Washington: Sexual assault in the U.S. military has set a new record, with the Army up 26 percent, followed by the Navy at 19 percent, and the Air Force and Marines at two percent each, according to an annual report released by the Pentagon.
In fiscal year 2021, the number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military increased by a record 13 percent, the Pentagon said in an annual report released Thursday.
The Department of Defense’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) reported that as of September 30, 2021, 8,866 personnel were victims of sexual assault, up from 7,813 last year.
But only a fraction of sexual assaults are reported to authorities, and SAPR, using military surveys, found that 8.4 percent of women and 1.5 percent of men among the roughly 36,000 women and men in the workforce are said to be victims of unwanted sexual harassment.
Furthermore, the Pentagon stated that studies detailing the prevalence of sexual assaults “scientifically cannot determine whether there has been an actual increase.”
But the statistics point to an increase in other indicators, the report says, “indicating an overall increase in the unhealthy military environment” after 2018.
Elizabeth Foster, executive director of the Pentagon’s Office of the Armed Forces, said, “The data shows that this is the highest incidence rate of sexual assault against women” since the issue was first closely studied in 2006.
“For men, the statistics show that there has been an increase since 2006 at the most, and they are distressing and very depressing,” Foster said.
That is, 26 percent in the Army, 19 percent in the Navy, and two percent each in the Air Force and Navy. Last January, President Joe Biden issued an executive order criminalizing sexual assault under military law.
Sexual assaults, domestic violence and assaults on minors will be tried in military courts, and decisions on whether to take cases to court will be left to special prosecutors instead of military officers, it said.
In the past, senior officials have been accused of ignoring, covering up or making light of sexual harassment claims. The army resisted the changes, saying the previous system had done well with the need to maintain discipline.
But after previous efforts to bring the problem under control failed, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed an independent commission to make recommendations on how best to deal with sexual abuse in the military.
The commission is said to have decided that the only way to deal with it is to remove the power to prosecute or not to prosecute from the command hierarchy.