Army Sex Convictions: Now the Larger Questions

In what has now become the military’s biggest sexual misconduct scandal since the Navy’s Tailhook affair, an Army court-martial has found Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson guilty on 43 of the 54 counts brought against him. Next week the same panel will hand down its sentence. Simpson’s earlier admission to having had consensual sex with 11 women trainees at an Aberdeen, Md., base, in violation of military rules, has left him facing up to 32 years in prison. Tuesday’s verdicts place him in even greater jeopardy. Under military law, sex with a subordinate constitutes rape and conviction can bring a life sentence.

The Simpson case was the most serious and sensational yet in the recent series of trials involving allegations of sexual misconduct in the military, especially the Army. Other trials are pending.

The common thread in all these cases is sexual predation. Under military law this need not involve physical force. Recognizing the enormous power that officers and noncommissioned officers have over subordinates, recognizing, as an Army psychiatrist testified in the Simpson trial, that the drill sergeant sees himself as “mother, father and God to the recruits,” military law embodies the idea of “constructive force.” Rank conveys authority, and long before women were integrated into the services the military understood how coercive and intimidating authority can be. Consensual sex between a superior and a subordinate constitutes rape because of the superior’s implicit coercive power. Eighteen of the counts on which Simpson was convicted were for rape.

What Simpson did to a number of women under his command is now well established. How the Army failed to see what was going on remains to be explained. How is it that young trainees who had been briefed on their right to report sexual and other abuses immediately to higher authority chose for a long time to say nothing? Some have explained this silence as stemming from the fear that to complain would be ruinous to career hopes, would perhaps even invite prosecution. If that is in fact a fair explanation then the Army has done a miserable job of briefing its enlisted personnel on what they must know.

The fact that Simpson and others seemed confident that they could get away with repeated acts of sexual predation stretching over many months says much about the culture in which they lived. The fact that so far the Army sex investigations at Aberdeen have brought actions only against black soldiers is also more than curious.

The Simpson case, pending sentencing and review, is almost over. The deep and troubling systemic problems it has helped expose now cry out for redress.