Breakthrough: Exploring the Trends of Military Sexual Assault
Hello everyone! As I mentioned in my last post, I have been working on my graph and analysis to find trends in my data. I will now discuss some of the trends and notes I was able to observe from my graph.
Firstly, all of the countries that I am looking at have a minimum age of military enlistment between a range of 16 to 19 years old. The western countries had a wider variety of minimum ages of 16, 17, 18, and 19, while the eastern countries had mainly 18 years old as the minimum age apart from one with 16.5 years. One thing to note is that within the western countries, there aren’t any differences between the service conditions for men and women, while the eastern countries like Taiwan and South Korea put more emphasis on the military role of men, mentioning that women are mostly restricted to non combat roles or not even mentioning women for the age requirement and service.
Next, several countries I am looking at practice conscription or mandatory military service. These countries are Norway, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan. The U.S. practices a method different from the rest of the countries which is the de jure system which means Selective Service retains the right to randomly draft males aged 18 to 25 in time of need. For the western countries, there is only one country, Norway, currently with mandatory military service, but Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia have had conscription in the past as well before it was abolished or ended in these nations. The eastern countries have more currently practiced mandatory military service systems; however, both South Korea and Taiwan’s mandatory military services only pertain to males, while Israel’s requirements still apply to both men and women.
For the length of required service from officers in the military, I looked at the general length of time in the military contracts that the military personnel have to sign to serve for each of the countries. Although the lengths of time did vary based on the position a person has within the military, the average range of time for the western countries was 2 to 12 years. For Norway though, since it has mandatory service for males and females, citizens serve 19 months, but 80% of people are released from this service. Meanwhile, with the eastern countries with voluntary service, Japan has a required length of 3 years, while Indian officers have to go through the Agnipath Scheme in which recruits serve for a tenure of four years that include training for six months followed by 3.5 years deployment. On the other hand, the mandatory service-practicing countries are Israel that requires 32 months for men and 24 months for women (varying based on military occupation), Taiwan with a 1 year military training for males and up to four 20-day training recalls over the following 8 years, and South Korea with a required 18 to 22 month service for men.
Lastly, I want to discuss the factor of the consciousness of the perpetrator. For this factor, rather than finding data for each country which were unavailable, I collected general information that can pertain to all militaries overall. The base of this information is still from the U.S.A. though. Rates of reported military sexual assaults that involved the use of alcohol or alcohol/drugs ranged from 14% to 66.1% among servicemen and from 0% to 83% among servicewomen (Miggantz et. al, 2023). As clearly seen from these rates, alcohol abuse is a serious issue in the military as it can cause people to perceive and judge situations improperly. Whether the perpetrator and/or victim is intoxicated, the misuse of alcohol can cause severe issues as it is a huge risk for the occurrence of military sexual assault.
The remaining components which are pay, gender, and the mental health effects will be discussed in my next post. For pay, there is something called basic pay that all personnel receive which consists of the majority of their salary. However, the amount of basic pay that each country gives is inaccessible, so I will need to instead look at the salaries of a certain officer position in the militaries for each country in order to still provide a comparison. In addition, since gender and the mental health effects of this issue have complex aspects that tie in with culture, I will detail about them more in my next post in which I will be describing the cultural aspects of military sexual assault between the eastern and western countries.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
– Srimayi
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