Achtung Baby

THE ARMY HAS A SEXUAL harassment problem. It has been rocked by four harassment scandals since November, the latest surfacing recently at a base in Germany. A harassment hotline set up by the Army at the end of last year has received 7,000 calls.

But the Army is no different than the rest of America, and it is enduring the same harassment phenomenon as any workplace. After all, soldiers are just us in uniform. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and state agencies, for example, received about 50,000 sexual discrimination complaints relating to civilian workplaces in 1995, including 15,500 harassment complaints.

Curiously, harassment in the Army is not new. A Pentagon source says that some of the cases reported to the Army hotline date back to World War II. "Sexual harassment was not invented at Aberdeen," admits a female Army officer, referring to the first major scandal, which broke at a Maryland base in November.

Photo: Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney So why are Army incidents making headlines now? Female and male soldiers are being thrown together in more situations than ever before. The Army integrated basic training in 1993, and the number of women in the total force has increased from 5.4 percent in 1975 to 14.3 percent today.

The most important factor, perhaps, has been the female soldiers who have started to go public with allegations. Following Aberdeen, a few weeks ago a former aide to the Army's top enlisted man, Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney (photo), went public with accusations that he had harassed her, setting off an avalanche of news reports.

The pattern is familiar to Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women's Law Center. The Army isn't seeing anything much different than what police forces, fire departments and other traditionally male-dominated workplaces experienced during integration. The first wave of women must endure hostile reactions, and they are small in number and easy to stereotype as inferior.

In fact, Campbell notes, these factors can be present in just about any workplace during integration. They were there when Yale University , for example, went co-ed.

What will bring an end to Army harassment? Possibly the same factors that cause it to diminish anywhere. Campbell lists the following:

When the number of women in a workforce reaches a critical mass, perhaps 25 percent, men begin to see that women vary the same as men in their ability to do the job. There is also strength in numbers.

As women rise in the organization and begin to take on more leadership roles, men begin to see them as part of the group and are more likely to treat them as equals. (In the Army, women are currently not allowed to serve in combat, making it difficult for them to achieve equal status.)

The Army has sometimes been at the leading edge of cultural change: it racially integrated in 1948, years before the civil rights movement. Maybe it's behind in the move toward gender equality, maybe not. One thing is for sure: it is only a mirror image of the culture it's pledged to protect.

--Mac McKean, Feb. 14, 1997