Sexual assaults among active-duty US military forces climb by 35%

The US Defense Department has released a survey study showing a 35 % climb in sexual assault cases in the military, just two days after an officer leading Air Force’s sexual assault prevention programs was himself detained and charged with sexual battery.

The Pentagon report, released on Tuesday, estimates that 26,000 American military service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, a major heap from 19,000 such cases reported during 2010. 

In a separate report, also published on Tuesday, the US military further said that it recorded 3,374 sexual assault reports in 2012, up from 3,192 in the previous year, indicating that many sexual assault victims continue not to report the crimes out of fear of vengeance or lack of justice under the military’s system of prosecution. 

This is while an Air Force Lt. General reversed a guilty verdict in late 2012 in a major sexual assault case involving a senior air force commander. 

According to Pentagon officials, out of the 26,000 male and female soldiers that responded the sexual assault survey, 6.1 % of women and 1.2 percent of men said they had been subjected to sexual assault in the past year, ranging from rape to “unwanted sexual touching.” 

Responding to the survey study and the arrest of the officer leading sexual assault prevention programs in the Air Force for sexually assaulting a woman while drunk, top US officials and congressional lawmakers expressed anger about the seemingly unstoppable sexual assault trend among the American armed forces. 

“The bottom line is, I have no tolerance for this,” said President Barack Obama. “If we find out somebody’s engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.” 

Obama, however, did not at all protest the recent reversal of a guilty verdict of a top Air Force commander for persistently engaging in sexual assault offenses against female subordinates. 

Female lawmakers at a Tuesday hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, however, expressed outrage at testimonies offered by two senior Air Force officers, suggesting that they were making progress in “ending” the sexual assault problem in their branch. 

“If the man in charge for the Air Force in preventing sexual assaults is being alleged to have committed a sexual assault this weekend,” said New York’s Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, “obviously there’s a failing in training and understanding of what sexual assault is, and how corrosive and damaging it is to good order and discipline.”

Gillibrand was referring to the arrest of the 41-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Krusinski for sexually handling a woman in parking lot of a restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. 

Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, meanwhile, announced at the same hearing that she was holding up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to become the vice commander of the Air Force’s Space Command due to her unexplained decision to reverse guilty verdict of the Air Force commander convicted of sexual assault. 

McCaskill said she wanted more information about why General Helms overturned a jury conviction in the sexual assault case last year. 

MFB/MFB 

Source: Press TV (08/05/2013): http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/08/302410/sexual-assault-in-us-military-up-35/