Military Sexual Assault Totals Down: Women's Trust Remains Low
The reasons are clear and obvious. Improvements can start with the basics.
If less than half of any group within an organization distrust its leadership, that’s a critical or if you prefer, damning reflection. Such is the case with the military’s responses to sexual assault, according to a recent Pentagon report.
The majority of women in the armed services do not feel confident that their chain of command will ethically and successfully “handle reports of sexual assault, posing a continued problem for service leaders, even as the number of assault cases fell significantly last year,” writes Leo Shane III at the Military Times.
“We know we have a lot more work to do to rebuild trust, especially amongst our service women,” says Beth Foster, the executive director of the Defense Department’s Office of Force Resiliency.
That could be an understatement.
Shane III reports that sexual assaults or unwanted sexual contacts were down almost 7,000 in 2023 from 2021, yet “only 38% of active duty women said they trust the department to protect their privacy if they report an assault. Among men, rates of trust were significantly higher — 61% on privacy issues, and 66% on safety issues.”
That is objectively-speaking a disappointingly low level of trust, especially for the military, which assumed to be uncompromising about self discipline and ethical, reliable, leadership-administered discipline.
“From a female perspective, leaders need to consider how these cases have been handled in the past. If you were the woman and in this situation, would you have liked to be treated the way that person was treated by the military branch,” rhetorically asks Danielle Stepien, the CEO and president of Igniter Engineering, a partner to active duty Warrant Officer in the US Army Special Forces.
“I was a wildland firefighter for 2 seasons, which has a similar culture to the Department of Defense and it has a lot of the same issues, like lack of trust in leadership for sexual assault cases.”
She explains what she sees as what is commonly missing that leads to low confidence in leadership having women’s safety, culture and units’ best interests in mind.
“Empathize with the woman that had a horrific event happen to them and put yourself in her shoes. How would you like to be treated in that situation — and has the Armed Forces treated those situations correctly in the past, according to how you would have liked to been treated?” Stepien pointedly says.
“If the answer is ‘no,’ you have a trust issue in your branch or team and you need to exemplify leadership in showing that you are doing things differently and want to handle these situations better from now on.”
She adds how that can be done more impressively.
“Outline specific steps on how you plan to do that and communicate them to the team from the bottom up to instill trust at all levels,” Stepien states.
The low level of trust feedback is communicating what women and men, but especially women, feel about how unsafe a safe work environment the military is for them and how disappointing, discouraging and maybe depressing the poor display of responsibility is from leadership throughout the military. Safety and accountability don’t come across as a standard and priority.
“The low trust rating is not by accident,” Stepien says. “There are legitimate reasons the trust ratings are low.
“Look at what data you have available to you: Surveys from women who have had cases like this handled, data on how many women report these instances and how many likely go unreported, why cases ever go unreported -- why is there a culture of fear, if there is one, in your group or branch?
“Think of it like an engineering data problem to solve and treat it as such in your approach to resolution.”
Men feel somewhat more trusting and confident about having their privacy protected and being safe moving forward after assault and that should not be a surprise.
“Men feel like they are better represented in the military assault process because they are,” Stepien says. “How many women are involved in handling women sexual assault cases in the Armed Forces? Not many, because there aren't many women in the Armed Forces. They are a minority, statistically. There needs to be more women handling women's cases, that helps with the initial trust of the situation.”
That improvement needs to be supplemented, she stresses, with specific protections.
“There needs to be no — or limited — repercussions on women reporting these incidents, even if an investigation finds out for it to be untrue,” Stepien asserts.
She balances that advocacy with expected discipline for claims that are not factual.
“If that is the case, and it is for sure a lie, then the woman should be fully punished for that in her unit, to prevent other females from submitting false claims,” Stepien says. “This should be a fully equitable and fair reporting and punishment process, anything less is a disservice to all women who serve this country.”
Sexual assaults and a trusted relationship between those victimized and the military leadership is a moral, safety, trust, relationship, morale and reputation issue.
Commitment to improvement and an adherence to respectable conduct requires responsible, sustained effort and that includes the emotions, feelings and psychology.
“Support mental health services internally at all rankings for free. The current system is terrible for active duty military members of all kinds,” Stepien says.
“Someone initially sexually assaults another person due to mental health issues,” she states. “That is the root problem and the military has a huge problem with helping current active duty servicemembers with access to free — or low cost — mental health care that doesn't impact their ability to serve.”
She provides a concern she knows about.
“An example is an active duty servicemember goes to the V.A.-sponsored, on-base mental health counselor at no cost for divorce help. They then get their personal health data told to supervisors and it impacts their right to serve overseas, etc. because they are now marked as ‘mentally unfit’ when they are just trying to talk through basic life problems with someone confidentially,” Stepien says.
It’s disturbing to her and not what is helpful or needed, she declares.
“It is a broken system that needs resolving now, yesterday and in the future for all active duty and all veterans.”
Thank you for reading this issue.
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