“The watchful eye of Congress is needed to ensure that military leadership is held to account and any additional changes deemed necessary to address this national embarrassment and crisis are made,” she said in the statement. Speier, the chairwoman of the House Armed Services military personnel subpanel, called the results “disturbing” and announced that she would hold a hearing in the coming weeks “to get more answers,” according to a statement from her office. Though language was included in the most recently passed National Defense Authorization Act to overhaul the military justice system - taking most decisions on whether to prosecute cases of rape and sexual assault away from military commanders - that’s not enough, according to Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). The dismal findings have some lawmakers calling for more changes at the DOD. That’s a far cry from 2013, when military services started court-martial proceedings for 71 percent of 1,187 cases. In 2021, only 42 percent of the 1,974 cases that ended in discipline saw court-martial proceedings. The lack of confidence is likely linked to a drop in prosecutions for sexual assault. Unsurprisingly, confidence in the military’s response to sexual assault is waning, with only 39 percent of female service members saying they trust those in their chain of command to “treat them with dignity and respect” after an incident, compared with 66 percent in 2018.įor male troops during the same time period, only 63 percent were confident they would be treated well after reporting an assault, down from 82 percent in 2018. The Navy, meanwhile, experienced a 9.2 percent increase of reported sexual assaults, while the Air Force and the Marines each had a roughly 2 percent increase.
The spike was largely driven by the Army, where reports of sexual assault increased 25.6 percent from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2021.
That adds up to less than a quarter of suspected incidents being reported.
Overall, out of nearly 35,900 incidents that the department estimated to have occurred, there were 8,866 sexual assault reports filed from Oct. “On an individual level, it is devastating to conceptualize that these numbers mean that over 35,000 service members’ lives and careers were irrevocably changed by these crimes.” “These numbers are tragic and extremely disappointing,” Elizabeth Foster, the DOD’s director of force resiliency, told reporters ahead of the document’s release.
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