And when it comes to the military's corrosive gender culture, bystanders may be the bulk of the problem.


“It’s the peers who don’t blow the whistle who are the biggest problem in the whole culture,” said Lory Manning, a former captain in the U.S. Navy and a director of the Women’s Research and Education Institute. “When you’re talking about a serial rapist, his friends—and I say he intentionally—generally know what’s going. It’s a huge issue in the military and it’s not much talked about, and nor are the peers held responsible for not informing the command.”

On that last point, at least, the Fort Hood case may represent the slow march of progress: Conway claims it’s precisely Grimes’s refusal to squeal that has landed his client in court. “At the end of the day, Master Sgt. Grimes chose to do the right thing and not have sex with that young lady,” Conway told the Statesman. He disparaged the prosecutor for trying “to charge [Grimes] in hopes of a conviction and using [Grimes] to testify against McQueen.” If Conway’s theory is correct, this is a rare case of the military cracking down on an officer for keeping mum.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115810/army-prostitution-ring-fort-hood-case-represent-progress