Unwanted

The American justice system has its flaws. The rich get away with more than the poor because they can hire the best law firms. The use of precedent overwhelms the system and creates loopholes and unintended consequences. And, in today's mobile, online, instant news society, the law doesn't always keep up or make sense to the masses.

The goal of this system is to provide an unbiased result based on the facts of the case. The biggest benefit to it is that an (supposed to be) impartial judge or a jury of one's peers is used to arbitrate between the accused and the accuser. This is especially essential for instances where the hierarchical power system in place most everywhere (between employee and employer, between the government and the individual, etc.) would unnecessarily bias one side against the other.

However, there is one glaring area where an impartial system does not exist: the military.

In the military, everything is kept "in house." In many cases, your commanding officer (or that person's commanding officer) is used to administer justice. Even when something actually makes it to military court, many of the people involved may be the accuser's superior officers. Even if they are not, they have something to gain or lose based on what is accused and what the verdict is.

The military has a sexual assault problem. The rates for all types of sexual misconduct are much higher per capita in the military than in the private sector. Both men and women are attacked, as sexual assault is mostly about power and not about the act of sexual intercourse. So, the fact that women are in the military doesn't make sexual assault more prevalent -- it just means that women are now being attacked along with the men.

The problem, though, is that those who are attacked are forced to go through their own chain of command in order to report the assault. In some cases, this means going to either the person who is performing the assault or who is the direct commander of the person who is committing the act, or that person's immediate superior (if the commander in charge is the one performing the assault) in order to levy a charge of sexual assault. These individuals have direct and biased reasons not to send the assault charge up the chain command: first, a charge of sexual assault looks negatively on them as the leader of the person(s) in question and could negatively influence their ability to move up the chain of command; and, secondly, they may like the conduct, person, or performance of the accused more or less than the accuser.

There have been many reports of sexual assault and outright rape in the military over the last 20 years. No one branch has been spared the scandals of these allegations. There have been movies about it, including a recent documentary about the problem, The Invisible War. Even if you consider that movie biased against the military, the facts presented and the incredibly myopic way in which the military is shown to respond (for example, making it the assaulted person's fault for being assaulted, or the program to make sure you have a safe buddy to walk around base with at night, etc.) shows the military culture to be biased against women and "weak" men and stuck in a version of the past where these sorts of things just "didn't happen." (Of course, they did, but like the nostalgia films from the 1950s, the military's response just seems to gloss over and simplify how very real and present the problems actually are.)

While that movie was able to briefly change the way the military works, much more is needed. (The military took away the unit commander's decision whether to prosecute these cases.) When Congress confronted the military leadership and demanded answers, strongly considering changing things so that sexual assault would be prosecuted in civilian court systems, the military leadership determined that it would hurt morale, undermine the command structure, and somehow bring down the military as an institution to take away military prosecution of sexual assault. And Congress backed down.

My question is why? Many companies work on a similarly hierarchical command structure yet having a judicial system outside of that structure hasn't toppled those businesses when a sexual assault charge is levied. In no other stratosphere of life does having an independent and unbiased judicial system hurt the process -- and, as I argued at the beginning, it actually helps the process by trying to ensure as fair and balanced a process as possible. (Yes, we can argue all day about how actually fair and balanced the judicial system is, which is why I noted some of the problems with it, above. The fact is that it tries harder than most other judicial systems to be unbiased.)

The military is an insular system. They need that in order to do what they do. But when that insular system, in essence, rewards sexual assault predators with a system in which they can get away with the act more often than not, the system has to change. Taking sexual assault cases out of the system so that both the accused and accuser get a fair court hearing and verdict is paramount to this process.

As we consistently learn, whenever an institution is left to police itself, be it Congress, banks, brokerage firms, churches, or, now, the military, it fails because the participants are biased for a variety of reasons. It is time for the men and women of our armed forces to be safe and able to bring these charges to a fair, unbiased court system outside of their chain of command. The military has proven both unwilling to change and unable to cope with this problem, so the government should force the issue. Our servicemen and women deserve nothing less.