Female Selective Service

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Kelly Kolb English-111-760 Eric Roe June 28th, 2011 A Woman Registering for Selective Service is Not Necessary Changing the law to mandate that women register for selective service for the military after so many years is an important issue that gets many different responses. After reading three very different sources on the topic of women in combat I developed a strong opinion, but none provoked me like Anne Quindlen’s essay “Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha.” Quindlen suggest that to end a gender war women should be required to register for selective services to produce equality and fairness. Brian Turner writes an emotional poem regarding female soldiers and sexual assault and Mary Eberstadt’s essay is aimed to address the issue of mothers…show more content…
Women soldiers are actually having to fight two wars when they are in combat, one against the enemy and the other against her fellow male soldiers who she should be able to trust, but, “One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military,” according to a fact Turner uses before the poem (64). Mary Eberstadt, author of “Mother in Combat Boots” also asserts “An astonishing one-third of female service members say they have experienced sexual harassment while serving” (41). Furthermore, there is a very low prosecution rate for the service members, “Only 8 percent of sexual assailants were referred to courts martial or military court, compared with 40 percent of similar offenders prosecuted in the civilian court system” (41). From that we can conclude the amount of unreported sexual assaults happening in the military is high because, women have to worry about if there perpetrator will even be prosecuted or if it will cause her to be at odds with the rest of her fellow service workers. Turner’s poem is especially moving since he is writing from a soldier’s point of view serving overseas. He professes his desire for a sergeant to just let a female soldier sleep and sheds light on how women in combat that get sexually assaulted do experience trauma even after they return home by saying, “Sergeant—she’ll dream of your for years to come / You will be the fire and the hovering breath. Not the sniper. Not the bomber in the streets. You” (64.6-9). With this kind of hurt and pain harvesting in a victims mind it will be increasingly difficult to deal with the demands of parenting, upon many other things, once they return home. It will be hard for some of these sexually assaulted women, especially the ones who never spoke out, to have a healthy relationship with men,

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