When women were first introduced into the Naval Academy by Congressional directive (1976), things were bad. Many of the men resented them, and took out that resentment on the particular women on board. Now thirty years on -- as a result of the pendulum having swung too far in the opposite direction -- things are once again bad. All women are treated as victims, potential or real, of all men. The problem with this is that you can't work together with people you assume to be ready to victimize you (the female perspective), or with people assuming the position of victim (the male perspective). You can only work together with equals. If women want, finally, to be treated as equals, they're not well advised to assume the mantle of victimhood. But this is exactly what they've done. Or, paradoxically, perhaps the brass has forced it on them in an attempt to show that they are too doing something about ongoing problems.

Some years ago the Navy -- and the Naval Academy -- instituted the SAVI program; a well-meaning program to address what was certainly an untreated problem: sexual assault in the Navy, typically (no duh) by men on women. The intrinsic problems of this program became clear in the recent trial for rape of the USNA quarterback (a topic whose reverberations continue to sound), where the Academy Superintendent was held to have been out of line in sending all-hands e-mails speaking of “the victim” before the trial had even started.

I can see how the Superintendent fell into this one. The full name of the almost-acronym SAVI (sounds like “savvy”) is “Sexual Assault Victim Intervention.” Quick-witted readers will see the problem immediately. It's the problem that tripped up the Superintendent and that caused the judge in the rape case to sustain a defense objection to referring to the young woman allegedly raped as “the victim.” That's just what was on the docket: was she the victim or not? You can't start off presupposing it. Yet the SAVI program does make that presupposition -- in its very name.

Furthermore, the SAVI program insists (I've read the dozens and dozens of pages of its many directives) that apparently most incidents of probable assault go unreported. This puts a premium on reporting; just bringing the charge is held to be a victory for the victims. Implicitly, the reported cases have to be punished as proxies for all those that never make it to the light.

This assumption was apparently behind the testimony in the rape trial of one of the “expert witnesses,” who turned out not to have had any contact with the alleged rape victim, and whose testimony consisted of projected statistics about the number of unreported rapes and assaults. The prosecution apparently thought this meant the case in hand had, therefore, to be a real rape. If the case makes it over the bar that prevents so many incidents from being reported, it has to be a really bad scene. The judge (quite correctly) brushed the witness aside as irrelevant to this particular case.

The SAVI program also insists that one sign of great trauma (i.e. that something really bad has happened) is that women are hesitant to protest. The illegitimate conclusion that we're encouraged to draw is that lack of protest means something very bad has happened. It's a form of conspiracy theory: The less the “victim” protests, the more has to have happened. The Martians came last night. Really? Where's their spaceship? Oh, they took that with them, of course.

This sets the stage for something that, in fact, I find absolutely no justification for (even in the SAVI/CMEO directives) -- a third party protesting on the part of the “victim.” That's what's happening in the upcoming court martial of the USNA LT who allegedly said some (yes, clearly inappropriate) things to a female midshipman. The complaint wasn't made by the midshipman (to whom the LT subsequently apologized, and who reportedly accepted his apology); it was made by a female officer on her behalf. Apparently the assumption was that the midshipman was so offended she couldn't bring herself to say so, or perhaps that she was so awed by the LT she couldn't even bring herself to be offended. The officer, superior to the LT, wasn't awed, so she could be offended.

The phrase from the directives that's being invoked here is the creation of a “hostile working environment.” This phrase doesn't actually come from the SAVI directives, but from the CMEO directives. However CMEO has, for administrative purposes, been folded into SAVI, so that even inappropriate language is treated as part of the slippery slope towards sexual assault. We've decided that every off-color joke is first cousin to rape. Whose environment is being made “hostile”? The officer's, who wasn't there? If this is possible, then I can be offended by the proverbial butterfly beating its wings in China.

Aside from creating an atmosphere of suspicion and innuendo, this makes everybody into busybodies, going around being offended on somebody else's behalf. You can't run a Navy in an atmosphere of victimhood and suspicion. You can't assume the men with off-color jokes are rapists. You can't assume there was a victim. You can't assume that the less the protest, the greater the offense. Nor can you assume that all incidents where someone is uncomfortable because reference is made to genitals is on the slippery slope to rape. Yet that's where we are, in terms of gender integration.

Yes, provide clear ways for women to protest a situation or incident. But if you want men to accept women as equals, women have to be required to act like equals, not victims -- to make their own protest, accept (or not) their own apologies, decide how far to take a situation. If women are such weak traumatized creatures they can't fight their own battles (I don't think they are, though the current system appears to), then men can't ever take them seriously as fellow warriors.