US military service members who report sexual assault frequently experience retaliation that goes unpunished, Human Rights Watch said. The report is the result of an 18-month investigation by Human Rights Watch with the support of Protect Our Defenders, a human rights organization that supports and advocates for survivors of military sexual assault. Despite extensive reforms by the Defense Department to address sexual assault, the military has done little to hold retaliators to account or provide effective remedies for retaliation.
The 113-page report, “Embattled: Retaliation against Sexual Assault Survivors in the US Military,” finds that both male and female military personnel who report sexual assault are 12 times as likely to experience some form of retaliation as to see their attacker convicted of a sex offense. Retaliation against survivors ranges from threats, vandalism, and harassment to poor work assignments, loss of promotion opportunities, disciplinary action including discharge, and even criminal charges.
“The US military’s progress in getting people to report sexual assaults isn’t going to continue as long as retaliation for making a report goes unpunished,” said Sara Darehshori, senior US counsel at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “Ending retaliation is critical to addressing the problem of sexual assault in the military.”
The report says that some of the retaliation came from superior officers including this chilling claim by one soldier:
“A certain Sergeant in my platoon had told me he would kill me if we ever went to Afghanistan because ‘friendly fire is a tragic accident that happens,’” said a soldier who reported a sexual assault by a male soldier from another platoon in 2012. “After I had been there for a year, someone tried to knife me in a bar and kept screaming ‘DIE FAGGOT, DIE’ and that was when I told my Captain that I wanted a discharge before I ended up dead on the evening news which would be bad for him too.”
It is incredibly troubling that not only are in serious danger of being sexually assaulted in the United States military, whether you are a man or a woman, but that if you dare report the crime you can then be subjected to threats of violence, harassment, and loss of promotion.
That is not just a few assholes being assholes, that is a systemic problem which speaks to an underlying problem in our military structure.
American exceptionalism my ass.
