Harassment & Hurt

March 15, 2006

Lawsuits are often inspired by someone looking for one thing.
An apology.
So it seems with Kaitlyn, a 16-year-old girl who had some problems with a fellow teen in her Traverse City Young Marines unit. Kaitlyn had achieved the third highest rank in just two years, and in the process, “grew up a lot, learned a lot of new stuff, did a lot of cool things.”
But all that changed at a Marine Corps birthday bash at the Holiday Inn in early November. Kaitlyn was waiting with her color guard and talking with another boy, Darren, 17, about the ribbons she’d earned.
“What’s this one?” he asked. He pointed to a ribbon with his finger. “What’s this one? What’s this one?” And then he pushed her breast with his finger. An instructor, standing by, chuckled. Kaitlyn, who is a bookish looking girl and wears little make-up, didn’t report the incident. After all, her instructor saw what happened and just laughed.
A month later, Kaitlyn was in a relay race at the Army Reserve Center near the old Traverse City airport, where the Young Marines meet every Thursday night. She was standing behind several boys, away from the line where the tagee takes off. Darren reached past the boys and pushed her breast.
Kaitlyn was upset and immediately told her best friend, Todd, what had happened. Todd’s mother, a Young Marines instructor, took Kaitlyn home and sympathized with her. She advised her mom, Diane Burk, not to contact the police, but to call the commander, Wade Boyd, who would be home in a few hours.
Kaitlyn and her mother decided it was unlikely the touching was accidental. Darren had already been demoted last summer after he had touched another girl inappropriately while waiting for the parade to start. Kaitlyn saw the girl crying and an instructor told her what had happened. Darren was demoted, but wasn’t kicked out because the girl had inappropriately touched him too. He was warned he’d be kicked out if it ever happened again.
Burk did call the police, feeling the incident should be reported immediately and there was no guarantee that the Young Marines would take action. A few days later, Darren told the Young Marines that it was an accident, but confessed to police on tape that he touched Kaitlyn on purpose. He said he was just joking around.
Despite that admission, Kaitlyn’s world began falling apart. The commander and instructors of the Traverse City Young Marines would side with Darren, she’d lose her two best friends, one of whom would spread rumors about her at school, and she’d be shunned by the Young Marines, a group she loved.

Instructors believe it was an accident
Normally when something like this happens, the Young Marines hold a court martial where both sides present their story. Four instructors did question Kaitlyn for the court martial, but suspended the second part of the court martial on the day Darren was arrested. Commander Wade Boyd explained to Burk that he would wait for the court decision.
Kaitlyn said the instructors were skeptical about her story because she first pointed to one area of her chest and later pointed to a different place (Kaitlyn said she was too shy to point to the real area at first). Another complicating factor was that Todd told police he had seen everything and filled out a detailed report. Later he recanted the report and said that Kaitlyn had told him to lie.
Kaitlyn said Todd’s story was absolutely untrue. But now she had been branded a liar by the instructors, Todd, and Callie, who was Todd’s girlfriend. Callie was also one of Kaitlyn’s best friends, but she told other kids at school about the incident. Kaitlyn soon began to feel the pressure and often came home from school in tears.
The instructors felt that Kaitlyn and her mother over-reacted by calling the police and ultimately concluded it was an accident, Kaitlyn said. Some felt that Darren had mental disabilities and lacked social skills because he was home-schooled. Todd had also said that Kaitlyn was a “man hater” because her sister had been sexually assaulted 15 years ago as a pre-teen (although she had never reported it), and because Kaitlyn made comments about “typical male behavior” when she watched movies.
Perhaps part of the problem was a change in leadership. Commander Ed Wilson, who demoted Darren after the first incident, died suddenly in August and was replaced by Boyd, a long-time veteran of the Young Marines.
Boyd was reluctant to talk about this case for reasons of confidentiality. He did say, however, that none of the instructors saw anything happen and they were right there. He also said that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty. “The instructors are my eyes and ears. I can’t be everywhere at once.”
He said that unintended things happen when the kids are playing games.
“A relay race, a kid bumps into another kid. What is that? In sports, there are interactions all the time. We have girls and boys together all the time, and the kids are always supervised. We do our level best. There again, nobody saw anything. This is a youth group’s worst nightmare.”
Boyd said he would make the same decision if he had to do it over again.
If someone was convicted of sexual harassment, would he ask that person to leave the Young Marines?
“Every situation is different,” Boyd said and then paused. “It’s not tolerated, so I’d have to say yes. I don’t know what else to say. We have our rules and regulations that we go by. The kids are supervised all the time. We have girls and boys together all the time, and our goal is to avoid any type of situation like this. We have classes on appropriate conduct. That’s part of our training.
“In the 32 plus years that the Young Marines has been here, nothing like this has ever happened and I’ve had 2,500 kids through the program. It kind of blind-sided me,” he added.
After the Young Marines cancelled the court martial and Darren admitted guilt, Darren was allowed to stay in the Young Marines. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn, in exasperation, went to a meeting and gave a letter to four instructors asking for an apology.
She also attended a December 22 meeting, but felt humiliated; the instructors talked about her while standing right next to her. She left for good. No one called. No one apologized.
The next time that Kaitlyn saw her instructors was in 86th District Court. They were there to support Darren, who pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of indecent expo-sure. At the sentencing, Commander Boyd tried to present a letter in Darren’s defense to Judge Mike Haley.
“In the letter, he accused the police of lying,” Burk said. “Haley told him right in court that it was outrageous and he wouldn’t even consider it.”
As Kaitlyn was leaving the courtroom, Darren’s father called her a bitch and followed her out to the hallway to harass her. A parole officer, a woman, told him to knock it off and Kaitlyn was escorted to her car.
Darren was sentenced to 45 days in jail, two years of probation, counseling, and he was banned from participating in the Young Marines for two years.

A military culture?
The Young Marines is not a paramilitary organization nor does it recruit youth for the armed services, but it has the feel of military. Drills, rank, uniforms, lots of saluting. And like the military, the Young Marines was a male bastion before opening up to girls in 1975.
Problems of sexual harassment and
male chauvinism in the military are legendary. Perhaps the most notorious was the conviction of a staff sergeant for raping six women. Prosecutors said Delmar Simpson used his authority as a drill sergeant to prey upon women. This was a key case causing society at large to rethink rape. Prosecutors argued that Simpson used “constructive force,” meaning, “I am your boss, your drill sergeant, and you go along because I have power over you.”
The conviction came on the heels of a 1995 Department of Defense survey that showed 55 percent of military women said they suffered uninvited and unwanted sexual attention during the last 12 months.
And problems have persisted. In 2003, an investigation found that the Air Force Academy had not properly investigated sex harassment allegations and victims reported that they were punished for saying something. As a result, the academy instituted a blanket amnesty for cadets who report being assaulted.
The most recent news of sexual harassment cropped up in the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut; a new report said that many women believed the academy is a “bastion of male chauvinism fueled by an old-boy network reaching beyond the academy itself.”
Why do these problems persist? Is it because the military culture is rooted so deeply in a warrior mentality with the presumption of male superiority? Can such a culture truly embrace modern rules of sexual behavior?
Interestingly, Kaitlyn said a female instructor counseled her to slug Darren the next time he molested her, a suggestion that she found insensitive.
“Instead of kicking him out of the group, she just thought I should just wait for him to do it again,” she said.
Judith Stiehm, author of It’s Our
Military Too! has suggested that the military needs to teach women how to properly retaliate. In a 1996 New York Times article, she told the story of how a commanding officer pressured a young Marine sergeant to sleep with him. She finally conceded to go to a hotel and waited for him to undress and slip into the bathroom. She picked up his clothes, returned to the base, and delivered his clothes into the hands of the military police. Problem solved.

Not over yet
The commander’s decision to suspend the court martial and to side with Darren prompted Kaitlyn and her mother to seek out Traverse City attorney Grant Parsons to file a lawsuit. Parsons agreed they have cause.
“I am really personally angered by this – the leadership showed up in court to defend the perpetrator,” Parsons said. “That’s ridiculous. The organization, which is supposedly about honor and duty, doesn’t even have the sense of honor to recognize the harm here. You’d think they’d be the first ones to stand up for the American way, and traditionally those institutions have had the hardest problems because they were male dominated for so long. It’s vestiges of prejudice that survive. It’s not only the harm to my client, it’s harm to the boy who was allowed to do this. And really encouraged. My client is the one getting shunned.
“She’s a member of the Young Marines for two years, achieved third to the highest rank, she’s done everything to deserve rank, respect, honor, and some goofy kid who grabs her breast is more important than she is? Why is that? Because it would seem the organization is inherently flawed. The damage done – the whole point of sexual assault and sexual humiliation – has nothing to do with sex, it’s all about power.”

The damage done
It’s hard to understand how easy it is to damage a teen’s psyche – an age when a badly placed zit or a mean word by a respected teacher rocks a teen’s fragile world, Parsons said.
“That’s why hazing is so damaging to kids. I represented a kid getting hazed in the Central High School gym eight years ago. This kid was held down by three guys on the wrestling team and the fourth guy has a bowel movement and wipes his bare ass on his face. The awful thing was, when the kid went to the teacher (Robert Whitman, who was also the assistant wrestling coach at the time) to complain what these kids had done, the teacher laughed in class, and told everybody about the event and all the kids called this poor kid a brown-noser.
“By the time he got to a counselor, he was in serious emotional trouble. We went through a litigation process -- two of the kids who held him down sincerely apologized. The other two were insulting and unrepentant.
“The good news is by the time we were done with the lawsuit, this kid was so redeemed and he wants to be a lawyer now because he saw that the justice system works. It was an amazing turnaround. But before he got into counseling and to me, he had suffered such humiliation.
“At this age, it’s a time of such turbulence, you’re trying to build your image and you’re so susceptible to peer pressure and to authority figures. If a person with authority who is familiar with you either abuses you or betrays your confidence, that is a fundamental cracking of your personality, your foundation.”
Kaitlyn said she was harmed by Darren’s actions, but the betrayal of her instructors and friends caused a much deeper pain.
“No one should ever have to go through this, especially for what somebody considers a joke. Labeling me as a liar and losing all my friends. The way they treated me, is worse than what this kid did. I got hurt.”


What is the Young Marines?
There are so many misconceptions about the Young Marines that maybe it’s best to define what it
is not.
The public most often sees these kids, age 8 to 18,
in summertime parades wear-ing camouflage uniforms and marching in lockstep. In fact, the Young Marines is not
a paramilitary organization, although it is the official youth program of the U.S. Marine Corps.
The Young Marines is also not a group designed for problem children who need a good dose of discipline. The group emphasizes self-discipline, but it draws kids from all walks of behavior, often kids who have family members in the military.
And despite its serious name, the Young Marines is a lot like a scouting program where the kids have fun while working for medals and ribbons. Every year, for example, the group goes on a winter camping trip and builds a snow shelter that’s kept “warm” with a candle.
The Traverse City unit often meets at a building in Interlochen where kids can go down a zip line, rappel down a tower, and scale up a climbing wall. They also raise money for good causes, such as the Father Fred Foundation, Toys for Tots, and Adopt-A-Highway. They also do nice things for veterans’ groups, such as sending thank-you cards to hospitalized veterans, cleaning up a disabled veteran’s yard, or visiting a veteran in the hospital.
About 40 to 50 boys and girls belong to the Traverse City Young Marines, nearly a third of them girls. The group meets once a week, and attracts kids from seven different counties, as far away as Boyne City and Clare. They meet every Thursday night for two hours, said Wade Boyd, the unit’s commander.
Each youth must first pass 26 hours of “boot camp” – weekly meetings that teach general subjects such as history, courtesy, drills, physical fitness, and military rank. After graduating, the kids can earn ribbons for survival skills, wilderness training, swimming classes, and first aid classes.
A total of 10,000 kids are involved in Young Marines across the country.

Young Marine Obligation
“From this day forward, I sincerely promise, I will set an example for all other youth to follow and I shall never do anything that would bring disgrace or dishonor upon God, my Country, and its flag, my parents, myself or the Young Marines. These I will honor and respect in a manner that will reflect credit upon them and myself. Semper fidelis.”