scholarly journals The Politics of Sex Abuse in Sacred Hierarchies: A Comparative Study of the Catholic Church and the Military in the United States

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 281
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Warner

The paper explores similarities in patterns of abuse and in patterns of how the known abuse cases are handled by the Catholic church and the U.S. military and develops preliminary explanations of why. The paper considers how the two organizations deal with external efforts by civil authorities at oversight and prosecution, and the extent to which they invoke their sacred status authority to evade responsibility and civilian oversight. The paper finds that the handling of sex abuse in each organization has been affected partly by the institutions seeing themselves as sacred, as something apart from the secular state, beholden to alternative authorities. The paper highlights the fact that child sex abuse by religious officials and sexual assault of soldiers by fellow soldiers and officers constitute profound challenges for democracy in the US and elsewhere, as the institutions claim and may be accorded separate and privileged status, beyond the reach of democratic laws and procedures. It is a warning about the costs of public deference to other institutions. The study utilizes documentation of Catholic church clergy child sex abuse cases in the US, and documentation of sex abuse cases in the US military.

The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-130
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle

Chapter 4 argues that drones accelerate the trend toward information-rich warfare and place enormous pressure on the military to learn ever more about the battlefields that it faces. Today, for the United States, war is increasingly a contest for information about any future battlespace. This has had an organizational effect as the ability for the United States to know more through drone imagery has turned into a necessity to know more. The US military is becoming so enamored of its ability to know more through drone surveillance that it is overlooking the operational and organizational costs of “collecting the whole haystack.” Using drones for a vast surveillance apparatus, as the United States and now other countries have been doing, has underappreciated implications for the workload, organizational structures, and culture of the military itself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-275
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Wiggins ◽  
Mary L. Gautier ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt

The official, parish-identified, Catholic population in the United States over the past forty years (1980 to 2019) has grown 40 percent, from about 48 million to over 67 million. Such a hearty rate of growth might lead one to assume that the Catholic population is increasing across all parts of the country. This growth, however, has been anything but uniform. From 1980 to the present, the Catholic population in some US Census regions—mostly in the South and in the West of the country—has experienced a boom, while in others—mostly in the Northeast and Midwest—it has experienced a bust. In this article, the growth or decline in the number of Catholics in each of the four US Census regions is explored, using data from the 2020 Faith Communities Today survey as well as data submitted by Catholic dioceses. These analyses give a more nuanced portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States, shedding light on both the challenges and opportunities the US Catholic Church is experiencing in 2021.


Author(s):  
William E. Rapp

Despite the high regard for the US military by the American public, a number of tensions continue to grow in civil-military relations in the United States. These are exacerbated by a lack of clarity, and thus productive debate, in the various relationships inherent in civil and military interaction. By trisecting civil military relations into the relations between the people and the military, the military and the government, and the people and the government on military issues, this chapter examines the potential for crisis in coming years. Doing so allows for greater theoretical and popular understanding and thus action in addressing the tensions, for there is cause for concern and action in each of the legs of this interconnected triangle.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Reno Ismadi ◽  
Awatar Bayu Putranto ◽  
Tiffany Setyo Pratiwi

The US military invasion to Afghanistan took place when the War on Terror declared by the United States after the incident in September, 2001 at World Trade Center. One of the military operations in this invasion was called Enduring Freedom. This research will discuss the violations committed by America in the invasion of Afghanistan, particularly during the Enduring Freedom operation, which it was reviewed through Geneva Law and The Rome Statute. The author using literature studies with qualitative methods. The author found that the violations of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and The Rome Statute Article 8 and 11 were carried out by America during the deliberate Enduring Freedom Operation. The violation was proven but the International Criminal Court (ICC) did nothing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda L. Moore

This Armed Forces & Society issue is on women in the contemporary armed forces in the United States and other nations to include the South African National Defense Force and the Australian Defense Force. This issue contains a collection of nine papers, each reviewing a current aspect of women serving in the military since the post–Vietnam War Era. There are also two review essays of Megan Mackenzie’s book, Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth That Women Can’t Fight. An overview of changing laws and the expanding role of women in the military is provided in this introduction, as well as summaries of the nine articles, and comments on the two book reviews mentioned above.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 433-450
Author(s):  
Thomas Hanson

The US Department of State has embarked on a significant expansion of personnel, yet still grapples with the consequences of severe cutbacks in the 1990s that now hamper its ability to fulfill more expeditionary tasks in the wake of 9/11. Historical factors slowed the development of career diplomacy in the US up to 1924, and in recent decades the State Department has been impacted by greater Congressional assertiveness in foreign affairs, an expanded role for other US agencies and the military, and increased security restrictions in the face of terrorist threats. Numerous studies have called for a greater emphasis on civilian diplomacy amid US military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Current US strategy documents evoke a ‘whole of government’ approach to nation-building as the primary context for devoting more resources to diplomacy and development. Over time, however, global trends toward multi-polarity and US fiscal limitations may require a more fundamental re-evaluation of the role and importance of career diplomacy in US foreign policy.


Author(s):  
Tanisha M Fazal

Abstract Dramatic improvements in US military medicine have produced an equally dramatic shift in the kinds of battle casualties the US military has sustained in its most recent wars. Specifically, there has been a notable increase in the ratio of nonfatal to fatal casualties. Most studies of casualty aversion in the United States, however, have focused on fatal casualties. Using a series of survey experiments, I investigate whether respondents are equally sensitive to fatal and nonfatal casualties, differences between populations with and without close military ties, and whether views on casualties are conditioned by respondents’ level of knowledge about casualties or the individual costs of war they expect to incur. I find that, while the general public is generally insensitive to different types of casualties, respondents with close ties to the military are better able to distinguish among kinds of casualties. This advantage, however, is not due to respondents with close military ties being better informed about war casualties. Instead, those who bear the costs of war directly appear better able to distinguish among those costs.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-28
Author(s):  
David Lin

An early-2008 Foreign Policy index found that 88% of active and retired American servicemen and women agree that the war in Iraq has stretched the United States military dangerously thin. Another 60% think that the US military today is weaker than it was five years ago. 74% of those surveyed hold low regards for the civilian leadership expressing that civilian policymakers set unreasonable goals for the US military to accomplish. With current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan serving as backdrops, these inflections serve as the basis of a much-needed conversation on the evolving roles and responsibilities of civilian and military agencies in the post-conflict environment. The immediate solutions to the military’s frustrations have been logical if not only reactionary or temporary stopgaps. If the military is stretched too thin, then expand it. Over the next five years there will be substantial increases in the Army and Marine Corps by as much as over 90,000 troops. If the military is weakening, then strengthen it. The President’s 2008 defense budget pushes defense spending to levels not seen since the Reagan Administration, bringing with it a slew of new military hardware meant to keep the US military on the cutting edge of technology and flexible in the face of emerging threats. If the military is lacking comprehensive training and doctrine to combat insurgencies, then revise doctrine. In December 2007, the US Army and Marine Corps revamped their Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the first time in over two decades either service had published a field manual devoted to counterinsurgency.3 The next President of the United States will face a dynamic range of transnational threats that will likely make us rethink the way modern wars are fought. From terrorism and counterinsurgency to combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction, from illicit trafficking of drugs, people, and guns back to traditional conventional warfare with rising superpowers such as China and Russia, the United States must maintain a variety of diplomatic and military responses at its disposal. As emerging threats in the twenty-first century appear to be rooted at the nexus of security and development, a single-sided military solution cannot fully resolve a multi-dimensional problem. There is a need to develop a more comprehensive civil-military approach to combating terrorism, insurgency, and asymmetric warfare, something that has not fully materialized on the strategic or on the operational level. In order to do this, there is a need to tear down the stereotypes and reintroduce the hippie (statesmen) to the snake-eater (soldier).


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