As the credits roll, and the post-screening discussion panel assembles at the front of the Lexi Cinema in Kensal Rise, no one speaks. The film’s relentless roll-call of violations has reduced us to silence:
- Robin Khale US Marine Corps: It’s just after 3am, I see shadow of a human head over my body.
- Ayana Defour US Army: Next thing you know, like I wake up and like he’s on top of me.
- Christina Jones US Army: he pushed my legs apart and put himself on top of me and started pulling up my shirt.
- Captain Debra Dickerson US Air force: and I wake up, and he’s on top of me. He’s already penetrated me.
- Lee Le Teff US Army: He put his locked and loaded 45 at the base of my skull, engaged the bolt so that I knew that there was a round chambered.
- Katie Webber US Army: All I could do was continue to concentrate on breathing.
- Valine Demos US Army Medical Corps: when we got tested I had trich, and gonorrhoea and I was pregnant.
The New York Times said of Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War, that “this is not a movie that can be ignored”. It is a bitter irony for the women involved that one of the main things that cannot be ignored about this unflinching investigation into rape in the US military is how very ignored the many rapes it documents have been. Tia Christopher of the US Navy tells the filmmakers that when “they took me before my Lieutenant Commander, he says ‘d’you think this is funny’, I was like, ‘what do you mean?’, he’s like, ‘is this all a joke to you?’, I was like, ‘what do you mean?’ And he goes, ‘you’re the third girl to report rape this week; are you guys like all in cahoots, you think this is a game?’” Rather than leading commanding officers to think the army might have a problem with rape, the sheer volume of sexual assault in the military leads them to think that the women who report it must be lying.
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