y daughter just started high school. This
milestone was marked by the arrival in our home of a ream of
paperwork. Along with the usual bureaucratic permissions, I
found tucked into this package a seemingly innocuous form that
carries extraordinary consequences: Failing to fill it out might
result in my daughter being harassed, assaulted, or being
fast-tracked to fight in Iraq.
This form asks us if we want to opt out of
having our daughter's contact information sent to the U.S.
military. If we overlooked this form, or did not opt out for
some reason, our high school is required to forward her
information to military recruiters. This is thanks to a stealth
provision of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. It turns out
that President Bush's supposed signature education law also
happens to be the most aggressive military recruitment tool
enacted since the draft ended in 1973.
The military recruiting requirement of NCLB
has forced many schools to overturn longstanding policies on
protecting student records from prying eyes. My local high
school, like most in the country, carefully guards its
student-directory information from the countless organizations,
businesses and special-interest groups that are itching to tempt
impressionable teens. Now, parents and schools are being shoved
aside, and the military is being given carte blanche access to
our kids. Not surprisingly, abuse has followed closely behind.
|
DEAN
RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES (2003) |
In August, an Associated Press investigation
revealed that "more than 100 young women who expressed interest
in joining the military in the past year were preyed upon
sexually by their recruiters. Women were raped on recruiting
office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en route
to entrance exams ... . One out of 200 frontline recruiters —
the ones who deal directly with young people — was disciplined
for sexual misconduct last year."
Take the case of Indiana National Guard Sgt.
Eric P. Vetesy, accused of sexually assaulting six female
high-school recruits in 2002 and 2003. According to the
Indianapolis Star, Vetesy "picked out teens and young women with
backgrounds that made them vulnerable to authority. As a
military recruiter, he had access to personal information,
making the quest easier."
The NCLB recruiter provision is but one piece of a concerted
effort by the Bush administration to reach unwitting teens
without their parents' permission. In June 2005, privacy
advocates were shocked to learn that for two years, the Pentagon
had been amassing a database of information on some 30 million
students. The information dossiers on millions of young
Americans were to help identify college and high-school students
as young as 16 to target them for military recruiting.
The massive database includes an array of personal information
including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail
addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the
students are studying. The Pentagon has hired the
Massachusetts-based company BeNow to run the database. By
outsourcing this work to a private firm, the government is
circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold
citizen information.
If you are concerned about how this information on your children
might be used, you should be: The Pentagon has stated that it
can share the data with law enforcement, state tax authorities,
other agencies making employment inquiries, and with foreign
authorities, to name a few. Students will not know if their
information has been collected, and they cannot prevent it from
happening.
The main obstacle to getting kids into the military — concerned
parents — has at long last been circumvented. Private companies
can now harvest data on children, and provide recruiters — some
of whom are also now private contractors — with the information
they need to contact kids directly.
Should skeptical parents find out that the "Mr. Jones" calling
for Johnny is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the
military is spending millions to learn how best to persuade or
bypass these negative "influencers." One Pentagon study is
focused exclusively on changing mothers' attitudes to enable
recruiters to "exert some influence on mothers who are currently
against military service."
Grassroots groups are mobilizing against the Pentagon's massive
student-recruitment and data-mining campaigns. Leave My Child
Alone (www.leavemychildalone.org) offers online opt-out forms
that students and parents can download and submit to schools to
keep their names off of recruiter contact lists. The group
estimates that as of 2006, 37,000 students have opted out of the
No Child Left Behind requirement. Students can also file another
form to send to the Pentagon to have their names removed from
the giant student database.
I signed my form directing our local high school to withhold my
daughter's contact information from military recruiters. Other
parents undoubtedly missed it. When military recruiters
eventually come knocking at their doors, these families will
find out the hard way what President Bush really meant when he
promised to "leave no child behind."
David Goodman is co-author of "Static:
Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight
Back," published by Hyperion. He lives in Vermont.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
