This response is for Blog Stage 8.
While I think your heart is in the right place, your severe distrust of Military Justice is unfounded. Also, your status as a civilian unfairly limits your knowledge about how the military actually treats this issue outside of what you see on the news. It’s not directly your fault, but it still disables you from knowing all of the facts.
My first bone to pick is with the statement “Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than to die in combat”. To which my answer (sorry to say) is “no shit”. Women are going to be statistically likely to do just about anything more than die in combat because THEY ARE NOT ASSIGNED TO COMBAT ROLES. Women servicemen can serve in combat zones sure, but they are not assigned to direct combat roles. IE they are not on the front lines fighting people. Do they end up getting shot at sometimes? Sure. But that doesn’t mean they do the same amount of fighting as their male counterparts. So I could also say “Women are more likely to get called a bad name than to die in combat” and it would be equally as true as the statement you cited.
My second issue is with the idea that women that have legitimate issues have to “stay silent”. That is categorically false. They have a myriad of options to report a sexual assault. One would be to come right out and accuse another member, in which a very serious investigation would result. If that investigation was carried out by her command and she feels there is a conflict of interests, she can request her respective service Internal Investigations to conduct one (they are biased since they don’t answer to her chain of command). But say she didn’t want to go through all that and let everyone know what happened to her; there’s something for that too! It’s call a “Restricted Report”. The only people that will know about what happened are the Sexual Assault coordinator, the Commanding Officer, and any medical staff the service member requests for help from. Other than that, nobody else knows. And if at any time she decides to go forward and press and investigation, she can go ahead and do so.
The idea that the DoD takes this issue lightly is absolutely not true. For example, we receive quarterly (every 3 months) training on sexual assault that consists of a (yes I’m serious) 4 hour power point presentation, followed by group discussions and ending with the leadership talking about it with everyone in the command. It literally takes an entire day to complete this evolution and document it all. So over the course of a year, that’s 16 hours of power points, and probably another 6 hours of discussions and speeches, ending us with about 22 hours a year worth of Sexual Assault training… I challenge you to find a civilian organization that does more than that. I highly doubt you’ll find one.
While I think your heart is in the right place, your severe distrust of Military Justice is unfounded. Also, your status as a civilian unfairly limits your knowledge about how the military actually treats this issue outside of what you see on the news. It’s not directly your fault, but it still disables you from knowing all of the facts.
My first bone to pick is with the statement “Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than to die in combat”. To which my answer (sorry to say) is “no shit”. Women are going to be statistically likely to do just about anything more than die in combat because THEY ARE NOT ASSIGNED TO COMBAT ROLES. Women servicemen can serve in combat zones sure, but they are not assigned to direct combat roles. IE they are not on the front lines fighting people. Do they end up getting shot at sometimes? Sure. But that doesn’t mean they do the same amount of fighting as their male counterparts. So I could also say “Women are more likely to get called a bad name than to die in combat” and it would be equally as true as the statement you cited.
My second issue is with the idea that women that have legitimate issues have to “stay silent”. That is categorically false. They have a myriad of options to report a sexual assault. One would be to come right out and accuse another member, in which a very serious investigation would result. If that investigation was carried out by her command and she feels there is a conflict of interests, she can request her respective service Internal Investigations to conduct one (they are biased since they don’t answer to her chain of command). But say she didn’t want to go through all that and let everyone know what happened to her; there’s something for that too! It’s call a “Restricted Report”. The only people that will know about what happened are the Sexual Assault coordinator, the Commanding Officer, and any medical staff the service member requests for help from. Other than that, nobody else knows. And if at any time she decides to go forward and press and investigation, she can go ahead and do so.
The idea that the DoD takes this issue lightly is absolutely not true. For example, we receive quarterly (every 3 months) training on sexual assault that consists of a (yes I’m serious) 4 hour power point presentation, followed by group discussions and ending with the leadership talking about it with everyone in the command. It literally takes an entire day to complete this evolution and document it all. So over the course of a year, that’s 16 hours of power points, and probably another 6 hours of discussions and speeches, ending us with about 22 hours a year worth of Sexual Assault training… I challenge you to find a civilian organization that does more than that. I highly doubt you’ll find one.
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