Female Air Cadets Feared Punishment
Many female Air Force Academy cadets didn’t report sexual assaults to academy authorities because they feared being punished or ostracized, a Pentagon survey found.
Nearly one in five female cadets said they were sexually assaulted during their time at the academy, according to the May survey of 579 female cadets. The cadets said they reported only 33 of the 177 incidents of sexual assault.
The Defense Department’s Inspector General surveyed the cadets as part of its probe into a sexual assault scandal at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. Scores of female cadets have reported being raped or sexually assaulted, and some have said they were ostracized or punished for related offenses after they reported the assaults.
The survey results were contained in a preliminary report Pentagon officials described to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. A full report, including results from later surveys at the Air Force, Army and Navy academies, is due out this fall, the officials said.
Several academy leaders have been ousted and current leaders have vowed to clean up the problem.
Lt. Gen. John A. Rosa, the current Air Force Academy superintendent, said Friday that the military academies can’t wait for the fall survey. “We’ve got to attack this problem now,” he said.
Rosa, who took over the academy last month when top commanders were replaced, spoke to about 1,000 people gathered for parents’ weekend. He suggested previous commanders missed the signs of a major problem.
“I don’t buy that nobody knew what was going on. It’s just unbelievable to me that nobody knew what was going on,” he said. “We’ve got to stop rationalizing, fooling ourselves that the survey wasn’t right.”
In a sword-brandishing dressing-down of the academy’s cadets on Thursday, commandant of cadets Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida said the assaults were tarnishing the school’s image.
“If we don’t reverse this trend, the very existence of this institution is threatened,” he said.
The survey defined sexual assault as anything from unwanted sexual touching to rape. Of the surveyed cadets, 109 said they had been sexually assaulted, reporting a total of 177 incidents. Less than 19 percent of those incidents had been reported to authorities, the survey found.
That reporting rate is far below the national average. More than half of sexual assault victims in 2002 reported the crimes, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Of those Air Force cadets who said they reported the assaults, 15, or about 46 percent, said they had suffered reprisals for their report.
Those who did not report assaults were asked to list several reasons why they did not speak up. Nearly half said they feared being ostracized by their peers for reporting an assault.
About 45 percent said they feared nothing would be done about the assault. A quarter said they feared being punished for other infractions and the same proportion said they feared reprisals from command officials.
“When you have such tremendous fear on the part of victims, fear of reprisals for reporting to the authorities, and you have a lack of services available, it shows there’s a great deal of work still to be done,” said Kate Summers of the Miles Foundation, which helps victims of violence in the military
Summers said the survey results show the academy must make more changes to help victims. She said the academy’s requirement that anyone with knowledge of an assault must report it to superiors can trap fearful victims into keeping silent.
In 89 percent of the academy cases, the alleged assailant was identified as another cadet.
The survey also said that 11 percent of senior female cadets and 3 percent of freshman female cadets reported having been the victim of rape or attempted rape since enrolling at the academy.
—
On the Net:
Air Force Academy: http://www.usafa.af.mil