Gonna break the OP into several posts, because at 6 pages you would be begging.  tldr for this is: We need something, but this isn’t that bill

Vanessa, Vanessa, Vanessa…

Holy cow, I am tired AF of hearing that name. I hear that name over and over and the bill that is associated with it. It has nothing to do with what happened to her. Vanessa had no evidence of sexual assault or rape. Some sexual harassment allegations were “going to made,” based on some accounts given by some of her squad, but even an investigation could not corroborate those allegations.

The Army’s internal investigation of Guillen’s case interviewed hundreds of people but found no credible evidence of sexual harassment. There is a lot of conspiracy flying about a cover-up, as always happens these days. One person with an internet opinion (okay, I resemble that) One of the best theories is the “poorly trained CID agents.” Agents who are probably as well trained as any other investigators. (CID is the Army version of NCIS except for no fancy office and, sadly, no Gibbs. I mean, what kind of person doesn’t like Mark Harmon?)

Before all y’all storm my castle with torches and pitchforks (remember I have boiling oil). My dislike for the bill is the naming of it when that is not what happened to her.  That said, it does not excuse the horrible causes of her death. What happened to her should not have occurred to anyone serving in the armed forces. At the time, several deaths were discovered or occurred at Ft Hood, so why wasn’t the bill named after them? Those deaths happened simultaneously with just as much human tragedy as Vanessa. Better command oversight would have made all the difference. As the Ft Hood investigation quickly found those failings. I have to say I was at Ft Hood in the 90s; it’s a fecal festival on a good day.

I am going to be blunt. It is a lot easier to support a bill about sexual assault with a pretty, young female as the bill’s name instead of a male. Yup, I said it and remember I have boiling oil, so fight me.

But Nursiepoo, women are always rape victims (BUZZ) wrong, thanks for playing. Yes, women are assaulted, but so are men, especially in the military, yours truly included.

What is the I Am Vanessa Guillen bill?

Well, GovTrack has this:

It explicitly lists sexual harassment as a crime in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the official constitution for military law. While rape and sexual assault are listed, sexual harassment is not, although it could still be prosecuted under other vaguer provisions.

Okay, an attorney was asked about this, and his response was the bill defines sexual harassment so vague that it would undoubtedly scrutinize this vagueness from a defense attorney. It also fails to provide adequate notice as to what constitutes sexual harassment. Great start for a bill that is supposed to combat sexual harassment, a vague definition. That will give just about any chucklefuck and his barracks lawyer enough leverage to get the case thrown out.

Requiring the Secretary of Defense to establish a process by which a servicemember can lodge a sexual harassment complaint confidentially.

The bill would move legal decisions on the prosecution of a sexual offense outside of the existing military chain of command. It establishes an Office of Special Prosecutor within each branch, including creating such an office in any branch where it does not yet exist.

While sexual assault is mentioned here, that is already clearly defined, so is sexual harassment ( to some extent) in the UCMJ. So essentially, we are taking a vague definition of sexual harassment, the well-defined report of sexual assault, and moving it outside the chain of command to a punishment set up by DoD. Congrats, we are creating more bureaucracy. There isn’t even a rough sketch of the review process. It takes the bill from the military and puts it back to the civilian leadership at DoD (the civilians that run the military). Is your head swimming? So is mine.

In the military, the commander decides what to charge and punish someone if there is a suspected crime committed. Commanders have no formal legal training and only receive cursory instruction in the UCMJ. They are not legal experts. Add to it; they are subject to favoritism or the desire to rid themselves of a problem.

As expected, it has met some resistance from the military (not surprisingly). In the GovTrack article, former Air Force attorney and Southwestern Law School professor Rachel E. VanLandingham indicated that “If the purported conflict of interest exists for sexual offenses, it exists for all other crimes as well.”

She’s correct there. So what crime is next here?

One can argue that all crimes could present a conflict of interest since the commander works with his same servicemembers every day. In many cases, the commander knows the servicemember on a semi-personal basis. A command relationship introduces a level of bias right off. Like you would expect, if you are a “good soldier,” you will get a pass on some behavior. Also, do not forget we need to look good on that annual eval. Thus the concerns about leaving these decisions to command.

The real problem is this poorly written bill ignores survivors. It does nothing to address the Feres Doctrine’s protection that bars a civil suit against a perpetrator in uniform when the service member committed the crime.

When Paul from Hope after MST (which you should donate to his go fund me), reached out to

Representative Spiers office about his thoughts on the bill, he was flat out told by her office that “survivors are not their focus” and that they were only trying to “fix” the DoD.

Okay, wow, so we create a bill with nothing to do with the victim. Save a possible allegation about to be made by her about sexual harassment. Murder is already illegal, and there are better examples. Elder Fernandez

Elder Fernandez was a young sergeant who made sexual harassment and potential assault allegations against a fellow soldier and was found hanging at a lake near Ft Hood. The circumstances of his death are suspicious (more on him in the next post) Most people haven’t heard his name. Honestly, even some of the sexual assault counselors that I spoke to don’t believe men deserve the same support because they “aren’t sexually assaulted.”

Let me break this down. We are taking a long road that essentially says let’s pull sexual assaults and harassment away from the military and give it to an as yet undefined entity that Sec Def and the DoD are supposed to create. Let’s use some ambiguity in terms so that it is a quagmire (giggty) to charge someone with sexual harassment, and then let’s not do diddly for survivors. Because the bill still fails to remove the Feres Doctrine, how in the holy hand grenade of Antioch is a way to bring civil action.

What a survivor can expect will continue this series. (Spoiler not very much)

Be the kind of person that your dog and your mom hope you are.