As if you need another reason to keep your children away from military recruiters.

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.

A six-month Associated Press investigation found that more than 80 military recruiters were disciplined last year for sexual misconduct with potential enlistees. The cases occurred across all branches of the military and in all regions of the country.

At least 35 Army recruiters, 18 Marine Corps recruiters, 18 Navy recruiters and 12 Air Force recruiters were disciplined for sexual misconduct or other inappropriate behavior with potential enlistees in 2005, according to records obtained by the AP under dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests. That's significantly more than the handful of cases disclosed in the past decade.

The AP also found:

• The Army, which accounts for almost half of the military, has had 722 recruiters accused of rape and sexual misconduct since 1996.
  
• Across all services, one out of 200 frontline recruiters , the ones who deal directly with young people, was disciplined for sexual misconduct last year.
  
• Some cases of improper behavior involved romantic relationships, and sometimes those relationships were initiated by the women.
  
• Most recruiters found guilty of sexual misconduct are disciplined administratively, facing a reduction in rank or forfeiture of pay; military and civilian prosecutions are rare.
  
• The increase in sexual misconduct incidents is consistent with overall recruiter wrongdoing, which has increased from just over 400 cases in 2004 to 630 cases in 2005, according to a General Accounting Office report released this week.

You know I want to support our military as much as I can, I know they are overworked and spread incredibly thin fighting two wars and trying to get help to their comrades in arms as soon as possible. But if they don't do some serious housecleaning they are going to find themselves vilified like they have not been since Vietnam.

We have soldiers raping and killing Iraqis, we have soldiers shooting civilians like they are part of some bigoted computer game, we have recruiters falsifying documents so that they can enlist kids much to screwed up to be in the Army, and now we have recruiters using their positions of power to rape young women.

All in all this makes the United States military look like a gang of thugs getting off on dominating and murdering anybody perceived as weaker then them. This must be stopped now!

I don't think that it will be effectively dealt with until we get our soldiers out of Iraq. Until then I would suggest that any parents out there with children old enough to serve, to keep them home and away from these predators until they do some internal investigations and find out just how screwed up the military has become.