NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 28, 2013
EDITORIAL
Next Steps on Military Sexual Assaults
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: April 28, 2013 152 Comments
In the last big health survey of active-duty American military personnel, conducted in 2011 and released last week, one in five female service members said they had been subjected to unwanted sexual contact since joining the military. That shocking statistic squares with other alarming indicators of the military’s pervasiveculture of sexual misconduct. It also underscores the urgent need to change that culture.
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Despite promises of zero tolerance, the Pentagon has nothing less than a sexual assault crisis on its hands. The Defense Department estimated last year that as many as 19,000 service members are sexually assaulted annually. Only a small fraction of the incidents, 3,192 in 2011, are reported, and a mere 10 percent of those cases proceed to trial — hardly enough to create meaningful deterrence to criminal behavior and establish accountability. And sexual assaults at the three elite military academies are at record numbers, according to Pentagon data. Studies have shown sexual trauma to be the leading cause of post-traumatic stress disorder among servicewomen.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, is offering two promising bills aimed generally at improving conditions for women in the military and reforming the way the military handles sexual assault cases. The first measure, introduced last week, would allow women to use their own money to pay for abortions in military medical facilities. Under current law, military doctors may perform abortions only in cases of rape, incest or when the woman’s life is endangered, an appalling restriction on a woman’s right to make her own childbearing decisions. The rule also has the effect of denying abortion care to military rape victims who are unwilling to risk their careers and privacy by coming forward.
The second bill, to be introduced next month, seeks to give women confidence that they can eventually receive justice by repairing a key structural flaw in the military’s handling of assault cases. As things stand, senior officers with no legal training but ample conflicts of interest can decide whether court-martial charges can be brought against subordinates and whether to throw out a verdict once it is rendered. In one recent case, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, an Air Force commander, dismissed without explanation the aggravated sexual assault conviction of an Air Force fighter pilot, Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, permitting Colonel Wilkerson’s reinstatement.
Ms. Gillibrand would leave decisions in serious military cases, including sexual assaults, to an independent prosecutor and end the power of senior commanders to quash a verdict. A similar measure that would create a system for handling sexual trauma cases outside the chain of command has been introduced in the House by Jackie Speier, a California Democrat. To his credit, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel supports eliminating the discretion of senior officers to overturn jury findings in serious cases, still leaving defendants robust rights of appeal. But he has stopped short of endorsing the changes necessary to give impartial military prosecutors the power to investigate and prosecute offenses.
Opponents of reform seem in denial about the severity of the problem while raising overblown fears that handling felony-level cases outside the chain of command would ruin military discipline. What that argument misses is that military discipline is already badly broken when the many victims of sexual assaults have almost zero faith that justice will be served and their careers protected if they report them.
