Governance by scandal? Eradicating sexual assault in the US military
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395716661342 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Author | Thomas Crosbie,Jensen Sass |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2016
Article
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(2) 117 –133
Governance by scandal?
© The Author(s) 2016
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Eradicating sexual assault
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395716661342
DOI: 10.1177/0263395716661342
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
in the US military
Thomas Crosbie
Center for Research on Military Organization, University of Maryland, USA
Jensen Sass
Institute for Governance & Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Australia
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between scandal and democracy through the case of sexual
assault within the US military. Scandal is routinely seen as hostile to democracy. It signals either
the corruption of prominent institutions or the decline of ethical journalism. But scandal may have
a positive dimension in forcing tainted institutions to correct their course. To explore this thesis,
we examine how the US military responded to news reports of sexual assault over a period of
nearly four decades. During the first three decades of this period, news reports of sexual assault
were widespread but largely ignored by military leaders. During the last decade, however, the
fact that sexual assault was endemic but largely ignored by the armed forces triggered a scandal,
one senior military figures were forced to address. In light of this case, the article concludes that
scandal can function as a mechanism of democratic governance, where it compels social and
ethical norms to be properly enforced.
Keywords
democracy, governance, media influence, military, scandal, sexual assault
Received: 7th July 2015; Revised version received: 11th May 2016; Accepted: 30th May 2016
Introduction
In the social sciences, as in public life, the reputation of scandal seems beyond repair.
Scandals concern grave normative violations that occur within prominent institutions. As
such, they entail the corruption of these institutions, and if the institutions in question are
sufficiently prominent, scandal can signal that a whole society has lost its way. But
scandals can also arise from nothing. Journalists seek scandal where none exists, thereby
cheapening politics and diverting our attention from matters of much greater import.
Corresponding author:
Thomas Crosbie, Center for Research on Military Organization, University of Maryland, College Park,
2112 Art-Sociology Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Email: tcrosbie@umd.edu
118
Politics 37(2)
In this article, we aim to complicate the reputation of scandal. We challenge the idea
that scandal is either merely trivial or strictly negative by examining how scandals can
correct the behaviour of public institutions. To this end, we focus our attention on a hard
case. The Department of Defense (DOD) is among the most powerful institutions in the
United States, one whose actions are governed by existential considerations, which trump
many of the concerns of the public – and indeed may trump the political concerns of the
President. The DOD, therefore, would appear an unlikely institution to be shaped by
scandal or any other media event – and yet, it is. When faced with a series of news stories
concerning sexual assault within its ranks, Defense leaders routinely acknowledged the
problem but offered little by way of reform, in effect ‘buffering’ their organizations
(Mezner and Nigh, 1995). But as journalists started to publicize the endemic nature of
sexual assault, military leaders were compelled to respond. They began by measuring and
reporting the incidence of sexual assault and, in doing so, they inadvertently established
standards against which all future military leaders would be assessed, so making further
reform irresistible. Scandal, to be sure, was not the sole driver of the changes in the US
armed services, but it will be central to any full explanation of these ongoing reforms.
In what follows, we examine this case and explore its implications for democratic
theories of governance. Our primary method is to examine the relationship between press
coverage of military sexual assault and the way senior military leaders address this issue
within Senate oversight committees. We begin, however, with a discussion of scandal
itself, setting out its defining features and exploring some of the key ways it has been
studied at the intersection of sociology and political science.
Scandal: a minimal definition
As befits its subject matter, the idea of scandal is itself contested (Apostolidis and
Williams, 2004; Markovits and Silverstein, 1988). To avoid this foray, we deploy a mini-
mal definition of scandal, one that enables us to productively delimit the object of our
analysis (Gerring and Barresi, 2003). More elaborate social scientific definitions, though
not without their uses, can obscure patterns which might otherwise be observed across
different contexts. Minimally, then, scandal comprises a normative violation that becomes
widely known and a matter of public concern. This definition captures basic features of
scandal, whether one studies traditional societies, early modern Europe, or late modern
America, and it sets it off from related phenomena such as ‘controversy’ or ‘dispute’, as
we shall see (Bellany, 2006; Gluckman, 1963; Thompson, 2000).
Scandal, as noted, entails the wide publicization of a normative violation, one with
institutional implications. The focal norm can be ethical, religious, political, legal, or
otherwise, but the key issue is not the facticity of violation but rather its perception.
Scandals can erupt over a perceived violation that turns out to be false (Fine, 1997).
Likewise, serious violations, though widely known, do not always become scandals
(Adut, 2005; cf. Entman, 2012; Sass and Crosbie).
That scandal is a proper object of social inquiry is hardly in doubt, but whether it is a
discrete object of inquiry is indeed open to question. Within the literature, the term
‘scandal’ is sometimes substituted for other terms, most often ‘controversy’, and this is
done in error (Clark, 2004; Nyhan, 2015; Thompson, 2000). These notions can be ana-
lytically distinguished and doing so allows us to better explain the unique powers of
scandal over otherwise powerful institutions and actors. Controversies, on our terms, are
characterized by deep disagreement. They routinely erupt between political parties and
Crosbie and Sass
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along the social, political, and ethical lines which divide populations into meaningful
groups. Scandals, by contrast, are characterized not by disagreement but by a specific
form of consensus. During a scandal, parties who ordinarily oppose one another agree
about the basic facts concerning a normative violation (Alexander, 1989). More specifi-
cally, they agree about the status of the values at stake, and about certain facts surround-
ing their breech. Such consensus often emerges because the facts in question, however
inconvenient, cannot be denied. Picture the images which triggered the Abu Graib scan-
dal (Anden-Papadopolous, 2008; Sass and Crosbie). That they depicted horrendous vio-
lations was never in doubt. During a major scandal of this kind, journalists, political
elites, and the general public cease to question the significance or reality of a violation;
they ask, instead, who is responsible and how justice should be served.
A good part of the current literature has examined the conditions under which scandals
emerge and the scope of their effects on politicians, voting, and public trust (Adut, 2005;
Basinger, 2013; Bowler and Karp, 2004; Entman, 2012; Lawrence and Bennett, 2001;
Nyhan, 2015; Rottinghaus, 2014a, 2014b). A crucial variable explaining the emergence of
scandals concerns the state of the media environment at the time of the normative viola-
tion. Like wildfires, scandals need air to grow. For this reason, crowded media environ-
ments are inhospitable to scandal: they often see journalists unable to report serious
violations (Nyhan, 2015). Another factor which explains the emergence of scandals con-
cerns the political status of the actors they concern. In the United States, presidents who
enjoy the support of the opposition party are less liable to be engulfed in scandal (Nyhan,
2015; Rottinghaus, 2014b). Furthermore, the symbolic character of the violation matters
– it needs to be represented as a compelling story (Entman, 2012; Sass and Crosbie).
Normative violations which involve technical details or arcane principles, where what is
at stake is unclear, have difficulty holding public attention.
Before beginning our analysis, we set out some conceptual distinctions. As noted,
most current scholarship on scandal has considered how they emerge or their effects on
particular individuals, political actors especially (for a key exception, see Rottinghaus,
2015). Our interest is with institutional responses to external pressure, scandal included,
over extended periods of time. We categorize these responses in three ways. The first we
term evasion. Here, an institution’s leadership recognizes the existence of a violation but
sees no need for public comment, let alone an organizational response. The second
response is rhetorical accommodation, where an institution’s leaders publicly acknowl-
edge the incidence or pattern of a violation but still avoid organizational reform. The third
possibility is reform, where leaders acknowledge both the incidence and gravity...
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