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Abuse of war zone detainees: veterans' perceptions of acceptability
William C Holmes1, Katherine O Gariti, Leila Sadeghi
1Physician, Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, PA 19104, USA.
Abstract:
We assessed detainee abuse acceptance and variables associated with it. Outpatients from a veterans' hospital were administered questionnaires with three increasingly severe scenarios of a U.S. soldier abusing a detainee. Three questionnaire versions differed in the final line of each version's scenarios, describing abuse either as: soldier initiated, superior ordered, or wrong by a "whistleblower" soldier. Three hundred fifty-one veterans participated, 80% with service during the Vietnam War. Zero tolerance for abuse--"completely unacceptable" regardless of who the detainee was--increased with abuse severity (16% for exposure, 31% for humiliation, and 48% for rape of detainee) and with soldier initiation. The strongest, most consistently significant odds were of depressed veterans, veterans with comorbid depression/post-traumatic stress disorder, and men being approximately 2, 3, and 4 to 20 times more tolerant of abuse than those without depression/post-traumatic stress disorder and women, respectively. There may be potential value to using similar scenario-based questionnaires to study active duty military perceptions of detainee abuse. Results may inform prevention policies.
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