Report Ranking Military Installations for Sex Assault Risk Delayed

The Pentagon is finalizing the release of a potentially explosive report that will rank individual military installations and ships based on the likelihood service members may experience sexual harassment or sexual assault there.

The report, titled “Estimates for Installation- and Command-Level Risk of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment,” was slated for release this week, but last-minute concerns about the politically sensitive data, which would identify specific installations or ships as high risk, generated questions during pre-release briefings on Capitol Hill.

The Pentagon still intends to make the findings public eventually... The Pentagon commissioned the RAND Corporation to produce the not-yet published report “because we believe it will help us better understand and prevent sexual assault and sexual harassment,” Gleason said. "These estimates give us a better understanding of how the risk of sexual assault varies within and across the services, it is not a current snapshot of installation sexual assault reports.”

The RAND study relies on the raw data obtained in 2014 surveys completed for the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. By comparing survey response, locations and base populations, RAND’s report aims to “estimate sexual assault and sexual harassment risk across U.S. military installations, ships, and major commands.”  (Military Times, September 19, 2018)
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Over the past 10 years there has been a significant increase in the number of sexual assaults reported in the military. This is good, not of course because more people have been sexually assaulted, but because victims of these crimes are coming forward and reporting them.

Unfortunately, the increase in the number of sexual assaults in the military cannot all be attributed to better reporting. The statistics clearly show an increased number of sexual assaults occurring in the armed forces.

It is also important to note that not all allegations of sexual assault are true. False reporting may account for a small percentage of the increase in sexual assault cases in the military.

The Chicago Tribune (August 12, 2017) reported: Col. David "Wil" Riggins, after a highly decorated Army career that included multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was on the verge of promotion to brigadier general in July 2013 when he got a phone call at the Pentagon from the Army's Criminal Investigative Division to come in for a meeting. Once there, he learned that a blogger in Washington state had just accused him of raping her, when both were cadets at West Point in 1986. An investigation was underway.

Riggins waived his right to an attorney and immediately gave a statement denying any sexual assault of the woman, Susan Shannon of Everett, Washington. Shannon also cooperated with the CID investigation, which could not "prove or disprove Ms. Shannon's allegation she was raped," the CID report concluded. But in the spring of 2014, with the armed forces facing heavy criticism for their handling of sexual assault cases, Secretary of the Army John McHugh recommended removing Riggins from the list for promotion to general. Riggins promptly retired.

Then, Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was "provably false," and that she wrote two blog posts and a Facebook post "to intentionally derail [his] promotion" to brigadier general. During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Virginia, heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2½ hours of deliberation, they sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens. The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages, "to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again," according to one of the jurors.

In the above case with Col. Riggins, allegations of sexual assault made in July 2013, claimed that the assault occurred in 1986. Should claims of a crime that occurred 17 years ago be investigated? Should such claims be believed?

Of course the other side of this is that there may be cases of actual sexual assault that are not reported because the victims feel that they won't be believed, or that they will be retaliated against for reporting misconduct / criminal activity of someone in power.