Sexual Assaults Within the Military
Accusations from female soldiers, plus concerns voiced by elected officials, have caused the Penta- gon to investigate domestic violence and sexual misconduct in the military and to issue sweeping policy reforms 18 times over 16 years (see Office of the Inspector General, 2003; Corbett, 2007; Herbert, 2009; Myers, 2009; and Parker, 2011). Besides sexual assaults in the barracks on military bases, the problem has involved cadets at military academies and patients at mental health clinics run by the Department of Veterans Affairs (Walsh, 2011).
Technically, in the military, “sexual assault” investigations refer to a range of crimes, including rape, aggravated sexual assault, nonconsensual sod- omy, aggravated sexual contact, abusive sexual con- tact, wrongful sexual contact, and attempts to commit these offenses, as defined by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Many of the assaults are of the less serious contact types. The accused “subjects of investigation” are interrogated by military police officers of that branch of the service (Brown, 2013).
The size of the problem is measured in two ways. One is by monitoring the number of com- plaints and the other is by periodically surveying a sample of the nearly 1.5 million members of the U.S. armed forces. According to the survey, an esti- mated 19,000 men and women suffered sexual assaults in 2010. That figure rose to 26,000 in 2011. The stereotype of a female enlistee being forced to submit to the demands of a superior offi- cer, especially a drill sergeant during basic training, has some truth to it. Women are only 15 percent of all members of the service but account for nearly half of all the respondents disclosing that they suf- fered an assault. However, more than half (53 per- cent) of the respondents describing unwanted sexual contacts—or worse—were men and the alleged perpetrators were other men taking part in
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bullying or hazing. Most male victims are too ashamed or too fearful (of being punished, ignored, or ridiculed) to report what happened to them. As for formal complaints, about 3,500 were filed dur- ing a nine-month period ending in June 2013 (Dao, 2013; and Steinhauer, 2013).
Offenders can receive reductions in rank or dishonorable discharges and could be imprisoned. But a number of issues make it difficult for victims to get the machinery of the court martial system to deliver justice. Commanding officers control whether or not a case moves forward to prosecu- tion, and some seem inclined toward covering up what goes on in their units. Some of the accused are superior officers who take advantage of their rank and can retaliate against those who dare to file charges against them. Some soldiers are deterred from lodging complaints because they are subject to harsh cross-examinations at “Article 32” pretrial hearings (Steinhauer, 2013).
In recent years, the Pentagon has reformed the nature of the training commissioned officers and enlisted personnel receive right at the outset of their service and has established “Special Victims Units”. A Senate bill to remove cases from the chain of command and give prosecutors more power to pursue them was rejected in favor of a bill that assigned lawyers to complainants and removed the authority of commanding officers to overturn jury verdicts. Some would attribute the sexual assault problem to allowing women into the previously all-male world of the armed forces or to ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on openly gay soldiers. But the large number of male- on-male attacks due to bullying and hazing indicates that the problem goes deeper and started earlier and is rooted in the centuries-old macho norms of traditional military culture (Brown, 2013; and Dao, 2013).