Sex for troops touchy subject

AN Australian Army captain says the Defence Force should consider sending prostitutes to “service” combat soldiers on the front line to relieve stress.

Captain Sally Williamson – currently on deployment in the Middle East – made the suggestion on an official Australian Army website.

She also wrote that if the front line was too dangerous for prostitutes, troops could be given sex toys instead.

Her article “Sex and War – A Conversation Army Has to Have” was posted earlier this month on the army’s official Land Power Forum blog and removed several days later.

It said chiefs were too “nervous” to talk about sex in the wake of a string of sexual scandals.

Capt Williams wondered “whether the army could contract Australian male and female sex workers to service troops in forward operating bases and air bases”.

These would be the same as the official Field Mobile Brothels the French military de- ployed around the airfields of Dien Bien Phu during the French Indochina War in 1954.

However, she found there were “moral, legal, practical, medical, and logistical barriers” to putting sex workers in the line of fire.

Instead, she urged army chiefs to loosen the rules on fraternisation to allow willing soldiers on the front line to “have sexual relations in a safe, secure and controlled environment”.

She said sex helped relieve the stress of “loneliness or prolonged absence from family, friends, partners and spouses”.

Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans Association NSW president Bruce Relph said: “If a soldier is going to war or on a peacekeeping operation, they need to keep sex out of the picture.”

Former Army officer and Australian Conservatives member Bernie Gaynor said: “I can’t believe that an officer wrote this article in the first place.

“It is even harder to comprehend how it was allowed to be published.”