Governance by scandal? Eradicating sexual assault in the US military

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between scandal and democracy through the case of sexual assault within the US military. Scandal is routinely seen as hostile to democracy. It signals either the corruption of prominent institutions or the decline of ethical journalism. But scandal may have a positive dimension in forcing tainted institutions to correct their course. To explore this thesis, we examine how the US military responded to news reports of sexual assault over a period of nearly four decades. During the first three decades of this period, news reports of sexual assault were widespread but largely ignored by military leaders. During the last decade, however, the fact that sexual assault was endemic but largely ignored by the armed forces triggered a scandal, one senior military figures were forced to address. In light of this case, the article concludes that scandal can function as a mechanism of democratic governance, where it compels social and ethical norms to be properly enforced.

The Strategic Use of Scandals

“…This point is of the utmost importance. Indeed, a scandal can be defined, however minimally, as ‘a normative violation that becomes widely known and a matter of public concern.’ (Crosbie and Sass 2017, 118) Here, two words particularly matter: ‘widely’ and ‘public’. Thus, scandals are highly publicized events that come from the disruptive publicity of a transgression (Adut 2008) that causes general public outrage and disapproval (Thompson 2000).…”

The Military Scandal: Its Definition, Dynamics, and Significance

“…From the Athenian General Alcibiades’s sacrilege scandal (Thucydides, 1972, 6.27–6.29, 6.60–6.61), to the nation-dividing furore of Lieutenant Dreyfus’ framing (Harris, 2010; Read, 2012), and the horrors exposed by My Lai (Rowling, Sheets, & Jones, 2015) and Abu Ghraib (Entman, 2006), a high magnitude military scandal is a caesural moment in civil–military relations that can profoundly affect how a military operates, is perceived, and is overseen. Military scandals can have manifold effects (Crosbie & Sass, 2017, p. 128), from perceptible consequences such as inquiries, sanctions, and reforms to imperceptible ones such as the loss of public trust, changed patterns of internal reporting, and informal norm enforcement (Travis, 2018, p. 736). Because scandals can have such effects, they can disturb relationships within the military institution as well as those it maintains with the state, news media organizations, civil society, and the public more broadly.…”

“…Military scandals, as with scandals generally, occupy an uneasy theoretical territory and resist ordinary empirical analysis. They are neither wholly of a military’s making (Crosbie & Sass, 2017)—thus they tend to be examined only on the fringes of military sociology and civil–military relations studies—but nor are they simply chalked up as the excesses of scurrilous news media organizations. Hence, they sometimes serve as uncommon case studies for media and communications research.…”

“…Hence, they sometimes serve as uncommon case studies for media and communications research. Recently though, scholars such as Crosbie (2015), Wadham (2016), Habiba (2017), Crosbie and Sass (2017), and Johnson (2017) have sought to clarify and articulate the significance of military scandals. These valuable contributions go some way toward demystifying this phenomenon, but the accounts presented are brief and mainly focus on specific episodes.…”

“…The article will clarify the nature, dynamics, and significance of military scandals and provide scholars who study the military institution with a framework for analyzing this phenomenon. We argue that military scandals are episodes of mediatized public moral conflict concerning transgressions that, to greater or lesser extents, precipitate interactions: within the military institution and its attendant bureaucracies (Crosbie & Sass, 2017, p. 126; Wadham, 2016, pp. 555, 558–589), between the “masculinised fraternities of the state and the military” (Wadham, 2016, p. 552), and between the military and civil society within the mediatized public sphere (Maltby, 2012a, 2012b).…”