Does military service turn young men into sexual predators?

From Truthdig today. The numbers are from the American military establishment. I can't imagine ours are any different.

Does military service turn young men into sexual predators?

A culture that encourages violence and misogyny, says Helen Benedict, attracts a disproportionate number of sexually violent men: half of male recruits enlist to escape abusive families, a history that is often predictive of an abuser.

But whatever attracts them, and wherever they come from, this is about a system plagued by rot, and not about a few bad apples. American veterans embody the inevitable, predictable blowback from that rotten system.

Pretty troubling statistics, and interesting that the sexually abused men in the military, though much smaller by percentage than women, are virtually equal in numbers. A constant military culture is a safe haven for psychos and sexual predators. To keep the numbers up, they have been reduced to accepting just about anybody, regardless of poor education, low I.Q. or previous convictions for violent crimes, including rape.

One reason women are overwhelmingly against war in all its forms is that it endangers them and kills their children.

Not surprising that most weapons of war are phallic, and don't give me the aerodynamic argument. Kites and birds do a splendid job of flying.

Don't tell me that your basic tank isn't a set of male genitalia on tracks with its little friend pointing proudly forward and upward.

How about the lingo of war - penetration, deep penetration, on and on and on. The new Iran bunker-buster bomb on rush order by the U.S. military is supposed to provide deep and superior penetration.

It reminds me of the ongoing, but until recently covered-up, problems with the Catholic Church. It must have been well known, and probably a drawing card, for pedophiles that the Catholic priesthood gave maximum opportunity to predate upon children, with an understanding that crimes would never be prosecuted and the victims would never be believed.

The Church has a recruiting problem too.

I'd go with the anti-Federalists on this one, who deplored the evil of standing armies as a drain on the public purse and danger to liberty.

Brutus on the Evil of Standing Armies