According to the report, at least 8,866 sexual assault cases were reported at US military academies last year.
Washington:
The number of sexual assaults in the US military increased by 13 percent in fiscal year 2021, reaching a record high, according to an annual report published Thursday by the Pentagon.
The Defense Department’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) said there were 8,866 attacks “involving service members as victims or subjects” in the year as of September 30, 2021, compared to 7,813 the previous year.
But only a fraction of sexual assaults are reported to officers, and SAPR, using surveys of soldiers, estimates that about 36,000 active duty servicemen and men — 8.4 percent of women and 1.5 percent of men — during the year. experience unwanted sexual contact.
The Pentagon said it “could not scientifically determine whether there was actually an increase” because of the change in metrics used to measure sexual assault.
But other data pointed to an increase “suggesting an overall increase in an unhealthy military environment” since 2018, the report said.
Elizabeth Foster, executive director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Resilience, said, “Our numbers show that this is the highest estimated prevalence rate of sexual assault for women” since the issue was first studied closely, according to the Service. focused on the well-being of Member
For men, the level of attacks ranks second; The highest level was in 2006.
“These numbers are sad, and extremely disappointing,” Foster said.
The sharpest increase in attack occurred in the Army, with a 26 percent increase, followed by the Navy at 19 percent, and the Air Force and Marines with a two percent increase each.
In January, President Joe Biden issued an order making sexual assault a crime under military law.
The order means that sexual assault, domestic violence and assaults on minors will now be presented before a military court, and that decisions on whether to take cases to court will be delegated to special prosecutors rather than officers of the military chain.
Senior executives have been accused in the past of habitually neglecting, concealing or treating sexual harassment claims lightly.
The military was opposed to the changes, insisting that the previous system better met the need to maintain discipline in the ranks.
But because previous efforts to get the problem under control had failed, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed an independent commission to submit recommendations on how best to deal with perpetrators of sexual violence in the military.
The commission concluded that removing the power to prosecute or not prosecute cases from the command hierarchy was the only way to deal with it.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)