The Pentagon Takes Aim at Sexual Assaults

The military plans a new database and other steps to help victims and catch perpetrators in the ranks

By Anna Mulrine

January 29, 2009 RSS Feed Print

A Department of Defense-wide sexual assault database is currently under development, according to Dr. Kaye Whitley, director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. Over the past three months, the military services have developed a proposal for how such a database should be constructed. Funding has now been secured and, she says, the department is "working hard to have it completed by January 2010.

"In the meantime," she said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, "we are collecting data regarding service referrals for victims of sexual assault."

Since 2005, 1,896 people have come forward to report sexual assault under a "restricted reporting" option that provided confidential disclosure for sexual assault victims. The committee heard testimony that the data shows that most of the reported victims (73 percent) are at the rank of privates through privates first-class, as are 54 percent of the offenders.

Whitley added that it is often difficult "to get victims to stay with the military criminal justice process." She noted that during testimony and investigations, they may have to "tell their story 25, 30 times, and it's very painful. And they drop out."

When Army divisions deploy under a new sexual assault response program, the Defense Department will assign two unit victim advocates per battalion and one sexual assault response counselor for every brigade.

Tags:
Army,
national security terrorism and the military,
military

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The BBC is currently reporting on sexual assault in the military. One in three women at war in Afghanistan, are reporting rape by "superior" officers, gang rape by fellow "soldiers". Nothing is being done about these rapes.

These women are fighting a war, WHY? What country needs women to fight in combat? Most countries conceed defeat before they make their women go to combat.

America needs teen aged women to fight? WHY

Those women are being sexually abused by our own military, and when they return home, what will they get? VA psychiatrists that treat them as if they were "crazy", they get "counseling" get on with your life, as if rape were nothing serious.

Rape in the military is a federal crime under US CODE 109A, and the UCMJ, numerous other federal titles as well. Try to find a JAG lawyer that did not defend the rapist. Find just a few cases, where the federal government enforced the law. They don't. They are allowing these rapes of our women.

Our women should not be sent to fight this war.

Most civilized nations only use men for war.

Beverly Prather of DE 11:52AM March 12, 2010

but I served during Vietnam Era and have heard all kinds of stories from other women who were raped in service despite the era or time they served. First of all, some of us never knew who the attacker was and how could we prosecute? Second, I believe that most women do or have not received the care that they should from the VA. We have been put in groups with men who have PTSD (some of the were offenders); we have been medicated so heavily that we were lucky to remember our names; we have been labeled crazy, borderline, or other disorders or somehow been blamed for the assault and rape that we may have suffered; and most of all, most of us are living in the shadow of what we might have been. This problem of sexual assault in the military has been on-going for many, many years. I use to work closely with women veterans, and have talked to those who served from World War II and it still continues today even though Congress has investigated sexual assault in the military as early as 1980 and a huge investigation in 1992. so where does this all end? If one does a research on Internet for sexual assault you will see so many stories are repeated over the years. For many of us, the trauma never end until we are shadows of what we could have been, hiding behind the curtains of our darkened homes, afraid to go out to do a simple errand until we are driven out for need of food and basics of life. Many of us are traumatized as much by the VA basic treatment of us as we were by the original events.

LKD of MT 3:15PM March 21, 2009

Until military sexual perpetrators are imprisoned and discharged-there will be no justice for female victims. Male sexual perpetrators should be put in the National Sexual Predator Database then perhaps that might discourage future actions by their brother cohorts.

Also, Until women are treated as equals-sexual violence will proliferate only female soldiers willsimply not report out of fear of harrassment.

Nadia of CA 6:17PM February 17, 2009

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