Military sexual assault is declining, but more military members are reporting their sexual assaults, a 136-page Pentagon report revealed Thursday.
“[T]he importance of this upward trend in reporting cannot be overstated,” the military sexual assault report states. “Increased reporting signals not only growing trust of command and confidence in the response system, but serves as the gateway to provide more victims with support and to hold a greater number of offenders appropriately accountable.”
“That’s actually good news,” declared Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel of the higher number of reports during a Thursday press conference, noting that one in four women now report their assault — as opposed to one in 10 in 2012.
While sexual assault for women is down from 6.1% in 2012 to 4.3% in 2014, these are still huge numbers, hovering around 20,000 assaults a year. Just one in four of those assaults is actually reported, investigators found. For men — a group that still vastly underreports assaults — the number was largely unchanged, dipping just slightly from 1.2% to 0.9% from 2013 to 2014; while women are more likely to be raped, there’s more than a million men in the military, so even a small figure like 0.9% represents nearly ten thousand assaults.
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Furthermore, retaliation against those reports was also found to be a massive—and unmitigated—problem by investigators. In 2012, 62% of victims who reported unwanted sexual contact indicated they’d been retaliated against, socially and professionally.
“It should be a screaming red flag to everyone when 62% of those who say they reported a crime were retaliated against – nearly two-thirds – the exact same number as last year,” New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in a statement to msnbc. She’s been a leading advocate of reforming how military sexual assaults are handled. “And let me be clear, an estimate of 20,000 cases of sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact a year in our military, or 55 cases a day, is appalling, and remains at 2010 levels. There is no other mission in the world for our military where this much failure would be allowed.”
The military has been unable to combat retaliation, the report notes.
“[T]he Department was unable to identify clear progress in the area of perceived victim retaliation. Despite significant efforts by the Department, military victims continue to perceive social and/or professional retaliation,” the report says. “Retaliation, in any form, is unacceptable in the Department of Defense. Addressing this issue will be a top priority moving forward.”
Hagel reiterated that promise in his press conference, saying that victims “need to be embraced and helped, not ostracized.”









