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

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Katherine Boo

Full-metal jackals

With a wider lens, it's hard to deny that knowledge of wrongdoing should carry with it some obligation: to do what you can to stop the drug company executive who suppresses negative evidence from laboratory studies, to keep the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from breaking the rules he's been entrusted to implement, to turn a time-honored atrocity into an obsolete one. Hill seemed to concentrate primarily on personal preservation-what George Bernard Shaw called the Gospel of Getting On. Coughlin, on the other hand, seemed to get the big picture. "This was not the Navy officer image I grew up with, that I worked with," she later said. So she tried to change that image.

Still, as anyone who's been there knows, there's a yawning chasm between believing that something should be changed and actually making it happen. When Coughlin reported her story to her superiors, she found herself in another gantlet--a kind of Let's Go guide to institutional sexism. Her boss' response on the morning after the attack was, "That's what you get when you go to a hotel party with a bunch of drunk aviators." In the following weeks, she was told to get counseling, warned of the enormous professional folly of her actions (she could or be "blackballed by the aviation community," a superior informed her), made fun of, and just plain ignored. The detailed complaint she wrote languished in the hands of her boss. And while dozens of aviators had witnessed the '91 gantlet, they circled their wagons so tightly that Clarence Thomas's fawning secretaries look like turncoats by comparison.

X refused to participate in any "witch hunt for admirals and had no further information concerning this investigation." Y "may have attended Tailhook '91 but he is not sure. Could not provide any additional information .... "Z defended a suspect by noting, "[Accused] was a very handsome person and ... women were attracted to him." A male officer'acquaintance who had consoled Coughlin immediately after the attack felt compelled to note, when interviewed by the Naval Intelligence Service (NIS), that the skirt she had been wearing was rather short. And even the NIS agent assigned to help her identify her attackers came on to her, at one point calling her "Sweet Cakes."

This is the stuff of Anita Hill's worst nightmares circa 1983--and it was a collective acceptance of their plausibility that caused women to embrace her eight years later. And why not accept it? It takes true doggedness to force an organization to live up to its ideals, and the media are full of stories in which the innocent lose when they fight. Those stories surely crossed Coughlin's mind as the Navy dawdled after her attackers. In the months following the attack, she sobbed like a child and ate like a logger. What she didn't do, however, was shut up. Instead, in June she decided to go public.

To the average woman discriminated against at work, "going public" means getting a lawyer, turning to an advocacy group, perhaps talking to the local paper. For Coughlin, who happened to be sitting on a major story, it meant essentially telling the world. Still, in interviews with "World News Tonight" and The Washington Post, Coughlin criticized the Navy bluntly and allowed her name to be used. And if that seemed to her female colleagues like career suicide, it ended up being the savviest move, on feminist and professional grounds, that she could have made. Amid the Navy transcripts is the testimony of another woman officer abused at Tailhook. "I didn't think about reporting this to anyone," she stated, until she read an article about Coughlin, whom she had previously met and respected. "Then I felt it was my duty to come to the defense of the lieutenant who initially reported the incident." More and more officers joined her, until a dozen had disgorged their stories. The Navy now had on its hands something too noisome to ignore.