Joan Smith: The ancient fears stirred by women at war

A woman's place, we have discovered in the last few days, certainly isn't on Iranian television, wearing a headscarf and nervously smoking a cigarette. Nor is it, it seems, in a high-speed patrol boat on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which is where Leading Seaman Faye Turney and 14 other British sailors and marines were captured by the Iranians last month. As far as some commentators are concerned, Ms Turney's captivity appears to have confirmed every dire warning they have ever given about what will happen if women are allowed anywhere near the front line.

Ms Turney is a mother, inevitably prompting suggestions that women with young children shouldn't serve in the armed forces (unlike fathers who, apparently, can get blown to bits as often as they like). Obviously this argument appeals chiefly to people who believe that women shouldn't do a great number of things, from becoming priests to going out to work at all. In the modern world it is the province of a conservative minority, most of them belonging to a generation which grew up before the spectacular successes of the 1970s women's movement.

It is true that the Iranians have paraded Ms Turney on TV, confirming fears that women prisoners will be singled out for special treatment, thus endangering not just the women themselves but male colleagues who, allegedly, may do something rash to protect them out of motives of chivalry. The underlying anxiety, which few commentators express openly, is that captured women will be raped, which would naturally cross the mind of any woman in Ms Turney's unenviable position. Whether the Iranians would do something so outrageous and provocative seems unlikely.

In any case, most women who serve in the military know that you don't have to be held hostage by unfriendly forces to get sexually assaulted. You don't even have to be in the military, as the thousands of women civilians herded into rape camps in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s can testify. In Darfur, rape is once again being used as a tool of war, several years after it became both a war crime and a crime against under humanity under international law, and six years after the first successful prosecutions for rape in war at the The Hague.

More to the point in this context, nearly a third of female veterans surveyed by the US Department of Defense in 2003 said that they had experienced rape or attempted rape by their own colleagues, a staggering figure which confirms alarming anecdotal evidence of sexual abuse of women in the American military; it is clear that the American armed forces have a huge, unresolved problem on their hands, much of it caused by superior officers preying on young women under their command.

No one would suggest that it exists to the same extent among British forces, but last month a chief petty officer was jailed for five years at a court martial after he became the first member of the Royal Navy to be found guilty of rape since women began going to sea in 1990.

In an even more extraordinary development, Colonel Janis Karpinski, the woman officer who was once in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, has claimed that some female American soldiers were risking death from dehydration in 40-degree heat because they feared being raped in the women's latrines at night; she said it had become a widespread practice among women soldiers based at Camp Victory in Iraq to avoid drinking fluids in the evening, so afraid were they to use the latrines after dark.

None of this will provide much comfort to Ms Turney's friends and relatives, but it suggests that the problem of sexual violence in conflict zones is more complicated than conservative commentators would have us believe. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that fears that female soldiers, sailors and air crew will be subjected to sexual violence are in fact a cover for something else, which is the way in which captured military personnel of both sexes are vulnerable to explicitly sexual humiliation, up to and including rape.

Controversy still rages over what is perhaps the locus classicus of such accounts, given by T E Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia, as he was known, offered different versions of the story at different times, but in essence what he described was a beating and homosexual rape after he was captured behind Turkish lines at Deraa in 1917. Whether or not the incident happened as Lawrence described it, it vividly expresses the way in which prisoners-of-war are feminised by their captors, for whom imposing sexual humiliation is a thrilling expression of masculine domination.

This was my first thought when the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their American guards at Abu Ghraib became public, shocking the world. Graphic photographs of naked, trussed-up captives, and of men being forced to simulate sex with each other, were horrifying but not really surprising, even though the abusers included a woman, US Army reservist Lynndie England. Many observers were astonished by the fact that the guards were so clearly enjoying themslves, when the truly amazing aspect of the whole sordid episode was that the participants were stupid enough to photograph each other.

If soldiers stand for masculinity and power, prisoners-of-war represent precisely the opposite. In the great museum of Pharaonic art in Luxor, on the Upper Nile in Egypt, prisoners are shown grovelling at the feet of the pharoah who has defeated their armies, testifying to the enduring human tendency to revel in power and military success.

The West has traditionally projected conflicting ideas of sexual potency and effeminacy onto Arab men, creating a volatile mixture of envy, fear and disgust; E M Hull, the wife of a Yorkshire pig farmer who had never been near the Arabian desert, supplied unintentional insights into this emotional maelstrom in her best-selling novel The Sheik, which was turned into a hugely successful movie starring the sexually ambiguous Italian heart-throb Rudolph Valentino.

It might have been helpful if someone had pointed out this history to Karpinski and senior American officers serving in Iraq, where the potential for sexual abuse of prisoners should have been clear from the start. It's also hard to avoid the conclusion that Western military authorities remain in denial about the extent of sexual abuse in their own ranks, towards prisoners and colleagues alike, and it's worth bearing this in mind each time right-wing commentators get hot under the collar, without any hard evidence, about how "they" are treating "our" women.

I'm always suspicious of displays of chivalry, which are often an excuse for reactionary attitudes or evidence of displaced fears. We should be worried about Ms Turney's safety in Iran not because she's a woman but because, like her 14 male colleagues, she's a human being.

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