Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski
The Pentagon is releasing its annual figures on sexual assaults in the military on Tuesday, and there's
bad news and worse news:
While the report will show that the number of reported assaults in fiscal year 2012 rose only 6 percent to 3,374—up from 3,192 a year before—the number of people who made an anonymous claim that they were sexually assaulted but never reported the attack skyrocketed from 19,000 in FY11 to 26,000 in FY12.
When you're talking about sexual assaults rising by "only" 6 percent, you've got problems. The military gained a poster boy for those problems on Monday when news broke that Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, the head of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, had been
arrested for sexual assault:
“A drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks,” according to a Arlington County Police Department crime report. “The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police.”
Krusinski is no longer in charge of the Air Force's sexual assault prevention efforts, but that's not really saying much for said efforts, now is it? And this is
after "The Air Force recently came under fire when a commander reversed a guilty verdict in a sexual assault case."
The military has been claiming it was getting serious about preventing and responding to sexual assault for years now, but the numbers aren't budging. And with leadership like this, it's not hard to see why.