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‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault

Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?

Florence Shmorgoner was raped by a fellow Marine in 2015. After she reported it and N.C.I.S. investigated, a commander decided not to press charges against her assailant. Credit... Danna Singer for The New York Times

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By Melinda Wenner Moyer

• Published Aug. 3, 2021 Updated Oct. 11, 2021

Pfc. Florence Shmorgoner woke up one afternoon in 2015 and realized that she was in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room. Something was wrong. The 19-year-old had been playing video games in her friend’s room in the barracks with the door open — the rule at their base at Twentynine Palms in California was that if male and female Marines were together in the same room, the door had to be left open. Although it was midafternoon, at some point she had dozed off on his bed. Now the door was closed, and her friend was groping her. She felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience, as if she was watching what was happening but not actually experiencing it. He took off her clothes and penetrated her.

Afterward, she got off the bed and couldn’t look at him. “I told him, ‘You know I didn’t want to,’” she recalls. “And I remember this distinctly — he goes, ‘I know.’”

Shmorgoner left, went back to her room and tried to scrub her skin raw in the shower. It didn’t occur to her to tell anyone what had happened, and she didn’t particularly want to. She was the only woman in the training course she was taking to become a computer-and-telephone-repair technician, and she didn’t get along with the few other women she had met in her barracks — women in the Marines often felt a competitive animosity toward one another, Shmorgoner says. She also didn’t know what resources were available to Marines in the aftermath of sexual assault . “I don’t remember that we were told who the victim advocate was when I was in Twentynine Palms,” she says. “I really didn’t have the resources to report if I wanted to.”

Shmorgoner fell into a deep depression. She saw her assailant a few times a week — they lived in the same building and used the same gym — and he acted as if nothing had happened. She was terrified that she would be attacked again, either by him or someone else. “Even walking from my room to where we ate, the chow hall — it was a task I had to prep myself for every day. It was almost a sit-down conversation with myself of, OK, it’s time to go to the chow hall. You’re going to pass all of these males and you need to prepare yourself. Just look down and keep walking,” Shmorgoner told me.

Soon, her fear gave way to self-loathing. She woke up every morning angry that she’d woken up at all. She began to believe that she deserved the attack and that the world would be better off without her. “It kind of tied back into the misogynistic view of myself,” she says. “I’m not as fast. I’m not as strong. It was a very weird rabbit hole that I went down of, well, maybe it was my fault. And maybe I was asking for it. And maybe I’m the bad person, and I’m the burden. And I’m just better off gone.”

Over the next four years, Shmorgoner tried to kill herself six times. She can still feel the scars on her wrists, but they are now mostly hidden by tattoos. Somehow, she always stopped just short of cutting deeply enough to die. “I don’t know what stopped me,” she says. “I was very prepared and pretty unafraid to take my own life.” Shmorgoner bore the pain and trauma of her rape without telling anyone, all while deploying to Bahrain, Japan and Australia as a computer-and-telephone technician and then returning to the United States to work on Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego in the same role.

In 2017, she met Ecko Arnold, another Marine who had also been sexually assaulted while on active duty. “Everything she told me about herself, I saw it in myself,” she recalls. That’s when Shmorgoner, whose friends call her Shmo, finally opened up. She told Arnold what happened, and Arnold encouraged Shmorgoner to report her rape. Shmorgoner first filed what in the military is called a restricted report in October 2017. This category of report allows a complainant to disclose what happened and receive counseling and health care, but the details remain confidential, with no investigation pursued. A month later, she filed an unrestricted report, too, initiating a rape investigation.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (N.C.I.S.) then began investigating. Shmorgoner had to tell the investigating agent, over and over again and in painstaking detail, what she could remember from that afternoon. By that point, her assailant was in Hawaii, and N.C.I.S. organized and recorded a phone call between her and the perpetrator to see if he would confess to the rape. The agent coached her on what to say and how to say it. It was the first time she had an extended conversation with her assailant since the assault, and she was terrified. “That was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” she says.

Shmorgoner started the telephone conversation casually, asking him about Hawaii and his job. Then she shifted the conversation to the assault. “I told him: ‘Hey, that really hurt me. I didn’t want to, we weren’t romantically involved,’” she says. “He ended up apologizing and said, ‘I’m sorry.’” An N.C.I.S. officer who was in the room with her signaled that she’d gotten what they needed and that she could end the call.

At this point, Shmorgoner assumed that the case was clear-cut — they had a recorded confession in hand. She was floored when a Marine commander and the N.C.I.S. recommended against a court-martial. They told her that, despite the confession, her assailant’s character witnesses had said good things about him and there was no physical evidence to prove that a rape had happened. They warned Shmorgoner that a court-martial would probably be hard on her and that she might not want to go through with it because it was unlikely to end with a conviction. (N.C.I.S. declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the Marine commandant’s office, which confirmed that N.C.I.S. investigated the case and that a commander recommended against a court-martial but would not confirm that there was a recorded confession. Shmorgoner declined to name her assailant, so The Times was unable to contact him for comment.)

Shmorgoner was heartbroken and confused, but she agreed — she didn’t want to go through a trial if it was only going to end in an acquittal. And she had seen what had happened to Arnold after reporting her assault and transferring. “She was sexually harassed,” Shmorgoner says. “There were things that people said about her that were beyond awful.” One male colleague, she remembers, told Arnold that she deserved what happened to her.

Shmorgoner then asked N.C.I.S. if the military could at least take some kind of administrative action against her perpetrator. Again, she says, she was told no.

The rape investigation was closed in 2018, and Shmorgoner says her attacker was able to serve out his Marine contract and receive an honorable discharge. She fell deeper into depression and despair. “My viewpoint of the Marine Corps really changed from then on, to it’s an institution that doesn’t really look after the people that comprise it,” she recalls. “We’re not in the business of taking care of people — it seemed to me that we were in the business of using them.”

For decades, sexual assault and harassment have festered through the ranks of the armed forces with military leaders repeatedly promising reform and then failing to live up to those promises. Women remain a distinct minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the armed services, yet nearly one in four servicewomen reports experiencing sexual assault in the military, and more than half report experiencing harassment, according to a meta-analysis of 69 studies published in 2018 in the journal Trauma, Violence & Abuse. (Men are victims of assault and harassment, too, though at significantly lower rates than women.) One key reason troops who are assaulted rarely see justice is the way in which such crimes are investigated and prosecuted. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, military commanders decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action — responsibilities that in the civilian world are overseen by dedicated law enforcement.

Some politicians have been fighting, and failing, for years to change these military laws. Every year since 2013, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has introduced legislation to move the decision to prosecute major military crimes, including sex crimes, out of the hands of commanders and into those of independent prosecutors. And every year, it has failed to move forward. Historically, the Pentagon has vehemently opposed the idea, saying that it would undermine institutional leadership. During a 2019 Senate hearing, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink, judge advocate general of the Navy, testified that removing authority over serious crimes from commanders “would have a detrimental impact on the ability of those commanders — and other commanders — to ensure good order and discipline.”

But this year has seen the arrival of a new administration, the end of a 20-year war in Afghanistan and the United States military’s reckoning with many of the politically heated questions also being debated across America, including demands to change the names of bases named after Confederate leaders, accusations of racial bias and sexism across the armed services and right-wing backlash over the supposed teaching of “critical race theory” to service members. It’s a combination of events that could help shepherd into the Pentagon some of the most significant policy reforms in a generation.

The bill that Gillibrand reintroduced in April, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, has far more bipartisan support than ever. In May, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that he no longer opposes the bill. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, a sexual-assault survivor and a retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, is now co-sponsoring the legislation, after previously opposing it. Ernst has said that she had a change of heart because she spent years working to address the issue of military sexual assault within the existing system, yet “we are not seeing a dent in the numbers.”

At least 70 senators and President Biden have indicated their support for Gillibrand’s bill this year. But it still faces staunch opposition from the leaders of the Armed Services Committee — Senators Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. Reed blocked an attempt by Gillibrand in May to bring the bill to a floor vote, saying that he found the legislation too broad because it seeks to change how the military handles all serious crimes, not just sexual assaults. In July, a bill with provisions put forward by both Gillibrand and Reed was incorporated into the annual defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, which will most likely be taken up by Congress for a vote later this year.

Yet support for change is also now coming from the Pentagon itself. In late April, a Pentagon-organized independent commission on military sexual assault made the first of a series of recommendations to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III that included removing commanders from prosecutorial decisions for sexual-assault and related crimes. In a statement in late June, Austin said that he supported this recommendation, and in early July, Biden said that he, too, supported the change.

Col. Don Christensen, a retired chief Air Force prosecutor who is now president of Protect Our Defenders, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing rape and sexual assault in the military, says that this year is different in large part because of the murder of Specialist Vanessa Guillén, whose body was found in Texas in June 2020. Guillén had reportedly been sexually harassed by a fellow soldier before her death, and an Army investigation revealed a culture of harassment and bullying at Fort Hood where she was based. “The independent review of what was going on at Fort Hood was incredibly damning,” Christensen told me. In April 2021, according to The Intercept, the Army also had to suspend 22 instructors from Fort Sill in Oklahoma after a trainee was sexually assaulted.

If these policy changes move forward, prosecutions will no longer be at the whim of commanders and influenced so easily by military politics. Decisions may happen faster, too, Christensen says; right now, prosecutorial decisions go up the chain of commanders one by one, culminating in a final decision made by a commander of senior rank, which can take many months. But these prosecutorial reforms won’t eradicate the military’s sexual-assault problem, because the issue is rooted in military culture, not its justice system. “I hope it makes an impact, but I’m not sure,” says Col. Ellen Haring, a retired Army officer and research fellow at the nonprofit Service Women’s Action Network, which advocates for improved policies that affect women in the military. “It doesn’t get to the root problem, which is, why are the assaults happening in the first place?”

Sexual assault is often the initial signal event in a long line of painful traumas that can culminate in post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicide. In a 2019 study, scientists at the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the University of Utah and the University of Colorado surveyed more than 300 servicewomen and female veterans who had experienced a sexual assault and found that 29 percent were currently contemplating suicide. From 2007 to 2017, the age-adjusted suicide rate among women veterans rose by 73 percent; according to Department of Defense data, in 2019, women accounted for 31 percent of all suicide attempts among active-duty service members.

Because a military sexual assault triggers multiple traumas, victims frequently experience feelings of betrayal, isolation and worthlessness that can sap them of the will to keep going. For one thing, military sexual assaults happen in an environment in which, multiple surveys show, women feel they are repeatedly treated as if they don’t belong. And women are typically assaulted by the men they serve with — sometimes even their direct superiors — so they have to continually see and work with their assailants, wondering if it will happen again.

After their attacks, victims also rarely see justice. Of the more than 6,200 sexual-assault reports made by United States service members in fiscal year 2020, only 50 — 0.8 percent — ended in sex-offense convictions under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, roughly one-third as many convictions as in 2019. It’s unclear why sexual-assault convictions have gone down, but it’s part of a much larger trend: Courts-martial dropped by 69 percent from 2007 to 2017, according to Military Times, perhaps because commanders are instead choosing administrative punishments, which are bureaucratically easier but also result in milder punishments for the perpetrators, such as deductions in rank or administrative discharges.

Even when convicted, perpetrators often don’t spend time in prison. “Many people don’t receive a single day of confinement,” Christensen says. He pointed to the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted of three counts of sexual assault but spent only three months in prison. “The uproar that was caused in California and across the nation by his sentence is kind of a weekly occurrence in the military,” he says. “That’s the lie that is perpetrated before Congress constantly — that ‘Oh, commanders are crushing these people. They want to hold them accountable,’” Christensen adds. “No, they don’t.”

Many service members leave the military soon after experiencing sexual trauma — and not voluntarily. Not only are military rapists rarely punished, but their victims are often punished for reporting what happened. According to a 2018 survey of active-duty service members by the Department of Defense, 38 percent of servicewomen who reported their assaults experienced professional retaliation afterward.

From 2009 to 2015, more than 22 percent of service members who left the military after reporting a sexual assault received a less-than-fully-honorable discharge, according to a 2016 investigation by the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General. That’s nearly one and a half times more than the percentage of overall service members who received less-than-fully-honorable discharges from 2002 to 2013, according to data compiled in a March 2016 report by Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy group.

‘I’m still kind of stuck picking up the pieces.’

Although veterans can apply to change their discharge status, it’s typically a long and losing battle: It can take up to 24 months for discharge-review boards to decide on a case, according to a report published by the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in 2020. On average, fewer than 15 percent of discharge-upgrade requests across the military were approved in fiscal year 2018, the report found.

Called bad-paper discharges, these administrative separations can cut veterans off from jobs and V.A. services, as well as education benefits via the G.I. Bill. (Veterans can apply to get a character-of-service upgrade to access V.A. health care, but few are granted.) Since 2010, the V.A. has been required by law to provide health care services to any veteran who has experienced a military sexual assault, regardless of discharge or disability status — but in reality, many are turned away and told they’re ineligible. The 2020 Veterans Legal Clinic report found that the V.A. has denied services to as many as 400,000 potentially eligible veterans. “They’re summarily just kicked out,” says Rose Carmen Goldberg, a California lawyer who for years represented veterans who survived military sexual trauma. “It is very, very frustrating.”

The original assault, the absence of a reliable system of justice and the lingering isolation can send victims into spirals of anger and self-blame and cause them to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. They are twice as likely as other women veterans to later experience intimate-partner violence. (After her assault, Shmorgoner herself was in a relationship with a man who became abusive.) Women veterans who suffer a military sexual assault are also roughly twice as likely as other women veterans to become homeless. Yet many don’t “realize what the pain they were experiencing stemmed from,” says Sara Kintzle, a research professor in the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, so they don’t know what kind of help they need.

Even when veterans can get V.A. health care, they don’t always feel safe enough to pursue it. In many V.A. clinics, women find themselves surrounded by men, some of whom harass and assault them, compounding their traumas: A 2019 study found that one in four female veterans was harassed by other veterans during visits to V.A. health care facilities.

In September 2019, Andrea N. Goldstein, then a lead staff member for the Women Veterans Task Force on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and a reserve Navy intelligence officer, was assaulted at the V.A. Medical Center in Washington while she was waiting for a smoothie at the center’s cafe. As she recalls, a man approached her, pressed his body against her and told her she looked like she could use a good time. When she later reported the incident, no charges were brought against the man, and Curtis Cashour, then the V.A. deputy assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, told a journalist to dig into her past and see if she had made similar allegations before.

“There’s this very real life-or-death situation,” Goldstein says, “where if women are being deferred from care because they’re getting harassed, or even physically assaulted, they’re not accessing life-saving care.”

Seven women and a service dog in training named Jax sat in a circle on the floor of a dark, sparsely furnished cabin at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Everyone was crying, and every few minutes a box of tissues slid across the floor for moral support. The women had come from all around the country in June 2019 to attend an annual healing retreat for survivors of military sexual assault.

These women and others in attendance used aliases with me during the retreat, introducing themselves as the adjectives they thought described them: Joyful, Caring, Grateful, Awesome, Lovely, Crazy Cool, Sassy and Diva, sunny names that belied the deep pain they all were clearly experiencing. Over the two days I was there, many of the women opened up and told me their real names.

At this gathering on the second day, the first veteran to talk was Kellie-Lynn Shuble, a 47-year-old former Army combat medic who was sitting cross-legged in a green T-shirt. Her voice shaking, Shuble told the group how she’d first been sexually harassed by a lieutenant colonel — although she reported it, he went on to be promoted — and then, while deployed in Kuwait and Iraq, she was raped three times by different soldiers. She never reported those assaults. Given how the Army had handled her harassment investigation, she felt it would be useless, and she feared retaliation.

On her third deployment, in August 2006, she suffered her final assault, which would lead to her discharge. While outside filling sandbags, she got into a disagreement with a first sergeant over a Gatorade. Suddenly, he ordered her to get on her knees, pressed the barrel of a loaded handgun against her forehead and started unbuckling his pants. He demanded she perform oral sex.

Shuble said she then stood up and told him, “If you’re going to shoot me, you better shoot me now and you will have to shoot me in the back.” Immediately after that, Shuble told a peer what happened and that person reported her for threatening to kill the first sergeant. Within 72 hours, Shuble said, she was on a military transport plane back to the United States. There, she was medically evaluated and eventually deemed unfit for service. She didn’t fight the decision for the same reasons that she hadn’t reported the men who assaulted her. (The Army would not comment on the harassment investigation, but a spokesperson said that “there is no place in the Army for corrosive behaviors like sexual harassment and assault.”)

After leaving the Army, Shuble struggled. Over the nearly 13 years she spent as a soldier, she picked up many military-style mannerisms — talking loudly, cursing, standing erect with her feet planted wide — all of which made it harder to transition back to civilian life. She was told by those around her that she was too brash, too different, and that made her feel more isolated and alone.

Later that summer, Kate Hendricks Thomas, a Marine veteran and a behavioral-medicine researcher at George Mason University, told me how difficult the transition into civilian life can be for women. “When I left the military, on one of my first job interviews, I was criticized for my handshake being too firm,” Thomas said. “I gave a talk and my stance was a little too wide to be feminine and somebody said, ‘You look like you’re standing funny.’” Kintzle, the U.S.C. professor, agrees: “The kind of characteristics that the military fosters aren’t necessarily characteristics that the civilian world celebrates in women,” she said.

Shuble’s experience was also made harder by the PTSD she developed from her sexual and combat traumas. She described her PTSD as two monkeys clinging to her back that she couldn’t reach to throw off. “You’re carrying that extra 50 pounds every day — sleeping, dreaming, waking — with everything you do,” she said. She is angry a lot. She often can’t sleep. She has considered suicide. She was homeless for about a year and a half, the only woman living in a veterans’ sanctuary with her service dog.

In 2011, the Veterans Benefits Administration lowered the threshold of evidence for veterans to “prove” they were sexually assaulted, which helps them qualify for PTSD-related disability benefits. A 2018 report by the V.A. Inspector General found that the agency nevertheless denied 46 percent of all medical claims related to military sexual-trauma-induced PTSD and that nearly half of those denied claims were improperly processed.

For women at the Omega retreat, the military had won their trust and allegiance and then betrayed them over and over again, fueling feelings of doubt and shame and making them second-guess their self-worth. “When the organization lets you down in that profound way — I feel like that’s one of the reasons the trauma is so powerful, because it gets at the core of identity,” Thomas said.

When veterans do access V.A. treatment, they often improve, although some sexual-assault survivors find the recommended regimens difficult. One popular approach used by the V.A. to treat PTSD is prolonged-exposure therapy, which requires that veterans repeatedly revisit the trauma memory and recount it aloud in detail, which can be challenging for sexual-assault survivors. Another common treatment is cognitive-processing therapy, or C.P.T., which teaches veterans to identify and change inaccurate and distressing thoughts about each of their traumas. But Shuble, for one, found C.P.T. excruciating, because the therapy focused on one trauma at a time and she had experienced countless between her sexual traumas and her combat experiences. “It was awful,” she said. “It was not effective for me.”

The women at the Omega Institute were receiving a form of therapy developed by the psychologist Lori S. Katz, an energetic woman who has worked for the V.A. since 1991 and has run this retreat every year since 2015 (except during the pandemic) at the institute, which offers scholarships for room, board and tuition but not for travel costs. Her program, called Warrior Renew, is based in part on the idea that people process information both rationally and emotionally, and that permanent healing requires tapping into that emotional side through metaphors and imagery. Through this holistic approach, veterans learn to manage their trauma symptoms, resolve feelings of anger, self-blame and injustice, identify problematic patterns in their lives (such as harmful relationships) and cope with feelings of loss.

All trauma survivors, Katz explained to the women at the retreat, come back to the questions: Why did this happen to me? What did I do? “You look back at the event with hindsight, and you say: ‘I should never have gone in this car. I should never have agreed to do that. What’s wrong with me? I’m so stupid.’ And we blame ourselves. We inevitably come to that,” Katz said. The women in the room, some of whom were crying, all nodded along. Military commanders sometimes blame victims for their assaults, too, compounding the problem. “There’s a focus on ‘Well, what was she doing? What was she wearing?’ And that has nothing to do with what happened,” Katz said.

Perhaps most important, the Warrior Renew program occurs in a group setting, where the women can bond and build relationships that will help prevent them from feeling isolated enough to act on suicidal thoughts. “One of the things that can thwart that risk is connection,” Katz said to the women at the retreat. “You guys have a connection, and you have a new family and people who do understand it. That’s a really important part of the healing.” As one of the women at the retreat, who called herself Awesome, said to the group at one point, “We’re queens, and we’re here to fix each other’s crowns.”

Shuble had never shared her assaults with a group before, and when she finished, she could hardly speak. The room was buzzing with grief, with pride, with anger. All of the women in the room believed her — it was as if they were giving Shuble, for the first time, a steady foundation on which to rest her heavy and unsteady pain. With tears streaming down her face, Shuble turned to Katz and thanked her. “It’s been the first real healing that I’ve gotten,” she said.

Next, a woman named Jessica raised her hand. She told the group about the time she jumped off a second-floor balcony and shattered her pelvis to escape a Navy sailor who was trying to kill her. Shelly, a blond woman with wide-set eyes and pink sneakers, spoke up, saying that she was tied up, threatened with a razor blade and raped in Japan on a Navy deployment when she was 19; even though she reported it the next day, her assailant walked. Linda, a quiet woman with short highlighted hair, described being raped multiple times in service, including by commanders and an Army chaplain.

By the end of the Omega session, the floor was freckled with tear-soaked tissues, and Katz spoke up. “You’re brilliant and you’re beautiful and you’re strong and you’ve got a voice and you are anything but worthless,” she said to the women, who nodded in response, some more convincingly than others. Then, quietly, she asked how many of the seven women in the circle had considered suicide. Every hand went up. She asked how many had actually acted on it, and four of the seven raised their hands.

What the women kept coming back to in the discussions were not the specific horrific assaults they had endured, but the ways in which the military had failed them over and over again — and the ways in which these failings had shaped their lives and identities years, even decades, later. Many of the women were stuck in cycles of self-blame that caused them to make terrible choices; most suffered from mental and physical disabilities that made it hard for them to function or hold a job.

Jennifer Leigh Johnson, a Navy veteran, may end up paralyzed because of her gang rape by fellow servicemen in Bahrain 20 years ago: The assault injured her back so badly that she was given steroid injections for the pain, yet as a side-effect of these injections, she developed a rare degenerative spinal disease. (Lt. Cmdr. Patricia Kreuzberger, a Navy spokeswoman, would not comment on Johnson’s case, but said by email that the service “continually strives to foster an environment of dignity and respect, where sexual assault and sexual harassment are never tolerated, condoned or ignored.” )

“Trauma doesn’t scare me anymore,” Johnson said one evening while lying on the floor on a pile of pillows. “It’s surviving the trauma that scares the [expletive] out of me. Because the four hours,” she said, referring to the rape, “yeah — that was horrible and hurtful. But it ended. This never ends.”

Under increasing pressure and scrutiny, the military and the V.A. have been taking some steps to better support survivors of sexual trauma. Since 2011, service members who experience military sexual assault and file an unrestricted report can request a transfer to a new unit or installation, as Arnold, Shmorgoner’s friend, did, so they don’t have to work and live with their rapists. Since 2013, service members also have the option of asking for special victims’ counsels, who provide them with information, resources and support after sexual assault. But according to Goldberg, there aren’t enough of these counselors, so they tend to be overwhelmed and unable to give each case the attention it deserves. “I’ve heard anecdotally about victims just not being able to reach their special victims’ counsel, not having enough time with them, not really getting to benefit from the program,” she says.

The V.A. is also trying to reach and support more veterans who have experienced military sexual trauma. It has mailed out more than 475,000 letters to veterans with other-than-honorable discharges informing them of available V.A. services. With a universal screening program, the V.A. now asks every veteran receiving health care whether they experienced a sexual trauma during service, and those who did are told about the support they can receive. There are also now designated veterans service representatives, located within five central offices, who specialize in processing military sexual-trauma-related claims, and the V.A. has eliminated follow-up phone calls that could retraumatize veterans.

In January 2021, President Trump signed into law the Deborah Sampson Act, a comprehensive bill named after the woman who posed as a man during the Revolutionary War in order to serve in the Continental Army. The law includes provisions to monitor and address sexual harassment and sexual assault at V.A. health centers, and requires V.A. centers to make it easier for women to report harassment or assault; it also requires V.A. employees to report harassment they observe (and be punished if they don’t). The department “is committed to a culture rooted in our mission and core values where everyone is treated with civility, compassion and respect. Everyone should feel welcomed and safe when doing business with V.A.,” a spokesperson for the V.A. said in a statement.

If Gillibrand’s bill becomes law, it will herald a major shift — a voting out of the old way of doing things, and an admission by the government that the military-justice system must finally change. It won’t, however, be a panacea. If independent military prosecutors, rather than commanders, handle the prosecutorial decision-making process, more accused rapists and other assailants may be brought to court-martial. But without sentencing reform, they may not ultimately be held more accountable.

For that, the military will need a pervasive shift in its culture and the mind-set of its leaders. Yet Christensen, the retired Air Force lawyer, says that in recent months he has noticed increasing backlash against the notion that servicewomen are being mistreated and deserve more respect. “There’s been a poison in the system — of disbelief,” he says, and some in the military now argue that the push for reform reflects nothing but a politically correct, anti-male witch hunt. Shmorgoner says she noticed these reactions, too. Men, she suggests, are “angry that women are finally standing up for themselves.”

Looking back, Shmorgoner says that perhaps she should have expected what happened to her. She was warned about the Marine Corps before she joined — by her recruiter.

Shmorgoner grew up with a passion for riding horses, competing in show-jumping events from age 7. But after graduating from high school in 2014, she decided that instead of continuing to compete, she wanted to serve her country. Her parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States before she was born, and she felt joining the military was “almost a way to thank them for giving me this opportunity to live here,” she says. She made an appointment to meet with a Marine recruiter. “I think I was the very first female that he put in the Marine Corps,” she says. “He sat me down, and he told me, ‘You’re going to have a rough time.’” Yet Shmorgoner didn’t understand — she thought he was either patronizing her or using reverse psychology. “He was genuinely trying to warn me,” she says, “and I thought it was a challenge.”

The only reason she re-enlisted after the rape investigation was to encourage other women in her situation to report — just as learning about Arnold’s assault helped her come forward. “I thought, Maybe I could do that for someone else,” she says. Almost immediately, a woman was transferred into her battalion because of a sexual assault. “Within like three days of her arriving, her noncommissioned officers were giving her a hard time and making her feel as though she was a problem,” Shmorgoner recalls. But Shmorgoner was there, ready to support her.

Two years ago, Shmorgoner’s PTSD symptoms started affecting her more at work after she transferred to Camp Pendleton in California. On bad days, she would have six or seven panic attacks: Her heart would race, she would start visibly shaking and she would sit behind her desk trying to make herself as small as possible. Sometimes these attacks came on randomly; other times they were triggered by seeing a male Marine who resembled her assailant. Every time she started working with a new unit or under a new commander, she had to tell them about her assault and PTSD so they would understand her panic attacks, as well as her propensity to close and lock her office door when she worked. “It was just so exhausting mentally and emotionally,” she says, to have to explain “why I am the way I am.”

Around the same time, she started receiving intensive therapy to treat her depression, anxiety and PTSD. That was only because she was asked to complete a mental-health history form and filled out portions she wasn’t supposed to — sections intended for her superiors — which included questions about prior suicide attempts. “I just checked the boxes, for ‘all of the above,’ and I sent it up to my leadership, and they pulled me aside,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what happened.’”

The military, she says, can be blind to mental health issues because they simmer unseen beneath the surface. Mental health is often treated as a joke, as an aspect of military life that is kind of beside the point. When colleagues asked her how she was doing, she would sometimes say, “I wake up every day wishing I didn’t.” But everyone always assumed she was just trying to be funny. In the Marine Corps, “We joke about suicide in a very odd, dysfunctional and, frankly, toxic way,” she says.

In April 2020, Shmorgoner’s psychologist recommended that she be medically evaluated by the Marine Corps to determine if her PTSD was interfering with her ability to do her job. “I didn’t even feel comfortable standing duty,” Shmorgoner says, referring to having to work alone to guard the front desk of the barracks for 24 hours straight. “And with the suicidal ideations, they didn’t want me armed while on duty by myself.”

The results of the evaluation, which took longer than usual because of the pandemic, came back in early May of this year: The Marine Corps deemed her unfit for service because of her PTSD and eligible for medical retirement with V.A. benefits. At first, the news felt like yet another punishment for having been raped. Shmorgoner joined the Marine Corps hoping to stay in service for 20 years. Then she was assaulted, and everything unraveled — while her assailant suffered no apparent consequences. “My life has changed significantly over the last six years, and from everything that I know, his life has not,” she says. “I’m still kind of stuck picking up the pieces.”

Shmorgoner officially left the Marines in June. And although she is disappointed and angry and misses her colleagues, she’s relieved to get a fresh start. Earlier this year, Shmorgoner got married to a fellow Marine with two children who has since left the military. In July, she landed her dream job as a horse trainer at a training-and-breeding facility in Maryland, and she’s becoming close with the other women she works with. She is finding it easier to befriend civilian women than the women she met in the Marines. “I don’t think any of us meant to, but we all had a kind of a metaphorical wall up with our emotions — just because we were taught that that’s how Marines should be,” she explains. The women she has met this summer, on the other hand, seem willing to “build friendships and to be emotionally available.” She has also started seeing a therapist through the local V.A. Being so far removed from the Marine environment is helping her heal. “I’ve noticed I’ve gotten quite a bit better,” she says. She has been having fewer panic attacks, as few as one a day.

The biggest noticeable change came a few weeks ago. A man catcalled her while she was walking to a gas station, shouting, “Hey, mama, how you doing?” It was something that in the past would have immediately triggered a panic attack. This time, she felt anxious and gripped her keys, but she didn’t falter. “I just kept walking.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

Melinda Wenner Moyer is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. Her first book, “How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes,” was published in July. Danna Singer is an American photographer based in Philadelphia. In 2020, she was named a Guggenheim fellow; she currently holds the position of lecturer at the Yale School of Art and Rowan University.

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Article Contents

Introduction, background and definitions, research review, future recommendations, acknowledgments.

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Sexual Harassment and Assault in the U.S. Military: A Review of Policy and Research Trends

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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• Figures & tables
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Valerie A. Stander, Cynthia J. Thomsen, Sexual Harassment and Assault in the U.S. Military: A Review of Policy and Research Trends, Military Medicine , Volume 181, Issue suppl_1, January 2016, Pages 20–27, https://doi.org/10.7205/MILMED-D-15-00336

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Recently, there has been increasing concern regarding the problem of sexual violence in the military. Because sexual harassment and assault are more closely intertwined in the military than in most civilian contexts, the military context affords a unique opportunity to study the interrelationships between these two types of sexual violence. In this review, we briefly summarize existing research on military sexual trauma prevalence rates, effects on victims, and risk factors, as well as prevention and response programs in the military context. In each of these topic areas, we emphasize issues unique to the complex interplay between sexual harassment and assault in the military and make recommendations for future research.

In the past decade, there has been increasing concern among political and military leaders, as well as the American public, regarding the incidence of sexual harassment and assault in the military. 1 , 2 In response, the Department of Defense (DoD) has undertaken a variety of measures to enhance the prevention, surveillance, and reporting of sexual aggression and to increase support for victims, primarily through the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) programs and processes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). 3 Additionally, programmatic research on these problems has proliferated, resulting in a number of recent reviews. 4 , – 14 For instance, Turchik and Wilson 12 comprehensively summarized evidence regarding prevalence, risk factors, associated outcomes, and related policy. From a different angle, Bell and Reardon 5 expertly reviewed issues regarding the clinical care of veterans with a history of sexual victimization. Here, we focus on an issue that has not been adequately addressed to date: the complex interplay between sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military context.

Psychological trauma, which in the judgment of a mental health professional employed by the Department, resulted from a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature, or sexual harassment which occurred while the Veteran was serving on active duty or active duty for training. (p. 1) 15

… intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, threats, intimidation, abuse of authority, or when the victim does not or cannot consent. Sexual assault includes rape, forcible sodomy (oral or anal sex) and other unwanted sexual contact that is aggravated, abusive, or wrongful (to include unwanted and inappropriate sexual contact) or other attempts to commit these acts. (p. 93) 17

Despite DoD differentiation between sexual harassment and assault, there are undeniably behaviors that qualify as both; in particular, the most extreme instances of sexual harassment involving nonconsensual sexual contact meet both criteria. In the military environment, this area of overlap is much greater than in most civilian contexts, because the military “workplace” often has broad boundaries; at the extreme, work space and life space merge completely during an operational deployment. Also, in military environments, the use of authority to pressure a subordinate into sexual contact constitutes not only sexual harassment but also sexual assault, even though this is not the case in the civilian legal system. In the military, the level of coercion that can be facilitated through the use of rank and authority can be just as serious as the threat or use of physical force.

The complexity involved in defining sexual trauma within the DoD compared to the VA further reflects the multifaceted nature of the responsibilities the DoD has with respect to this problem. The services must implement programs and policies both to prevent and respond to sexual violence, and they must prosecute perpetrators as well as care for victims. Additionally, each of the service branches is responsible for surveillance and public and political accounting. Most importantly, all of these roles are secondary to the primary DoD mission of defense, which sometimes requires leaders to send personnel into harm's way even as they seek to protect them from sexual trauma. 18

Although there is more funding and interest now than there has been before for research on sexual harassment and assault among service members, this body of literature is still in its formative stages. Also, certain aspects of these problems have been addressed more than others, leaving significant gaps in what we know about their dynamics. For instance, although both VA and DoD researchers have made important strides in studying sexual aggression among service members, more work in military operational contexts is particularly needed. Below, we briefly review what is already known about four important issues related to sexual harassment and assault in the military: (1) prevalence rates; (2) effects on victims; (3) unique risk or protective factors, especially those that are military-specific; and (4) prevention program outcomes. As will become evident, there has been much more attention to the first two issues than the latter two. In addition, across topics, it is important to recognize that almost all research on sexual aggression among service members to date has focused on victims. In fact, we are aware of only one program of research that has assessed the perpetration of sexual aggression by military personnel. 19 , – 21 Therefore, unless explicitly noted, the discussion that follows pertains to service members who are victims of sexual aggression.

Estimating Prevalence Rates

By law, VA treatment facilities must provide care for problems resulting from sexual trauma that occurred during active duty service or military training, 22 , 23 and VA service providers are required to assess all patients for MST using two specific screening questions: While you were in the military (1) did you receive uninvited and unwanted sexual attention, such as touching, cornering, pressure for sexual favors, or verbal remarks? and (2) did someone ever use force or threat of force to have sexual contact with you against your will? 22 , 23 This screening program provides the VA with epidemiological data regarding the lifetime prevalence of MST among treatment-seeking veterans. In these data, 15% to 36% of women and 1% to 2% of men screened positive for MST. 23 , – 26

Within the DoD, official epidemiological surveillance of sexual harassment and assault historically has been conducted via periodic administrations of the Workplace and Gender Relations Survey (WGRS). Since it was first fielded in 1988, this survey has undergone some substantial revisions, but the core assessments consistently have included separate measures of sexual harassment and assault. Up until the most recent iteration of the WGRS, sexual harassment was assessed using the validated Sexual Experiences Questionnaire 27 whereas sexual assault was assessed using one or two questions developed for the WGRS. On the basis of data from the WGRS over the approximate period of the War on Terror (2002–2012), about 8% to 9% of women and 1% to 3% of men reported coercive sexual harassment (e.g., quid pro quo promises of job benefits or threats of negative consequences). 28 Annual prevalence rates for harassment involving other types of unwanted sexual attention (e.g., repeated, unwanted requests for dates) have ranged from 22% to 31% for women and 5% to 7% for men. During about the same time frame (2006–2012) annual sexual assault prevalence rates ranged from 4% to 7% for women and from 1% to 2% for men. 28

A number of other studies have reported prevalence rates for sexual trauma in military populations. Unfortunately, extreme heterogeneity in sample characteristics, study design, and construct measurement make it difficult to compare prevalence estimates across research efforts. In particular, some seminal studies have followed the VA's lead, using a combined assessment operationalizing MST, 29 , 30 whereas other studies have assessed sexual harassment and assault separately. 31 , – 34 The breadth of these methodological differences likely creates some confusion for research consumers.

There have been multiple attempts to compare the prevalence of sexual victimization in military versus civilian populations, and some have concluded that military rates are comparatively high. 4 , 12 , 35 Specifically for workplace sexual harassment, initial evidence does seem to support this conclusion. In early administrations of the WGRS, the same sexual harassment measures were administered to military personnel as had previously been used in research with civilian federal employees; results indicated that sexual harassment was substantially higher among male and female service members than in this civilian population. 36 , – 38 A more recent meta-analysis also concluded that the prevalence of sexual harassment is significantly higher in the military than in three different civilian contexts (university, government, and nongovernment), even after controlling for variation in type of assessment measure and sampling strategy. 39

More studies have compared military versus civilian rates for sexual assault than for harassment, but the results also have been more mixed. Perhaps the best and most recent comparative data come from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, in which the prevalence of sexual assault among military and civilian women did not significantly differ. 40 Although this runs counter to the expectations of some, it is not unprecedented. For instance, an early study found that although overall rates of violence were lower among military personnel than in the general population, this difference was less pronounced for sexual assault than for other types of aggression. 41 The authors point out that even finding comparable rates of sexual aggression for military and civilian populations may indicate a problem for the military. It is difficult to know how military populations that are heavily screened and fully employed should be compared with their civilian counterparts, and as a rule, the military cannot afford to tolerate levels of problem behavior that may be common among civilians.

Documenting Effects on Victims

Considerable research has focused on the impact of sexual victimization while in the military, primarily for female service members. Evidence shows that long-term effects can be serious and wide ranging, including physical (e.g., chronic health problems, pain, obesity), mental (e.g., post-traumatic stress, depression), and behavioral (e.g., substance abuse, eating disorders, employment difficulties, relationship problems) consequences. 11 , 23 , 34 Current evidence suggests that the consequences of sexual harassment and assault are similar. Like sexual assault, sexual harassment has been linked to poorer overall physical health, mental health symptoms such as depression, and work-related problems. 42 , 43 Unfortunately, few researchers have directly compared the impact of sexual harassment versus sexual assault among military personnel, and the comparison is complicated by the fact that victims of sexual assault often have experienced sexual harassment as well. 44 For those who have experienced multiple incidents involving both of these types of sexual victimization, more severe cumulative effects are likely; in military populations, operational stressors such as combat exposure may further add to these cumulative effects. 43 , 45

Although not as many studies have examined the impact of sexual trauma on military men, the consequences appear to be no less deleterious. 6 , 46 Male service members are significantly less likely than their female counterparts to be sexually victimized, however military men who are the victims of sexual aggression report just as many or more trauma symptoms. 29 , 42 , 47 , 48 Finally, a number of studies and reviews have noted that the adverse effects of sexual aggression may be greater for service members than for civilian victims. 4 , 5 , 23 , 49 , 50 Many possible explanations for this finding have been offered, including the fact that military victims may be forced to continue working with their perpetrator or that they may feel a greater sense of betrayal after an assault by a fellow service member. However, studies to date have not evaluated the relative importance of military-specific factors that may account for stronger adverse consequences associated with sexual trauma for military personnel versus civilians.

Identifying Critical Risk and Protective Factors

— Demographics (e.g., preponderance of young, single, male, and lower-ranking personnel).

— Recruiting and self-selection (e.g., high prevalence of premilitary sexual trauma, volunteering for service to escape difficult life circumstances).

— Military lifestyle (e.g., combat deployment, high mobility, heavy drinking, and coed barracks where sexual activity is common).

— Military culture (e.g., hostile attitudes toward women, rape myth acceptance, hypermasculinity, and an organizational climate condoning sexual aggression).

— Military structure and policy (e.g., prevention and response policies that make reporting and prosecution difficult; gender typing of military occupations; top-down hierarchical structure).

Some of these factors have been established as significant risks factors for victimization and/or perpetration of sexual aggression in the military (e.g., younger age, excessive alcohol use, and rape supportive attitudes). 19 , – 21 , 51 , 52 However, many hypothesized risk factors have been studied and validated only in the civilian literature and are simply known or presumed to be more prevalent in the military. For example, rigid masculine norms—sometimes called hypermasculinity (e.g., calloused attitudes toward women and sex, view that aggression is manly, or belief that danger is exciting) 53 —have been identified as a significant risk factor for the perpetration of sexual aggression in civilian populations. 54 These types of norms may be more inherent in military than in civilian culture. 12 , 14 Although this hypothesis makes intuitive sense, the scant research evaluating the impact of hypermasculinity on any type of interpersonal aggression by military personnel has been inconclusive, 21 , 55 , – 58 suggesting that other predictors may be more important. Furthermore, it is not clear that the individual-focused conceptualization of hypermasculinity that has emerged as a significant predictor of sexual assault in civilian studies is a good characterization of hypermasculinity as it may manifest in military culture. 56

Another issue is that almost no work has been done either to distinguish the risk factors for sexual harassment versus sexual assault among service members or to establish commonalities among them. However, this is critical in determining the nature of the association between these two types of sexual violence. There is clear evidence that sexual harassment itself is a critical risk factor for sexual assault in military populations. Not only is it unlikely that a victim will experience sexual assault without a history of sexual harassment, 44 but commonly the same perpetrator will have harassed victims before assaulting them. 28 , 33 , 51 , 59 Furthermore, based on the only military data available (a longitudinal study of junior enlisted U.S. Navy personnel) it appears extremely uncommon for perpetrators of military sexual aggression to have committed a sexual assault without a history of perpetrating harassment as well. 21

Because of the high overlap between sexual harassment and assault for both victims and perpetrators, some have concluded that both may be manifestations of a single continuum of sexual aggression. 44 , 60 If this is the case, then essentially there should be complete overlap in the risk and protective factors for both. In our own research, we have found that important risk factors for sexual assault perpetration (e.g., impersonal sex, hostility to women, alcohol use, and history of delinquency) 61 are equally predictive of sexual harassment and assault perpetration among junior enlisted sailors. 21 However, we are not aware of other studies confirming this hypothesis in civilian or military populations.

Developing Effective Prevention and Response Programs

A better understanding of military-specific risk and protective factors would greatly assist in developing tailored interventions for service members. To date, however, the DoD has relied primarily on evidence-based civilian programs to inform their prevention efforts. Most recently, a bystander intervention model has been widely adopted in prevention programs across all of the services and aggressively implemented through required trainings. 3 , 62 The goal of military bystander intervention education is to teach all personnel about the problem of sexual violence in the military, and to encourage everyone to become part of the solution. Service members are taught to recognize warning signs of a potential sexual assault incident and they are provided with strategies that can be used to prevent or respond to the incident. 3 Gender hostility and sexual harassment are explicitly identified as possible precursors that may escalate into sexual assault without intervention. At a macro level, the bystander approach has the potential to produce population-level change in military cultural norms and attitudes toward sexual aggression. 62 Another advantage is that it can be implemented in a positive way, without either confronting participants as possible perpetrators or labeling them as potential victims.

Given the military's emphasis on group cohesion and loyalty, the bystander approach seems to be a good cultural fit for the military. Unfortunately, very little work has been done to evaluate how effectively evidence-based civilian programs like the bystander intervention have been translated and implemented within the DoD. The services are required to identify metrics and track benchmarks of the success of their efforts. In support of this, important internal surveillance is systematically conducted, tracking service-specific sexual victimization rates, polling the attitudes and needs of SAPR program constituents, and, in some instances, attempting to correlate programmatic changes with reporting patterns. 63 , – 66 However, well-controlled studies are necessary to document the effectiveness of specific prevention strategies and to identify the critical elements that make them successful. Ideally, such studies would include control groups (i.e., participants who do not take part in the intervention), track outcomes over time, and assess behavioral as well as attitudinal changes. Unfortunately, studies of this type are scarce. 20 , 62 , 67 , 68

Currently, most of the services have separate response policies and procedures for sexual harassment and assault. Incidents of harassment are handled through Military Equal Opportunity programs whereas sexual assault cases fall under the purview of SAPR. The exception is the Army, where programs for both types of MST are integrated under the umbrella of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program. Air Force SAPR leaders recently reviewed the Army's program, evaluating whether to adopt a similar strategy. However, in the absence of systematic program evaluation, there is little objective basis for determining which strategy is better. At the grassroots level, some personnel are uncomfortable with the sense that an integrated approach lumps more “minor” sexual harassment infractions with more “serious” acts of sexual assault. 69 Despite such misgivings, there is clearly a much greater level of continuity between sexual harassment and assault in the military than there is in most civilian communities, where the boundaries separating work and private life are much clearer. Given the strong associations between sexual harassment and assault in the military context for both victims and perpetrators, increased integration in some areas would likely be efficient.

Throughout this review, we have highlighted parallels and overlaps between sexual harassment and assault with respect to their definitions, risk factors, and effects on victims. Further, we have noted that these two types of sexual violence are highly associated, and that sexual harassment often precedes sexual assault for both victims and perpetrators. However, the military community still needs to become better informed in many respects to effectively combat this problem. In this section, we outline some important future research priorities.

Improving Estimates of Sexual Harassment and Assault Prevalence in the Military

First, going forward it will be important to better understand how our research methods impact estimates of prevalence rates. 70 In this regard, it is helpful that the most recent DoD surveillance effort, the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study, compared two assessment approaches. Some respondents completed the standard WGRS measures, whereas others received newly developed measures more closely aligned with DoD legal definitions of sexual harassment and assault. Encouragingly, the results were remarkably similar across these two distinct assessment strategies. 59 More studies should evaluate the validity of their measures in this way. Although it would be a mistake to prematurely select a preferred operationalization and foreclose other options, a better understanding of the impact of different measures on prevalence estimates and some level of standardization within the military context would significantly advance research. It would particularly improve our ability to do comparative research across groups within the military and between military and civilian populations, and it would stabilize epidemiological surveillance over time. Ultimately, optimal assessment is a necessary foundation for all research endeavors in this topic area.

Further Delineating the Effects of Sexual Trauma

Moving forward, it will be important to build on what we already know about the impact of sexual aggression on military victims by exploring factors that mediate or moderate its effects. One important aspect of this is the severity of the victimization. Both sexual harassment and assault experiences can involve very severe levels of trauma, and research studies need to take this into account in understanding outcomes. Unfortunately, just as we need to improve our assessment of the prevalence of military sexual aggression, we currently do not know the best way to operationalize its severity; it may ultimately depend on a variety of factors such as the nature of the act, the tactics used, whether substance use was involved, and the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator.

Subgroup differences in the experience of military sexual aggression are another critical area for future research. For instance, we need more information regarding the MST experiences of racial/ethnic and sexual orientation minority group members in the military, who may be more likely to experience the cumulative effects of harassment as a result of their minority status as well. Male victims are another subgroup of service members that has not received enough attention. Although some work has been done to understand their sexual victimization experiences, 6 much more is needed. Finally, differences in the response and support systems available for military victims of sexual harassment versus sexual assault may influence long-term outcomes, and this should be a focus of study. Recent attempts to survey military victims of sexual assault victims about their experiences with the SAPR system are a step in the right direction 71 and should continue; parallel efforts with service members who experience sexual harassment also would be useful.

Verifying Military-Specific Risk Factors

A comprehensive understanding of risk factors for sexual violence that are overrepresented in military populations, as well as unique, military-specific risk factors for sexual violence, is essential in developing effective prevention programs. To date, few studies have examined risk factors for sexual violence in active duty populations, and almost all of these have focused on predictors of victimization rather than perpetration. Although understanding factors that increase the risk of being victimized is important, it is arguably even more important to understand factors that increase the likelihood of perpetration. This is an area in urgent need of further study. Whether from the victim or perpetrator perspective, though, future efforts should focus on identifying modifiable risk factors as targets for intervention.

With regard to the interrelationship between sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military, there are three important goals that need to be addressed in future research: (1) explicate the dynamics of sexual harassment as a precursor to sexual assault, (2) document commonalities across risk factors for both sexual harassment and assault, and (3) identify any factors that may differentially heighten the risk for either type of sexual aggression. First, although we know that sexual harassment tends to precede sexual assault for both victims and perpetrators, 33 , 44 , 52 we have very little understanding of this trajectory. There is a pressing need for research on pathways of escalation and ways to interrupt them. Research should examine this issue from the perspective of both victims and perpetrators. However, since extremely little work has been done from the perspective of perpetrators, this is a priority. We need to know how perpetrators progress from harassing and “grooming” behaviors to rape. Comparing trajectories of sexual violence marked by escalation versus cessation and identifying modifiable factors associated with these patterns will provide key information for prevention program development. 72

Next, the risk factors for sexual harassment and assault rarely have been compared in the research literature. In studies of civilians, this is partially because these two types of sexual violence typically occur in different contexts, making it difficult to assess them together. Primarily separate lines of research for harassment and assault have resulted in important differences in the typical risk factor models that have been studied for each type of sexual violence. Research on sexual harassment has emphasized contextual factors within workplace environments, whereas studies of sexual assault have focused more on the individual characteristics of victims and perpetrators. Given the particularly high level of overlap between sexual harassment and assault within the military, researchers studying active duty populations have a unique opportunity to examine contextual and individual risk factors together to understand their relative contributions and to develop more comprehensive predictive models. For sexual assault in particular, additional attention to environmental risk factors has important advantages. Individual characteristics may be difficult to change through SAPR policy or prevention efforts. Moreover, focusing on individual risk factors tends to result in population screening approaches, which raise serious ethical and practical challenges. Considering aspects of the military cultural and physical environment that significantly influence sexual violence may reveal contextual factors that are more readily modifiable and hence more amenable to intervention.

Finally, even though sexual harassment and assault perpetration may have more common than unique predictors in the military context, there may be nuances in how specific risk and protective factors impact the incidence of these two types of sexual violence. For instance, personnel may have more difficulty recognizing sexual harassment as inappropriate because it is frequently more ambiguous than sexual assault. Where there is more ambiguity, it may be reasonable to hypothesize that perpetrators will tend to ignore institutional deterrents (i.e., contextual protective factors) and pay more attention to personal motivations and attitudes (i.e., individual risk factors) in making the choice to become sexually aggressive.

Improving Prevention and Response

It would be particularly helpful to systematically explore alternative ways for the services to coordinate or integrate sexual harassment and assault prevention and response programs. As discussed above, differences in the way these problems are managed likely impact victims' experiences and may influence their long-term adjustment outcomes. Also, anecdotal evidence suggests that the distinction between sexual harassment and assault is confusing to some victims, and they may not know which reporting system to use. For these reasons, further integration of programs may be beneficial. Ultimately, however, the answer to whether sexual harassment and assault should be treated as manifestations of a single dimension or as distinct problems is a complex one, and the answer will certainly vary across contexts (e.g., prevention, victim support, legal response, and medical care).

Finally, the military needs to evaluate the success of its prevention and response efforts more consistently and systematically, in a way that illuminates the most important components for success. For example, in assessing the bystander intervention, we not only need to know how willing service members are to intervene when they recognize a potential problem with sexual aggression, but what factors may inhibit that recognition in the first place. Furthermore, even the most willing individual may not act depending upon immediate situational factors. Studies that present personnel with hypothetical but realistic high-risk scenarios and examine their response, for instance, may help to clarify how well personnel can use what they learn through trainings in real-life situations. 73 Understanding these dynamics is critical in developing the next generation of program materials.

The military community will always need to remain alert in the battle to eliminate sexual harassment and assault from its ranks. Furthermore, given the extent of the problem in civilian communities throughout the United States, the DoD must set its aspirations higher than parity in this fight; the military community must be at the forefront. In many ways, fundamental characteristics of the military environment present a double-edged sword for SAPR. For instance, the hierarchical structure may increase risk for victimization based on abuse of authority; at the same time, however, this hierarchy gives military leaders the ability to change policy and practice to improve SAPR programs much more dramatically and quickly than would be possible in most civilian environments. Also, the high value placed on cohesion throughout the force may lead to protectionism and make it difficult for victims to come forward; on the other hand, group loyalty may make prevention efforts more successful when leveraged through the bystander intervention program. In the military, the relationship between sexual harassment and assault is particularly complex, presenting dilemmas in structuring prevention and response programs. However, because of this, the VA and the DoD have a unique opportunity to study these problems in parallel, and to develop a comprehensive strategy to address the continuum of harm resulting from both. Given the current momentum across the military in addressing the problems of sexual harassment and assault, we are hopeful that SAPR programs will continue to progress to the point that military research, prevention, and response are the standard to emulate.

Report no. 15-02 was supported by the Tri-Service Nursing Research Program, under Work Unit no. N1411.

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Why the Military Has a Sexual Assault Problem

Brian Lewis, former Petty Officer Third Class, U.S. Navy, pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2013, during the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel hearing on sexual assault in the military. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The military’s campaign to prevent sexual assault largely centers on telling servicemen not to have sex with women when they’re drunk.

Last year, posters were distributed with the headline, “Ask Her When She’s Sober.” The posters have since been scrubbed from the MyDuty.Mil website , which now has a video showing service members watching a colleague who’s getting too forward with a woman at a bar.

“Man, that’s all we need, is to get put on lockdown again,” one of the guys in the video complains, before getting up to intervene.

The military also uses a video game that includes another bar scene: “Loud music, cold beer, hot girls, game on,” the narrator intones. Players then must choose whether to stop certain behaviors. If they fail, the game ends with a female private being raped in the barracks. She reports the assault, and ends up leaving the service.

The focus is “very 1950s,” said Nancy Parrish, president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for veterans and active-duty members.

More significantly, the campaign overlooks the actual demographics of sexual assault in the military: According to its own data, more than half of the military’s victims are men.

The Pentagon’s annual report on sexual assault in the military uses data from a survey of active-duty members to extrapolate an estimate of how many have experienced some form of assault.

Its most recent report , released this week, estimated that 26,000 service members experienced “unwanted sexual contact,” which includes rape, attempted rape and unwanted sexual touching.  Of these, an estimated 12,100 were women — and 13,900 were men. Fewer than half of the incidents involved alcohol.

Due to the much smaller number of women in the military — there are about 200,000 compared to 1.2 million men — women still bear a greater proportion of these assaults. But the numbers are still striking because attacks against men are so often overlooked.

And while the numbers of assaults spiked considerably from last year’s estimate of 19,000, the number of reported incidents documented by the DoD remained largely the same, rising only 6 percent from 3,192 to 3,374. (Read the full report here (pdf).)

In other words, men and women in the military are enduring sexual assault in greater numbers than last year, but still only a fraction choose to report what happened to them.

The problem may have reached a point where “it could very well undermine our ability to effectively carry out the mission and to recruit and retain the good people we need,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel acknowledged this week at a press briefing announcing the report.

“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.”

The Chain of Command

One reason sexual assault festers in the military is its leadership structure, according to former service men and women who have been assaulted in the military and advocates who work with them.

In the military, sexual assaults are handled within the chain of command. That means that a victim’s commanding officer has the ability to intervene at any point: to stop an investigation, reduce a sentence or even set aside a conviction.

For example, a top Air Force official  recently overturned the court-martial conviction of an officer for sexual assault. Lt. Gen. Susan Helms hadn’t attended the trial and offered no public explanation for her decision, nor is she required to do so.

Last year, then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced new policies, including a 24/7 hotline for military members and a special victims unit dedicated to investigating sexual assaults. He also instituted a requirement that all unit commanders report sexual assault allegations up the chain of command, so the cases can be handled at a special court-martial level.

But there are sometimes weak links in the chain of command.

One former soldier told Parrish’s group in a statement that she was sexually harassed and ultimately raped by a superior while deployed in Iraq.

The woman said she reported the assault to several officers in her chain of command, but was told that she’d be charged with adultery if she pursued the complaint. One officer even told her that he had mentioned the incident to her attacker, who said she had come onto him — and that she should be charged with harassing him.

She endured further threats, and was assigned to duties below her rank. She was medically retired in 2012. “I am one of the ‘unreported statistics’ — not without trying, I assure you of that,” she wrote. “He is free and able to do it again as long as he wears the uniform. The uniform represents a protective shield if you’re a rapist with rank. My life gets ruined, and he gets promoted.”

Military leadership structure provides a strong incentive for commanders to avoid pursuing sexual assault allegations in their ranks: It can hurt their careers.

Commanders are responsible for keeping their troops disciplined and in good order.

“You don’t want to be the commander that calls your superior to say you’ve had an allegation of rape in your unit,” said Brian Lewis, a former Navy petty officer third class who says he was raped by another sailor when he was 20 years old. “It makes you look bad, and affects your ability to be considered for a promotion.”

As the wars wind down and the military shrinks in size, commanders anxious to ensure they move up may feel especially compelled to make sure sexual assault doesn’t happen in their unit — at least, not on paper.

“I Was Viewed As the Problem Child”

Lewis knows this firsthand. After he was raped, he said he reported the attack to his commanding officer. “I thought my command would do the right thing,” he said. Instead, he said he was told not to report the crime to the Navy criminal investigators — or to tell anyone else.

Lewis said he lived in constant fear of running into his rapist again on the 600-foot-long ship. But he also was crushed by the betrayal from his command, who seemed to blame him for what had happened. “All of a sudden, I was viewed as the problem child,” he said.

He was moved to a different work station and disqualified from carrying a sidearm, which meant he could no longer stand watch on deck — a main duty for a sailor. At work, he said he was suddenly written up for minor violations: a scratch on his belt-buckle, a hanging thread on his uniform.

Lewis says other sailors, seeing the sanctions, assumed he’d done something wrong and kept away from him, not wanting to be branded a troublemaker by association.

“I had one person tell me, ‘I’d like to talk to you, but you’re not a good person to be around right now,'” he said.

After a few months, Lewis was removed from the ship and sent to a Navy psychiatrist in San Diego, who called him a liar, he said. “He wanted to know why I was tarnishing somebody’s good name,” Lewis said. The psychiatrist diagnosed Lewis with a personality disorder, which slated him for a general discharge, he said.

It’s one of the labels sexual assault victims receive in the military, according to advocates who have worked with victims, along with discharges for “weight-control failure,” or engaging in misconduct such as consuming alcohol, if the victim had drinks before the assault; or committing adultery, if the victim is married.

Within a year of his rape, Lewis was out of the military. Without an honorable discharge, he was on his own: He couldn’t get treatment from the VA for sexual trauma, or access to the GI bill to attend school. Lewis earned his bachelor’s degree anyway, and plans to attend law school in the fall. But he worries the general discharge on his record could hurt him when he tries to pass the bar.

Lewis testified about his assault earlier this year at a Senate hearing on sexual assault in the military, the first man to do so. (He’s pictured above; the full hearing transcript is here (pdf).) He said he doesn’t know where his rapist is now. Since the man was older, he may even have retired — with full benefits — from the Navy.

The psychiatrist, meanwhile, now holds a top position working with service members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

What Can Be Done?

Advocates are trying to prevent what Lewis, the woman in Iraq, and countless others have endured. They want to remove sexual assault allegations from the chain of command to ensure investigations and trials are conducted fairly. They point to England and Canada, which have already done so in their militaries.

Lawmakers have proposed initiatives to address this problem and sexual assault in the military generally. There’s a bipartisan proposal in the House, sponsored by Reps. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.) that would prohibit officers from altering or overturning a conviction for a major crime, such as a sexual assault. Those found guilty would be dishonorably discharged or dismissed.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-NY), plans to introduce legislation next week that would send sexual assault cases outside the chain of command.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has also instructed the department to conduct a full review of the military justice process, including this provision.

But such changes will be controversial in the Pentagon.

There are recent indications that some leadership still struggles to understand the roots of sexual assault in the military: The Air Force’s top general this week blamed the problem on a “hook-up culture” among young women in civilian society who join the military. And the officer in charge of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention office, Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, was arrested for sexually assaulting a civilian woman, after he allegedly approached her in a parking lot and groped her. She fought him off and called 911.

At a March Senate hearing on sexual assault in the military, senior officers from all five branches of the military said that while they were committed to addressing sexual assault, they also strongly opposed stripping commanders of the power to intervene in military justice.

The judicial process should be reviewed, Vice Adm. Nanette DeRenzi, the Navy’s judge advocate general told the panel, but legislators should be “ever mindful of the second- and third-order effects” of restricting commanders’ authority.

The Marine Corps’ representative also said that such authority was important to retain. “They are responsible for setting command climate,” said Maj. Gen. Vaughn Ary, the commandant’s staff judge advocate. “They are responsible for the culture, and it is their leadership that we have to hold accountable. And they need to be able to hold everyone in their unit accountable to preserve that good order and discipline to accomplish their missions.”

Even if lawmakers get their way, the current proposals aren’t going to be enough to impose broad, structural change, said Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine officer and executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.

“These numbers are not going to change with minor, Band-Aid proposals that [the Department of Defense and members of Congress] have attempted,” she said. “We need overwhelming, comprehensive criminal justice reform.”

Is that possible? Parrish, the victims’ advocate, says the military already made a major cultural change decades earlier, when it stamped out institutional racism.

Sweeping legislation helped, but what made the difference was “the subsequent decision within the military leadership that racism was a fundamental problem affecting mission readiness, cohesion and national security — and it was vital that the culture change.”

“It can be done,” she said. “They just have to mean it.”

Sarah Childress , Former Series Senior Editor , FRONTLINE

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Sexual Assault Within Military Is On The Rise

The Pentagon's anonymous survey of sexual assault in the military shows a sharp increase. It's unclear whether this is due to more reporting or more instances of assault.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Sexual Harassment and Assault: The Army Should Take Steps to Enhance Program Oversight, Evaluate Effectiveness, and Identify Reporting Barriers

The Army estimates that 40,000 soldiers were sexually harassed and 6,700 soldiers were sexually assaulted in 2018. However, only a fraction of them reported their experiences.

We found that the Army's program for preventing and resolving sexual harassment and sexual assault needs to be improved. For example, the Army hasn't consolidated its policies for sexual harassment and assault prevention and response. It also hasn't assessed the barriers that prevent soldiers from reporting such incidents or fully developed performance measures to evaluate the effectiveness of its efforts.

Our recommendations address these and other issues.

A soldier participates in Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) training

What GAO Found

The Army Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program has policies to prevent, respond to, and resolve incidents of sexual harassment and assault. Program implementation, however, is hindered by disjointed policy, among other things. Key provisions related to the SHARP program are spread across multiple Army guidance documents, creating confusion for SHARP personnel. Long-standing efforts to consolidate SHARP policy into a single regulation have been delayed due to competing priorities, according to SHARP program officials. Without expediting and establishing a timeline for the issuance of a consolidated SHARP regulation, the Army risks continued confusion among program personnel.

Several factors limit the Army's oversight of command SHARP programs. A 2019 reorganization decreased SHARP Program Office staff by half, eliminating dedicated key positions and limiting the office's ability to conduct oversight functions. Further, the office lacks visibility over program funding and staffing. Without designing an oversight structure that addresses these challenges, the Army may continue to face difficulties with program implementation.

In addition, two issues limit the Army's ability to gauge program effectiveness. First, GAO found that none of the SHARP program's performance measures fully exhibit key attributes of successful performance measures (see figure). SHARP personnel identified the number of reported incidents as a key measure, but it is neither clear nor objective. An increase in reports may indicate either increased trust in the program or an increase in incidents, indicating a lack of effectiveness. Without developing a suite of performance measures, the Army is unable to measure progress towards achieving its goals. Second, the Army has not systematically evaluated the SHARP program for effectiveness, despite prioritizing such an effort since its inception in 2009. Without developing and implementing a continuous evaluation plan to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the SHARP program, the Army may miss opportunities to prioritize promising approaches and address challenges.

Comparison of Army Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Program Performance Measures to GAO's Key Attributes of Successful Measures

Why GAO Did This Study

Reports of sexual harassment and assault in the Army continue to rise. Soldiers reported about 1,000 and 2,500 incidents occurring during military service, respectively, in fiscal year 2020. According to DOD survey data, many additional incidents go unreported. While the Army has taken steps to respond to such incidents through its SHARP Program, a November 2020 independent review of the command climate at Fort Hood found structural flaws in the program Army-wide. The review also found a pervasive lack of confidence in it among soldiers at that installation.

GAO was asked to review the Army's administration of the SHARP program. This report examines, among other things, the extent to which the Army has (1) implemented policies and programs to prevent, respond to, and resolve incidents of sexual harassment and assault; and (2) mechanisms in place to oversee the SHARP program and determine its effectiveness. GAO reviewed policies and guidance; conducted a generalizable survey of SHARP personnel; interviewed DOD and Army officials; and interviewed officials and commanders at three Army installations selected based on risk level, among other factors.

Recommendations

GAO is making nine recommendations, including that the Army expedite and establish a timeline for the issuance of a consolidated SHARP regulation, design its oversight structure to address identified challenges, develop a suite of performance measures, and develop and implement a continuous evaluation plan. The Army concurred with these recommendations.

Recommendations for Executive Action

Full report, gao contacts.

Brenda S. Farrell Director [email protected] (202) 512-3604

Office of Public Affairs

Chuck Young Managing Director [email protected] (202) 512-4800