Military Sexual Assault as Political Violence and Challenge to Christian Ethics

This article proceeds in three parts. First, it presents a brief summary of the current situation regarding military sexual trauma in the U.S. Intra-military sexual violence (hereafter referred to as military sexual violence) emerges as an ongoing epidemic in the U.S. Second, military sexual violence as political violence offers a hermeneutic for evaluating particular military institutions as instances of structural sin or violence. Finally, once it is acknowledged as political violence, military sexual violence exposes significant questions about the institution itself and reveals a blind spot in Christian ethics. Despite recent attention to sexual violence against civilian populations, sexual violence within the military is largely absent from Catholic discussions of the military, use of force, just war, pacifism, or peace building. Drawing upon the work of Nancy Pineda-Madrid and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, this article uses the ubiquity of military sexual assault as an existential challenge to the traditional approaches to war and violence within Catholic moral theology.