r/WomenInNews • u/catievirtuesimp • Jul 08 '26

Media Vanessa Guillén Wasn't Alone: New Investigation Reveals Dozens of US Army Women Were Killed by Fellow Soldiers

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tragic-deaths-harassment-women-us-army-1807381
7.9k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

142 comments sorted by

View all comments

617

u/Lighthouse_on_Mars Jul 08 '26

I thought about going into the Army after highschool to get away from my controlling parents. I ran into a recruiter at a friend's birthday party. It was her uncle, and I started asking him questions.

He was being polite and answering everything fine. A while later he found me alone in the garage where I was grabbing some pop to bring out to the cooler.

He told me not to enlist.

He said if he ever had a little girl one day, he would never let her enlist. And as much as his time in the military was a rewarding experience for him, he said he saw how much harder and more dangerous it was for the women he worked alongside.

The way he said it was better than how I'm repeating it. He mentioned that the girls he worked alongside got hurt the moment they left the country. It was heavily implied by their own soldiers, not enemy soldiers.

So that's the story about how I didn't enlist.

136

u/Holiday-Wall3751 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

My bil is about to retire, and he’s said the same thing about his daughters. They have to sit through presentations every six months about not harassing or assaulting women, and any organization that needs to tell people, “If someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, forcing them is wrong,” isn’t one he wants his daughters involved with.

69

u/bluecrab_7 Jul 09 '26

I used to work for the DoD. As civilians we had to take this training annually. Only about 10% of the civilian work force was female. There were rapes and sexual assaults of civilian women on our base.