Heartbreaking stories of sexual assault perpetrated against female soldiers and military contractors, including those of Maria Lauterbach, Jamie Leigh Jones, and Lavena Johnson, have shown that women in the military face risk harassment, rape, and even murder.
At an oversight hearing on sexual assault held by the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs last Thursday, Mary Lauterbach, the mother of Maria, and Ingrid Torres, a victim of sexual assault and an employee of the American Red Cross working with military bases, were called to testify. The subcommittee had also subpoenaed Dr. Kaye Whitley, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SARPO) office, and invited Michael Dominguez, principal deputy undersecretary for defense, to testify.
But Whitley didn't appear before the committee. When Subcommittee Chairman John Tierney (D-MA) inquired why Whitley hadn't shown, Dominguez said he instructed her not to testify before the committee. Tierney and Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted that it was illegal for Whitley not to appear before the committee with a subpoena. "Dr. Whitley is in serious legal jeopardy," Tierney said. "This is an unacceptable position for the Department to take." As a result, he dismissed Dominguez before Dominguez even delivered his testimony.
It's unclear why the DoD isn't willing to cooperate with hearings on sexual assault, but from the Tailhook scandal in 1991 to what appears to be deliberate resistance to cooperation with Congress today, the DoD's record on sexual assault is far from stellar.
The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) estimates that one in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, but chances of sexual assault on women in the military are worse. Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) recently said that 29 percent of women in the military have experienced sexual assault but as little as 8 percent are referred to courts marital. The Pentagon reported (PDF) this March that 6.8 percent of women and 1.8 percent of men in the DoD had experienced "unwanted sexual contact" in the previous year.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) preliminary report (PDF) released at the hearing last week surveyed a sample of servicemembers at 14 bases domestically and abroad. Roughly half of the 103 who said they had experienced a sexual assault in the previous 12 months chose not to report the incident, the report found. Women who experience sexual assault in the military seem not to report for a variety of reasons, including "the belief that nothing would be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip," says the GAO's report.
Often the ways sexual assaults are addressed across the branches aren't consistent with one another, as Torres discovered. As an employee of the American Red Cross, Torres worked with different branches when she was stationed on bases in Japan, Iraq, Korea, and Germany. While she had supportive personnel in Korea, the sexual assault response commanders stationed in Germany during her time there resisted her requests to keep paper records (so that her assailant, a doctor, might not access them).
Some of the branches have volunteer Victim Advocates (VAs) and other branches appoint them in each unit. Torres noted that the volunteers, often women who had been through a sexual assault themselves, tended to be better advocates than appointed ones since they had elected to fill the position. VAs also need the power to operate outside the chain of command so they can better protect victims from dangerous situations, Lauterbach said. A VA with the power to accelerate a base transfer might have saved her daughter's life.
Another solution that both Torres and the GAO report pointed to is that sexual assaults can be reported in two different ways: restricted and unrestricted. A restricted report allows a victim to confidentially report an assault and not necessarily press charges against the assailant. An unrestricted report, meanwhile, must be reported up the chain of command and automatically triggers a criminal investigation. An unrestricted report is especially problematic for women who have been assaulted by someone in the chain of command. By giving all victims of sexual assault at least the option to file a restricted report, more victims might be willing to report.
What SARPO ultimately needs, the GAO report concluded, is "an oversight framework-including clear objectives, milestones, performance measures, and criteria for measuring progress." But this is another area where the DoD has shown resistance. Congress directed the DoD to form a task force to address the issue of sexual assault in 2004, but it is only until recently that the task force has a full group appointed and they have yet to meet.
Congressman Chris Shays (R-CT), the ranking member of the oversight subcommittee, called for the formation of the task force in 2004 and noted that at the time the DoD kept telling him they were "days away from being fully operational." Still, no comprehensive database for tracking sexual assault has been created and there continue to be large inconsistencies for how SARPO policies are implemented.
But as dismal as it may look for victims and potential victims of sexual assault in the military, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren has recently shown new leadership on this issue. At a training session last month, Geren renewed a commitment to the SARPO program. "We will work in the area of sexual assault prevention, not just responding to the tragedy of sexual assault, but we want to be a model in how we prevent sexual assault," he said.
It seems clear that the military has a long way to go in addressing and preventing sexual assault. By creating clear and victim-friendly guidelines that are consistent across all branches, as well as creating high-quality training, the military might begin to prevent a number of sexual assaults that occur. As the GAO report indicated, the DoD has taken some steps toward addressing this problem, but the first step would seem to be cooperation.
