Former member of U.S. Marine Corps fights to reform culture

(WGHP) — When Stephanie Schroeder signed up to be a Marine after 9/11, she was ready for battle. The battle she got, though, was the last one she expected.

Shortly after she finished Boot Camp and got her first assignment, she said she was raped by a fellow Marine. She followed protocol and went to her superior officer to tell her what happened, and figured that she would have a somewhat sympathetic ear from that officer since she was also a woman.

It didn’t turn out like she’d hoped.

Stephanie got less than an empathetic hearing. The officer told her to, in essence, stop complaining.

That was enough to drive Stephanie from The Corps without pursuing the incident further.

“I was so broken and worn down that I couldn’t even start to face what I had been through,” Stephanie says.

Over the next decade, though, she learned a few things. First, she learned how prevalent sexual assault was in the military.

“Before I went in, I didn’t think that was even a thing,” she says. “After I went in, I was very shocked and then, after we started working on it, that started to come out just how many people that was.”

By “working on it,” she means finally finding officers who would listen to her about what happened and what it did to her. But, still, it took a long time to “right the ship.”

“In 2011, that’s when things started to change,” says Stephanie. “I met other survivors and that’s when I began to realize it wasn’t just me, it was a lot of us.”

Her message, when she finally got people to listen, was simple and straightforward.

“Look, we’ve been talking about this for many years, now, let’s move towards this and implement it,” she says.

For a while, she worked through Congress when Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger was there. Kinzinger was a former Air Force pilot who also joined the military shortly after 9/11. She also found a willing reformer in General Robert Neller, who was named as Commandant of the Marine Corps in September of 2015. But since Neller retired in 2019 and Kinzinger left Congress in 2023, she’s had to take a more circuitous approach to reaching top defense officials.

“What we do is we go to the United Nations and we use that as a point to come back in to be able to discuss with the brass of DoD, so sometimes it’s easier to do that than get legislation passed,” she says.

See more on Stephanie Schroeder’s battle to improve the Marine Corps in this edition of The Buckley Report.

Source: Fox 8 News Channel