Open Letter to PBS: Why Didn’t You Film the “Carrier” Rape-Stops?
Jun 13th, 2008 by admin
From our friend and sister, Suki Falconberg– Heart
Last month, PBS broadcast a show called Carrier, about life aboard the USS NIMITZ, an aircraft carrier with a crew of about 6000 sailors. It showed life on the ship and on shore during a six-month deployment in 2005. The Nimitz stopped at various ports in the Pacific, Australia, and the Arabian Gulf. Women were involved in the production of the film, among them director Maro Chermayeff and co-producer Deborah Dickson.
Here is a letter I wrote to PBS about the show:
I was disappointed that Carrier did not cover a basic fact of military life: when sailors move from port to port, they visit bars and brothels and rape the bodies of sexually enslaved women and girls. In its homeport, San Diego, sailors from the Nimitz rape the prostituted bodies of girls in that city and in Tijuana. These girls are subject to the harshness of the sex industry which treats women like modern-day slaves; girls are held in debt bondage, pimp-controlled, trafficked. Tijuana is in fact a ‘corridor’ city: girls are ‘broken’ there before being shipped to U.S. markets. To make them submissive, the girls are subjected to gang rapes, beatings, starvation, being filmed for porn to degrade them, along with psychological terror tactics. This is the norm of what happens to prostituted beings. These are the broken bodies sailors buy and use.
I notice that during this 2005 six-month deployment of the Nimitz which PBS filmed, the ship docked in Thailand. When our navy visits this country, they dock off of Pattaya, a prostitution city created for the military. About a third of the girls trafficked to meet the sailors’ sexual needs are underage. Numerous eyewitnesses have told me that the first thing the U.S. sailors do, when they hop of the boats that ferry them in, is head straight for the sex-for-sale enslaved girls. Why didn’t the film crew document the men going with prostituted, enslaved women and girls and girl children in Pattaya? (My sources are military men themselves who have told me about what the fleet does in Thailand.)
During this 2005 deployment, the Nimitz also stopped at Dubai, a major trafficking destination in that part of the world. Large numbers of girls from Russia, the Ukraine, and Moldova are trafficked into this ‘sex playground’ by the Russian mafia. The girls are broken at nearby Pakistani labor camps where the pimps let a different man in every 15 minutes to mount the enslaved body. This goes on for days or even weeks until her spirit is gone. Until she is docile enough to accept rape by 30 or more men on a daily basis. These broken women and girls are the ones our sailors are using. The men see only the end product—the girl who must smile to survive even though she is no longer alive as a human being.
Another stop, Bahrain, is also a major trafficking destination. It was amusing to see the PBS crew filming the sailors visiting an orphanage under the guidance of a chaplain. I assume this behavior was staged as a PR stunt for the benefit of the PBS crew.
All the other port stops—Hawaii, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Perth, India—also offer enslaved, prostituted bodies. When the men left the ship in Hong Kong, there was a girl handing out cards to them saying “Happy Place.” The sailors snorted with laughter, obviously well–acquainted with these ‘happy’ places. Then the film crew followed the men on a shopping trip. Why no film crew accompanying them into the brothels?
One young sailor aboard the ship did mention how, on a previous trip, he and his crewmates has visited a bar/brothel in Rio where, “it was insane, the strippers were really going at it, on the bar tops.”
Usage of prostituted/enslaved/trafficked bodies is commonplace in the military. Of course, the navy is not going to voluntarily show a film crew this aspect of sailors’ behavior. I am disappointed that the woman who directed the show and the female co-producer continue to cover up this side of the military—that they did not film the sailors and their typical ‘sexual liberty’ activities in Pattaya and Dubai. Closer to home, I am disappointed these women did not film the sailors visiting the red-light areas in San Diego which are full of trafficked, enslaved Filipina girls. This director and producer have betrayed the raped bodies of all these women.
I would like to know what the women sailors aboard the ship think of this rape of their prostituted sisters—do they make the connection? High rates of sexual assault in the military are directly related to the time-honored rape of for-sale women by sailors. Train and allow men to rape one group of women, and they will rape others as well.
I read that the Nimitz is planning to dock in Hong Kong this month. Perhaps PBS could do some ‘postscript’ filming–follow the men into the brothels. As a woman who was raped and prostituted by the U.S. military, I would like my side of military history to be told. What is ‘fun’ for the sailors is life imprisonment in rape hell for us prostitutes. I wish women journalists and filmmakers would cover what happens to us.
Cordially,
Suki Falconberg, rape/prostitution survivor (except that I didn’t survive)
© 2008, Suki Falconberg
Suki is an ex-prostitute and the author of two novels: Tender Bodies and Whore Stories and Comfort the Comfort Women. Both are erotic satires on military prostitution and can be ordered at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.
Thanks for this amazing and powerful piece. I find Suki Falconberg’s words so moving. It is so important that it known that this violence towards prostituted women and girls by the military is modern-day slavery.
I am sick of the acceptance that the forces can rape and torture prostituted women and girls as part of their “leisure”. I am sick that so often many members of the public just see these men having rest after the stress of their job.
There is no interest in the conditions the prostituted women and girls are forced to live in. No interest in whether it is rape or not. No interest that many of those used violence sexually, mentally and physicially.
It seemed to me that most people turn away from the forces abusing prostituted women and girls. For to see it with a clear eye, would means seeing the prostituted women and girls as full human being who desreve the freedom to live a life without violence. The freedom to not be prostituted.
Thanks Heart, as Rebbeca says this is a powerful piece, written by a brave woman.
We women have no army, or navy, or police force; all their guns are trained on us.
I think that military rape is justified by US aggression globally. We have been taught that it is unpatriotic to question not only the soldiers but the whole military complex. These young women are willingly sacrificed in the name of patriotism. To admit that these men who serve so that you can sleep at night are capable of such violence is to admit that there is something wrong with how American hegemony is maintained. Very few want to own their global privilege enough to question what is done in the maintenance of it.
Apparently men who serve in the military (whether it is navy, army or airforce) all supposedly suffer immense sexual deprivation that when they are on leave it is paramount numerous women and girls must be made available for these men to sexually exploit and rape. One justification for the military condoning and promoting female sexual slavery is that men as a group need a constant biological release of their supposed ‘pent up’ sexual feelings.
I prefer to see military justification and immense involvement in setting up places such as Pattaya as ‘payment in kind to men who enlist in the military.’ After all, when countries go to war it was and is still is widely believed (justified and condoned) the male victors were entitled to rape and sexually abuse defeated women whose nationality was those of the ‘enemy.!’ But actually the global sex industry wherein women and girls are turned into men’s sexual slaves happens because so many men globally still believe and insist it is their ordained right and entitlement to rape and sexually abuse women and girls. Or, as they euphemistically call it ‘men are programmed or hardwired to need a constant fresh supply of female sexual partners.’
Yes indeed why didn’t the PBS film the real story of male sailors lives aboard ‘The Carrier.’ But then PBS would probably have been accused of being unpatriotic and demonising poor hard-working sailors.
I feel almost all form of prostitution is open to violence and terrible conditions for prostituted women and girls.
The use of prostituted women and girls by the military is the tip of an iceberg. All men that choose to use prostituted women and girls are buying into an industry that will and does “enslave” women and girls for their orgasm.
As long as men feel entitled to buy women and girls, they are paying for the raping, torturing, and mental abuse of prostituted women and girls.
I don’t care if those men are sailors, lawyers, work in a garage, students, soldiers, teachers, unemployed, youth workers, and on and on. Men from all background feel it their “right” to use prostituted women and girls.
To feed this market, the sex trade will move women and girls from country to country. Will move women and girls inside one country from city to city. Will be under pimps or managers who will and do use violence to control. Will use rape as as a means to control. The sex trade will close most prostituted women and girls away from the “real world”. The sex trade will brainwash prostituted women and girls to believe they could survive in the real world.
These are a few tactics that sex trade uses to control prostituted women and girls.
For me I would most prostituted girls and women are enslaved.
So all men that choose to buy women and girls for sex, are paying for modern slavery.
I have a rather poor view of the military as a general rule, but I wonder sometimes if the military simply reflects the values of a society as a whole. I see, within the workings and politics of the American military branches, an enlarged picture of the same awful paradigms of dominance and submission. It is rife with homophobia, racism, misogyny and so forth. These values seem to permeate much of the American lifestyle but appear to be held up and made ever larger within the military ‘community’, even to the point of celebration.
I think that what we may be seeing is a mere reflection of societal values within any given military. It is sometimes said that a person can look back into history at the chosen entertainments of a given society and determine much about that society based upon what passes as entertainment to the masses. I rather wonder if one could say the same of a societies (sic) military arm.
Tree of Finches gathered a list of awful things male members of the Navy say while on base:
http://finchtree.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/a-hall-of-shame/2/
Yep, I smell serial rapists…
Thanks for this disturbing post. It’s very important. I see the use of prostitution by the military as yet another tool in the dehumanization arsenal: it serves to reduce women to sex slaves, and reduces men to enslavers. It’s a horrible bargain: “here, I’ll take your soul and humanity, but in exchange you get to abuse women and girls.”
Thank you Suki Falconberg. Thank you for calling these sister filmmakers out, and all of us out.
I appologize for posting on a womens site but I do find femenist views interesting. I just have to say this one thing. I HATE RAPISTS, ALL RAPISTS. Rape no matter how it happens is horrible. I know a firls who was raped on a daily basis during childhood and she can no longer have children because of the damage to internal argans. I know a guy that was raped by his babysitter and her friends multiple times and is now pretty messed up due to his mom not caring enough to stop it. Rapists deserve corperal punishment and imprisonment and the men who traffic women and use them as objects for monetary gain or pleaure deserve to be brutally murdered. I don’t think I can express how much I hate all rapists enough with words alone so I’m going to stop posting.
I can not begin to tell you how proud i am that someone is preaching the same thing that i have been trying to get through the thick skulls of the men i work with. yes i am a female and very much in the navy and i have a major issue with this ongoing evolution. unfortunatly this does hit home for me, my fiance is guilty of doing such things and it takes alot for me to put this out here like this but i am not proud of his past. in fact i pray everyday i could go erase it myself, but the fact is whats done is done but what i can do is make sure he learns from it and that he teaches future sailors not to partake in this naval tradition. there is not one day that i let go buy and i don’t bring it up, because i believe that those poor innocent girls will never let one day go by and forget what has happened to them. who will give them back they’re innocence, nobody because its gone, its been raped from them. i am ashamed to be serving along side these men and i am dreading this january as i pull out for a 7 month deployment, where i know i will be faced with the horrible stories once we pull out of these foreign ports. i do wish that this issue could be brought to the attention of senior enlisted members and not just swiftly brushed under the rug, but until that time keep telling your story and i’ll keep trying to get through they’re thick skulls.