Universal soldier: what Paula Coughlin can teach American women - sexual assault victim demands justice - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Katherine Boo

But after she wandered into a Las Vegas Hilton hallway that Tailhook weekend and faced the Navy tradition known as the "gantlet," the bootstrap stuff must have seemed a little flimsy. Suddenly a chant of "admiral's aide, admiral's aide" rose up and several dozen of her service peers engulfed her, mauling her, pushing her to the ground, and attempting to take her clothes off. As Coughlin yelled for help, they laughed, abandoning her only to treat more women walking down the hall to the same giddy molestation-attacks meant, as one Whidby Island, Washington, airman later noted, "in a good-natured, lighthearted way."

Coughlin wasn't the only officer who had personally learned the difference between good nature and hostile groping that night, but in the beginning she might as well have been. Although two civilian women filed official complaints about their treatment at Tailhook, the assaulted servicewomen, fearing professional reprisal, adhered firmly to the Anita Hill School of Silence. One female officer, who had earned a certain fame among Tailhook attendees for having decked one of the men who attacked her, cried for days after the incident. But when another officer encouraged her to file charges, she decided to just "let it go." "In the beginning I thought about reporting it," she told Navy officials later, "but I thought that there was nothing anyone could probably do about it anyway .... "

Recall that, like Anita Hill, these were women of considerable accomplishment and leverage--in this case, naval officers. They had a lot more credibility than the drunk teenage girl who that night had been stripped of her clothing, manhandled by dozens of aviators and left exposed and confused in a Hilton hallway. They had more power than the hundreds of enlisted women raped and otherwise abased annually in the service. Yet, as they repeatedly indicated to naval investigators, they also had a lot more to lose. Thus, at about the same time that Hill was explaining her eight years of silent suffering, Tailhook assault victims found themselves following her example.

Fear of professional reprisal is no idle worry, and post-Hill surveys have shown it's still a primary concern of victimized women. Yet it's critical that feminists count in the social cost of keeping quiet--a cost that the Tailhook victims had cause to understand firsthand. As male servicemen repeatedly noted to investigators, the gantlet, and the assaults it implied, had been going on at least since 1986; it was, as one put it, "an honored tradition." And as many aviators also pointed out, this Tailhook gathering was a beck of a lot less raucous than the previous year's. But while civilian women had occasionally protested their treatment, women officers--the ones with real love for, and leverage in, the Navy--had seldom joined them. The gantlet continued. And the women at Tailhook '91 became victims, not just of drunken aviators, but of all the women before them who had made the same choice of silence.