A Tale of Two Scandals: The Media Responses to Tailhook and Vanessa Guillen

Colleen Schoenfeld, California Institute of Integral Studies

The US Military is a large and diverse organization. Like the society it mirrors, it also has a long and storied history with violence, to include sexual violence. This paper examines two large-scale (of many) scandals which have taken place with regard to sexual violence in the military, known as military sexual assault or military sexual trauma. The two events, Tailhook in the early 1990s and the more recent 2020 Vanessa Guillen case, both kicked off firestorms of media coverage as well as demands from Congress for change, yet as will be explored, though the events of Tailhook and Vanessa Guillen were three decades apart, much of the problem and rhetoric remained the same. I set out to find out what changes, if any, had taken place to address sexual violence in the military and if media coverage and assumptions about victims were different in any way after nearly 30 years. What was found is that the victim blaming language in the early 1990s had shifted in the media to an institutional failure blaming of the military culture and continued failures to address sexual misconduct. However, also discovered was in social media comments and posts, many of the prior victim blaming statements are still held and being stated by the general public. Changes to policy have been minimal while efforts to subvert sexual misconduct and educate military members has been largely overhauled.

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 Presented in Session 195. Production of Social Problems