In 2003, sixty-one women cadets reported sexual assault at the US Air Force Academy, prompting intense media scrutiny and congressional inquiry. The literature on these assaults draws primarily from media and military reports and surveys, with little attention to the daily, lived experience comprising the problematic gender climate. To address this gap, we employ retrospective participant observation spanning the 2003 crisis to explore the everyday gendered interactions and institutional structure that sustained the rape-prone environment. This study makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, we amend Philippe Bourgois’s continuum of violence to include militarization in order to detail more effectively the contribution of quotidian sexual harassment to a rape-prone culture. Second, we identify institutional features—adversative education, unit cohesion, and assessment—as key contributors to sexual harassment and assault and as contributors to victims’ reluctance to report these offenses. Our findings suggest the need for greater scrutiny of sexual harassment as well as intervention into problematic institutional features. We submit the gendered continuum of violence as a powerful analytical tool for feminist research with applications beyond the military, providing new insights into the resilience of gendered harassment and assault but also suggesting new avenues for change.
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