Study: Female service members face retribution for reporting sexual assaults

WASHINGTON – Two-thirds of women in the military who reported they’d been sexually assaulted endure professional retaliation or other social ostracism, Pentagon leaders said Friday.

In releasing an annual study required by Congress on sexual harassment and assault within the ranks, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said combating the problem had proven difficult.

“We’re not making enough progress in countering retaliation,” Carter said at a Pentagon briefing. “Too many service members feel that when they report or try to stop these crimes, they’re being ostracized or retaliated against in some way.”

Carter said he was issuing a directive for his top military and civilian advisers to devise a strategy for protecting service members who report unwanted sexual contact.

About 22 percent of female service members and 7 percent of male service members experienced some form of sexual harassment last year, ranging from crude jokes to assaults, according to the report.

“That’s abhorrent, and it has to stop,” Carter said.

Carter declined to answer questions, but his deputies were at pains to explain what, on the surface at least, appeared to be a contradiction in the study’s central findings: While the number of reported sexual assaults increased in 2014 for the fourth straight year to 6,131, a survey of troops done in an effort to capture information on unreported sexual assaults suggested assaults overall had declined.

“We continue to see an unprecedented increase in the reporting of sexual assault from victims, which suggests growing confidence in the department’s response system, and estimates indicate overall occurrences of the crime have decreased since 2012,” said Brad Carson, acting defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness.

Pentagon officials said extrapolations from the survey of 560,000 active duty and reserve service members set the total number of sexual assaults at 20,300 in 2014. The Pentagon made no such extrapolation last year, but the number of sexual assaults actually reported in 2013 was 5,518.

Forty percent of the women who reported they’d been sexually assaulted in 2014 said they’d also suffered professional retaliation because they’d reported the crime, according to a summary of the report. It did not break down the form of retaliation.

Another 26 percent of women said they felt they had been ostracized by their fellow soldiers because they had reported the crime.

The Pentagon has been grappling with the problem of military sexual assault for decades, going back to at least 1991, when Navy and Marine Corps aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted 83 women and seven men at a Las Vegas convention in what became known as the Tailhook scandal.