Fighting to stay in control of military sexual assault response.
The Defense Department is
trying to get out in front of Congress on military sexual assault, introducing a new set of sexual assault policies before Congress does so and, it hopes, making Congress less likely to pass anything the military doesn't want.
The new rules include legal representation for sexual assault victims; transfers for service members accused of sexual assault, to limit contact between victims and alleged assailants; input into the sentencing phase for victims; and move unrestricted reports of sexual assault up the chain of command for oversight. They stop short, though, of taking decisions about sexual assault prosecution out of the hands of military commanders and putting them in the hands of trained legal experts. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been working to build support for a bill that would do exactly that, said in a statement that:
"The Pentagon taking action is a good thing and these are positive steps forward but it is not the leap forward required to solve the problem. As we have heard over and over again from the victims, and the top military leadership themselves, there is a lack of trust in the system that has a chilling effect on reporting. 302 prosecutions out of an estimated 26,000 cases just isn't good enough under any metric."
Steps forward are steps forward, and these new policies seem good as far as they go. But that's not far enough, especially when it looks like the Defense Department is only starting to get serious about preventing and responding to sexual assault because it faces the threat that Congress will force it to get far more serious than it wants to.
Tell the U.S. Senate to take action against sexual assault in the military by passing Sen. Gillibrand’s Military Justice Improvement Act.