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Article Excerpt
T.S. Nelson. For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military. Binghamton and London: The Haworth Maltreatment and Trauma Press, 2002. xv + 302 pp. Bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7890-1221-9; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7890-1222-7.
T.S. Nelson's detailed account of rape and sexual harassment in the American armed forces is a welcome addition to the literature on sexual violence. Nelson states that her book is "a documentation of the vast problem of sexual abuse in the military" (p.xi). It relies predominantly on the personal accounts of victims, buttressed by military documents, rape reports, press releases, news stories and other research studies. She herself is a psychotherapist specializing in sexual trauma recovery, and served in the United States Army for four years. Interestingly though, she does not discuss her own experience of being a woman in the military, nor explain this exclusion.
Nelson's book is a sensitive and sometimes moving approach to the subject matter, with a good mix of personal accounts and supporting official documents and statistics. However, it could have benefited from a more detailed methodological discussion than is provided. In the preface she explains that the participants in her study came from each of the military service branches, were women and men (though mostly women), officers and enlisted, victims and their families, non-victims (and presumably some abusers), and from diverse backgrounds, races, occupations and ages. Participants generally spoke anonymously, via letters, emails, responses to her research questionnaire, phone interviews, on Internet websites and so on. The study involved five years of research and over two hundred research participants (pp.xii-xiv). About halfway through the book she reflectively notes that although her study received very few positive statements about the military's response to victims who reported an abusive incident, one must be careful not to generalize too much "based solely on the input from a self-selected sample population" (pp.133-134). Further, she comments that "persons who respond to such studies...
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More articles from Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military
Bibliographies of women and the military in history.(Bibliography), September 22, 2002
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