Military Rape Reporting Flawed

(CBS/AP)  Victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault in the military have too often suffered additionally from a lack of support from commanders, criminal investigators and doctors, according to a military report.

The report, ordered in February by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after a number of sexual assaults against soldiers in the Iraqi theater came to light, described inconsistencies throughout the military in the treatment and investigation of such assaults.

Those responses varied unit to unit, case to case, said Ellen P. Embrey, head of an eight-member task force that authored the report. Embrey and her team heard from dozens of victims in Iraq and Kuwait.

"In many cases the commanders were very supportive of (a victim's) circumstance," she told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. "It was the process of investigation, the backlog of forensic analysis, or the failure to provide timely legal assistance that ended up being a problem. In other cases, the commander was insensitive to the fact that the assault was an assault. Some ignored it."

In some cases, commanders were unsure of the difference between sexual harassment, misconduct and assault. For her inquiry, Embrey defined sexual assault as rape, forcible sodomy, indecent assault or attempts to do any of those.

"Existing policies and programs aimed at preventing sexual assault are inconsistent and incomplete, principally because there is no Defense-wide policy requiring them," the report finds.

The task force recommends a series of primarily administrative changes that are aimed at increasing awareness throughout the ranks of how to respond, both medically and judicially, when a soldier reports being assaulted. The recommendations include new offices to focus on the issue as well as new training procedures.

David Chu, the undersecretary of defense for personnel, said some early changes were being implemented.

In a memo to commanders ordering them to take stock of their units' assault reporting systems, Rumsfeld wrote that sexual assault, "must not be tolerated."

"It threatens military readiness. It is an affront to decency owed to each human being," he wrote.

The study was initiated by Rumsfeld in response to media reports about sexual assaults in Iraq and Kuwait. In almost all of these cases, male U.S. troops were reported assaulting female soldiers.

In all, the military received 94 reports of sexual assault from soldiers in the region that includes Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan in 2003. It received 24 reports in that region in 2002.

Chu attributed the increase to the massive increase of U.S. service members sent to the region for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He said the rate was consistent with the rate reported throughout the military.

"It occurs here in garrison in the U.S.," Embrey said. "It occurs in combat environments."

Chu said those figures probably represent a small fraction of the number of assaults that actually occurred, because soldiers are often afraid or unwilling to report it to their chain of command.

Chu also disputed the notion that sexual assault cases are swept under the rug when commanders use less-severe administrative punishments on alleged sexual offenders, rather than send them to courts-martial.

Chu said those cases are frequently the result of the victim not wanting to go through the investigative and legal processes, so commanders take what measures they can against the assailant.

Military-wide, sexual assault in the military has dropped by half since the mid-1990s, Chu said. He cited military surveys in which soldiers can anonymously report being assaulted. In the mid-90s, between 6 and 7 percent of women answering the survey reported they had been assaulted in the last year; in 2002, the figure was around 3 percent, he said.

In 2002, military authorities investigated 901 alleged cases of sexual assault; in 2003, they investigated 1012 cases, the report says.

Across both years, more than three-quarters of the alleged assailants were members of the Armed Forces. Almost all the assailants were men; 91 percent of the victims were women.

Assaults usually take place in the junior ranks, Chu said.