Social Media Blamed for Rocketing Israeli Military Sex Crimes

Israel is wary of the effect of social media on its armed forces. There have been twice the number of sex crime allegations in the military than there were in 2012. The charges include violation of privacy, battlefield security breaches and even full-on sexual assault, according to rt.

"This is a very troublesome phenomenon, and soldiers don't understand how grave it is," chief military prosecutor, Colonel Udi Ben-Eliezer, told the journal, as cited by Reuters. "The telephone is easily available, and therefore the crime becomes very easy to do."

A number of cases are linked with instant messaging apps that infringe privacy and show how incriminating photographs are shared. "These comprise 35 percent of the transgressions", says the official military journal Bamahane, according to Jerusalempost.

For instance, one soldier photoshopped a female colleague's face on a body, and threatened to circulate it around unless she had sex with him. In another case, a soldier is seen barking at female soldiers taking showers.

Even female soldiers have been putting up semi-nude pictures with "combat gear".

WhatsApp is a big hit with the Israeli armed forces. Brigadier-General Sima Valnin-Gil agreed that it had been the main topic of discussion last summer, during the Gaza Protective Edge operation.

"Do I think WhatsApp is liable to be an acute problem in the future? Yes, unequivocally," she said last summer, according to Reuters.

Putting up the names of your dead victims before the next of kin find out is also a crime that soldiers have been accused of. It is a security and humanitarian issue to the Israelis.

However, it is impossible to stop the flow of information through WhatsApp. "First of all, it's not under my aegis," she continued. "Secondly, you would have to expand the body called censorship dozens of times over in order to handle all of the existing WhatsApps groups."