I read in a military.com article that according to the Pentagon, there were 13,000 male victims of sexual assault in the Army last year–male on male stuff. This figure surprises me. Opinions?
Recent news posted: http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/military-suffers-wave-of-gay-sex-assaults/
Deleted because study is worthless crap.
It’s amazing what the media chooses to report and ignore.
never mind
Nope not one iota, in fact the few who characteristically post in every single thread where homosexuality is mentioned in this particular sub-forum will jubilantly explain these reports away as mere homophobic hyperbole. :cray:
It is statistical manipulation.
The Defense Department survey of sexual assault in the military during fiscal 2012 estimated 26,000 assaults took place in the armed forces. Nearly 3,000 of them were formally reported. Just more than 6 percent of women reported being victims of assault and 1.2 percent of men said the same. Given the much larger number of men in the military, those numbers suggest 14,000 of the assaults in the Pentagon study happened to men.
This was done by a survey. I’ll have to look it up but only around 20% of those that received the survey actually responded to it…To say this is less than scientific is an understatement.
And without identifying exactly what constitutes sexual assault for these purposes, it is meaningless.
A question like, “Has a coworker ever said anything to you of a sexual nature that made you comfortable?” may get a “yes.” response from an E-2 when a E-5 said, “If you don’t get that shit done, I will dick slap you until your eyes bleed!”
Seriously, in over 20 years of service I have never heard of this occurring in the wild. SHARP coordinators brief it but I don’t know anyone who has actually heard of it happening. It really seems like an urban legend that is being used to scare male troops (and leaders) into taking MSA more seriously.
In 17 years of active duty I know of one instance that started as rape but ended up being consensual.
How the hell does that work? I can see consensual making out lead to rape but WTF?
Or was it a matter of a claim of rape that turned out have been consensual and rape claim made out of sobriety/regret?
Two new privates, alone in barracks waiting to ship to Kosovo. One that passed out drunk woke up being raped by the other one, the quote, “I liked it so I let him finish.” They were both discharged.
It happens more often than you think but its still nothing to the numbers of male on female.
I get the sense that a lot of these assault figures (male and female) are sketchy at best, considering the typical barracks environment, the unabashedly promiscuous nature of many in the current generation and the obvious effects of heavy alcohol consumption. I’m sure some legitimate cases are under-reported, but I’m equally sure that a great many frivolous cases are finding their way into the statistics. Senior leadership has no choice but to take it on as a serious concern because their political masters have defined it as such, but I think most of these battles are really won or lost at the company/battalion level.
Just another diversion, unfortunately.
AC
Another important consideration is that the above article states that claims are rising…Which is true. but they do not mention the statistics for report resolution. This is very significant…LINK
False reports outpace sex assaults in the military
False complaints of sexual abuse in the military are rising at a faster rate than overall reports of sexual assault, a trend that could harm combat readiness, analysts say.
Virtually all media attention on a Pentagon report last week focused on an increase in service members’ claims of sexual abuse in an anonymous survey, but unmentioned were statistics showing that a significant percentage of such actually investigated cases were baseless.
From 2009 to 2012, the number of sexual abuse reports rose from 3,244 to 3,374 — a 4 percent increase.
During the same period, the number of what the Pentagon calls “unfounded allegations” based on completed investigations of those reports rose from 331 to 444 — a 35 percent increase.
In 2012, there were 2,661 completed investigations, meaning that the 444 false complaints accounted for about 17 percent of all closed cases last year. False reports accounted for about 13 percent of closed cases in 2009.
Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and analyst at the Family Research Council, is writing a book for Regnery Publishing Inc. about the Pentagon’s push to put women in direct ground combat in the infantry, armor and special operations.
“In the course of conducting interviews with commanders, I heard time and again complaints about female service members making sex-related allegations which proved unfounded,” Mr. Maginnis said. “Not only do some women abuse the truth, but it also robs their commanders from more important, mission-related tasks.
“Female service members told me that some women invite problems which lead men on and then result in advances the woman can’t turn off. Too often, such female culpability leads to allegations of sexual contact, assault and then the women feign innocence.”
The annual Pentagon report on sexual assault noted the numbers of false complaints but included no analysis. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Elaine Donnelly, who runs the Center for Military Readiness, said the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Office (SAPRO) is ignoring the problem of false reports.
“Unsubstantiated accusations remain a significant problem, but the SAPRO is doing nothing about it,” Mrs. Donnelly said. “I went through both volumes and found no evidence of concern about the significant 17 percent of ‘unfounded accusations.’ Something should be done to reduce the numbers of false accusations, the first step being an admission that the problem exists.”
The number of sex abuse reports has risen from 1,700 a decade ago to 3,374 last year.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed male and female personnel into close living conditions at a sprawling network of bases.
The existence of unwanted and wanted sexual contact in the war zone is not disputed.
For example, a group of Army physicians in 2010 studied one brigade combat team deployed to Iraq in 2007.
The physicians’ study, published in the Military Medicine journal, examined the number of soldiers who sustained disease or noncombat injuries. Of 4,122 soldiers, including 325 women in support roles, 1,324 had diseases or injuries that forced them to miss time or be evacuated.
“Females, compared with males, had a significantly increased incident-rate ratio for becoming a [disease or noncombat] casualty,” the doctors found.
Of 47 female soldiers evacuated from the brigade and sent home, 35 — or 74 percent — were for “pregnancy-related issues.”
Even before the wars, the Pentagon removed barriers across the board to women and took action to mix the sexes more closely. Men and women share dorms and barracks in boot camp and at the service academies, and deploy in close quarters on ships.
The integration promises to become even more intimate in coming years as the Pentagon places women into training for direct ground combat jobs.
“The latest SAPRO report confirms that problems of sexual assault against both men and women are getting worse, not better,” Mrs. Donnelly said. “Pentagon leaders nevertheless are planning to extend these problems into the combat arms. Congress and the Pentagon first must do no harm. At a minimum, the Obama administration must not be allowed to extend complicated issues of sexual assault, which have increased by 129 percent since 2004, into direct ground combat infantry battalions.”
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week announced several steps to eliminate assaults, including ordering commanders to conduct “visual inspections” of all workplaces to ensure they are “free from materials that create a degrading or offensive work environment.”
The Air Force completed such an inspection last year after a female service member complained of persistent harassment.
In January, the Air Force reported the “health and welfare” inspection results:
“The Air Force found 631 instances of pornography (magazines, calendars, pictures, videos that intentionally displayed nudity or depicted acts of sexual activity); 3,987 instances of unprofessional material (discrimination, professional appearance, items specific to local military history such as patches, coins, heritage rooms, log books, song books, etc.); and 27,598 instances of inappropriate or offensive items (suggestive items, magazines, posters, pictures, calendars, vulgarity, graffiti). In total, 32,216 items were reported. Identified items were documented and either removed or destroyed.”
Said Mr. Hagel: “We need cultural change where every service member is treated with dignity and respect, where all allegations of inappropriate behavior are treated with seriousness, where victims’ privacy is protected, where bystanders are motivated to intervene, and where offenders know that they will be held accountable by strong and effective systems of justice.”
And then there is this take on how bad the data is: LINK
In the days since the Defense Department’s May 7 release of its 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, the media and lawmakers have been abuzz. The report’s estimate that last year 26,000 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact prompted many to conclude, incorrectly, that this reliably estimated the number of victims of sexual assault.
The 2012 estimate was also significantly higher than the last estimate, causing some to proclaim a growing “epidemic” of sexual assault in the military. The truth is that the 26,000 figure is such bad math—derived from an unscientific sample set and extrapolated military-wide—that no conclusions can be drawn from it.
Yet three bills have been introduced in Congress since the report’s release, all intended in various ways as a response to the findings. This week the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, which has power over the Pentagon budget, will hold a hearing where military leaders will be questioned about sexual assault in the armed forces.
It is disheartening to me, as a female officer in the Marine Corps and a judge advocate devoted to the professional practice of law in the military, to see Defense Department leaders and members of Congress deal with this emotionally charged issue without the benefit of solid, verifiable data. The 26,000 estimate is based on the 2012 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Military. The WGRA survey was fielded throughout all branches of the military in September and November 2012. As the report indicates, “Completed surveys were received from 22,792 eligible respondents,” while “the total sample consisted of 108,478 individuals.” In other words, one in five of the active-duty military personnel to whom the survey was sent responded.
I am one of those who responded to the survey after receiving an email with an online link. None of the males in my office received the email, though nearly every other female did. We have no way of knowing the exact number of male or female respondents to the 2012 WGRA survey because that information wasn’t released.
The term “sexual assault” was not used in the WGRA survey. Instead, the survey refers to “unwanted sexual contact,” which includes touching the buttocks and attempted touching. All of that behavior is wrongful, but it doesn’t comport with the conventional definition of sexual assault or with the legal definition of sexual assault in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as enacted by Congress.
The estimated 26,000 service members who fell victim to unwanted sexual contact in 2012 is higher than the 19,000 estimate based on the 2010 WRGA survey (the survey wasn’t conducted in 2011). Does this mean that there was a 34% jump in just two years? The data are too unreliable to tell. Before 2010, the Defense Department did not extrapolate military-wide in this manner, and for good reason. If you apply the same extrapolations to the 2006 WGRA survey results, you arrive at a far higher number—34,000.
These numbers vary widely because incidents involving unwanted sexual contact cannot accurately be extrapolated military-wide using this survey. The number of active-duty personnel is more than one million. The U.S. military as a whole is 14.6% female. Though the 2012 survey does not specify the gender composition of its respondents, the 2010 respondents were 42% female (10,029 women and 14,000 men).
Nevertheless, to achieve the 26,000 military-wide estimate in 2012 (and 19,000 in 2010) over half of the victims must have been male. Of course, male victims do exist, but empirically males do not constitute anywhere near the majority of victims of unwanted sexual contact—no less sexual assault.
Here is what we do know: The actual number of reported sexual assaults in the military in 2012 was 3,374, up from 3,192 in 2011. These figures include reports by civilians against service members. Of the 3,374 total cases reported last year, only 12%-14% were reported by men.
We also don’t know how actual sexual-assault rates in the military compare with civilian society. Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act asked the Defense Department to undertake two major studies that would review judicial proceedings and compare the military system with best practices in civilian jurisdictions. Both studies are set to begin this summer.
The military isn’t averse to changing to assure that all its service members, especially women, are treated justly. But change should come as a result of supportable data.
Each and every sexual assault is tragic and infuriating. But given the military’s recent emphasis on awareness of the problem and insistence that victims come forward, it’s no surprise that this number has gone up.
We in the military justice system want victims to come forward, and to seek accountability through the system. We want them to feel empowered to report, and to know that their command will take the allegation and their recovery seriously. An increasing number of reported sexual assaults, at least in the next few years, should be viewed as a positive sign that this message is being heard.
In my five years in the Marine Corps, I have seen revolutionary change regarding how military leadership addresses sexual assault. Ask the military service member closest to you whether the military takes sexual assault seriously. They will likely talk your ear off about increased training requirements, speeches from their leadership, videos they have watched and workshops they have attended. They can tell you what they have learned about bystander intervention, about alcohol and impaired judgement, and about the hefty consequences within the military justice system for sexual assault.
I often talk to young men and women interested in joining the military, and I find that women especially seek me out to gain the perspective of a female officer. In the past year or so, these potential female recruits have grown increasingly wary, asking many follow-up questions about whether women are treated fairly and respectfully. I tell them that serving in the military doesn’t turn a woman into a victim. I am a proud Marine, surrounded by outstanding military personnel from every service who take this problem seriously, male and female alike.
Capt. Rodman is a Marine Corps judge advocate stationed at U.S. Marine Headquarters in Arlington, Va. Her opinions do not reflect the position of the Defense Department or the Marine Corps.
A version of this article appeared May 20, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Pentagon’s Bad Math on Sexual Assault.
Why am I not surprised.
Thanks for the added info. The original article contained no mention of the study’s methods. I took the bait - shame on me. This study is worthless crap.
Care to elaborate? Because I call Bullshit.
This is my experience as well.
I remember several incidents that where just considered barracks life.
At a platoon party, one guy put his penis in another guy’s ear. From that point on, the receiving party was know as “Dick with ears” Didn’t really make sense, but that was his name from then on. I am not sure that would be considered assault since no actual penetration occurred & Dick with Ears seem to like it.
I had a Sgt that could milk his breast. He won a lot bets with that tit. I felt sexually assaulted having witnessed it.
One guy fell asleep with his mouth open. Another guy put his penis in front of his mouth & took a photo. The photo would show up on bulletin boards every couple of months.