Marine recruiters accused of rape: California high school students file suit

Each of the young women is seeking $1 million in damages against two recruiters in connection with the alleged rapes, which they said occurred early last year in a recruiting office in Ukiah, California. The recruiters named in the suit, Sgts. Joseph Dunzweiler and Brian Fukushima, were both convicted and demoted in rank last year following courts martial with allegations of sexual misconduct with recruits.

According to one of the accusers, “Jane Doe,” she was raped three times and told by the recruiter that she had to submit if she wanted to be accepted in the Marines. She accused the Marine Corps of covering up the incident, an accusation that was denied by Marine Corps Major Michael Samarov.

This case, like many others brought against recruiters from various branches of the military between 2003 and the present, has received scant media coverage. According to The Objector, a web site devoted to conscientious objectors, and the antiwar website Not In Our Name, some of the other major cases are as follows:

July 2003: an Army recruiter based in Moreno Valley, California, was sentenced to 16 months in prison for statutory rape of a 17-year-old female recruit.

January 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Baltimore, Maryland, was convicted of fondling a teenage recruit and was sentenced to probation.

May 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Blooming Grove, New York, was charged with six counts of rape; the recruit was only 16 years old.

June 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Riverside, California, was sentenced to five years in prison for raping a 17-year-old high school student.

November 2004: an Army recruiter, also based in Riverside, was charged with four felony counts of providing alcohol to and then having sex with two 17-year-old girls.

March 2005: a National Guard recruiter based in Castleton, Indiana, Sgt. Eric P. Vetesy, was charged with 31 counts stemming from alleged sexual assaults on seven potential female recruits. Vetesy was jailed on February 27, accused of sexually assaulting six female recruits—most of them high school students he had met during the course of 18 months as a full-time recruiter.

The recruiters victimize young women driven by economic necessity to the armed forces as a means—sometimes the only one—of obtaining an education and a well-paying job. Typically, the reasons the victims gave for going along with the abuse was that they did not wish to alienate the recruiters and therefore jeopardize their chances for a career in the military, and many of the alleged assaults took place either in recruiting offices or in military vehicles.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/mari-m21.shtml