WASHINGTON —
The Department of Defense released an annual report on Tuesday showing an 11
percent increase in reports of sexual assault in the military over the past
year, including a 16 percent increase in reported assaults occurring in combat
areas, principally Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report
said there were 3,230 reports of sexual assault filed involving service members
as either victims or assailants in the fiscal year that ended in September. The
Pentagon attributed the rise largely to an upward trend in the reporting of
incidents, and said the jump did “not necessarily” reflect an increase in the
number of incidents.
The Pentagon
offered no evidence that reporting rather than sexual assault itself was on the
rise in the military, and there have been reports in recent years suggesting
that the strains between men and women in close quarters in war zones have exacerbated
the problem.
But it is
also true that since 2004 the Defense Department has radically changed the way
it handles sexual abuse in the military, including encouraging victims to come
forward, expanding access to treatment and toughening standards for
prosecution.
From 2007 to
2008, there was an 8 percent increase in reported assaults, with an 11 percent
increase in combat areas. The Defense Department said that for the purposes of
the 2009 report, “combat areas” included Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen and
other countries in the Middle East and Central Asia where military men and
women are serving.
“One sexual
assault is too many,” Kaye Whitley, the director of the Pentagon’s sexual
assault prevention and response office, said in a telephone interview.
The 2009
report, like previous reports, included sexual assaults by civilians on service
members and by service members on civilians. But Ms. Whitley said a majority,
53 percent, were assaults by service members on other service members.
Of all the assaults,
Ms. Whitley said, a vast majority, 87 percent, were male on female, while 7
percent were male on male. The typical case, she said, was an assault by an 18-
to 25-year-old junior enlisted male service member on a woman, with alcohol
involved.
In the
report, sexual assault was defined as rape, sodomy and other unwanted sexual
contact, including touching of private body parts. It did not include sexual
harassment, which is handled by another office in the military.
Ms. Whitley
said that most sexual assault in the military went unreported, as it did in the
general population, and that she did not believe that there was more sexual
assault in the military than in the population at large. “We are recruiting
from the society we serve,” she said.
The report
said that sexual assault was devastating to individual service members because
it “destroys the human spirit,” but that it also took a serious toll on the
military. “Sexual assault reverberates throughout a unit and beyond,” it said.