From this article about the Pentagon’s biennial report on sexual assault in the military, we learn that the rate has jumped 38% from 2016 to 2018. Where the fuck did the current military get the idea that sexual assault is back in fashion?
My WAG? It was under-reported in the past, coupled with the fact that there are simply more women in the military than in the past. I don’t think it’s ‘back in fashion’ so much as the environment has changed, and shit that would have been handwaved away or maybe shrugged off isn’t anymore…and women now are confident enough to not just put up with that shit, including in the military.
Most likely it just simply was reported more often. There is no reason to believe that military men were less prone to assaulting women in the past.
The surveys appear to have been anonymous, though, which you would think would mitigate the effect of past under-reporting. Plus we’re only talking about a two year timespan - I seriously doubt there’s been that much of a change in either female enrollment or attitudes to reporting in that time.
We have had a difference CiC setting an example of appropriate behavior, though. Wonder if that’s emboldened anybody…
What, in those two years, inspired a close to 40% rise in reporting?
Are you being sarcastic?
:dubious:
Perhaps what constitutes ‘sexual harassment’ has changed in that time frame? I don’t actually think that there was such a jump…it was happening with the same frequency (hell, I think more) in the past than today. A 40% jump in just 2 years seems fairly extreme. Instead, I think that things that were considered sexual harassment in 2016 broadened to a lot of stuff that would have been shrugged off before or handwaved away. I’ve seen the work place view of what is or isn’t sexual harassment change fundamentally in the workplace in just the last few years (let alone how things were when I was younger to today), and I seriously doubt it’s any different in the military today. And I basically think the idea that because Trump is president that means the military has lost it’s mind and has jumped 40% in new sexual harassment is ridiculous. I’m, frankly, skeptical YOU believe that horseshit.
There was a whole thing? Me Too?
We keep talking about women here as the victims but aren’t a lot of the victims male?
Eh, the MeToo# movement?
I don’t think that the change is entirely based on a single factor. But pretending that we haven’t seen a fast and massive escalation in horseshit like incels and the like in the past couple of years is a pretty big pile of horseshit itself. Point fingers whichever way you like, but that’s a very rapey subculture that for one reason or another has quite suddenly decided that it can exist out in the open rather than under the rocks it used to dwell beneath. And I think it’s nigh-certain that there are incels in the military.
And that “let alone how things were when I was younger to today” you let drop suggests to me that you’re letting all that change in the past color your assumptions about the recent rise. I really don’t think that there’s been that massive a change in what’s considered acceptable - though I do concede that Me Too could indeed be a contributing factor to the rise in reporting. I’m just not seeing it as causing the whole 38%.
It WAS worse when I was younger. Seriously, I remember all sorts of really, really bad shit that was out in the open. Color my assumptions? Good grief. I saw men slapping women on the ass, or deliberately telling dirty jokes or showing dirty pictures in the open in the past. I heard about bosses pressuring female subordinates into sex and getting away with it. A lot of that stuff wasn’t even noticed. In the state I live in, it was a regular thing in many of the county’s even 10 years ago, state, local employees, even elected officials. They really started hammering down on this in the last 5 years, and folks (mainly female employees) felt they could come forward or stand up to it in that time period. There has been a ton of programs to educate and address this, HR has gotten involved and there has been a ton of cases that came forward and hammered offenders. So, I don’t think it’s color my view…I think I see clearly that people are able to come forward now, even anonymously and feel empowered and able to do so without fear and without concern that their assertions will be stomped on or laughed at. And this isn’t only sexual harassment…bullying and all sorts of other stuff are getting stomped on. As they fucking should be.
So, I don’t think there was a huge increase in sexual harassment in the military from 2016 to 2018, nor do I think that men in the military suddenly felt that they could sexually harass their female counterparts because of Trump…I think that the view of what is sexual harassment has broadened and widened, and also people feel they can and should bring it up now.
ETA: On the anonymous part. A lot of employees felt (even today) that those sorts of ‘anonymous’ polls or whatever weren’t all that ‘anonymous’, and with good reason. A lot of the times, the vendors doing them DID give the information in the past to the administration or the elected officials…or whoever was paying. Again, this has also been addressed, but even today many folks still won’t take those sorts of polls, or won’t actually give information they wouldn’t want their bosses to see for fear it will come back on them.
yeah thats the thing that no one really mentions … lot of old "pranks hazings and “punishments” now fall under sexual assualts and the stigma for a male reporting such things is slowly fading away…
Half sarcastic, with a bit of jaw-drop at the suggestion that a 38% increase in reporting in just two years couldn’t possibly mean that the rate of sexual assault might have also increased.
Did you read the report?
I don’t see how we can ascribe the increase to victims reporting incidents at a greater rate; even if that were so, it would mean that sexual assault was 40% higher than previously thought–which is no less appalling, especially given the military’s efforts to address and reduce the problem.
But here’s why I think it’s not just a matter of under-reporting or there being more women in the military: if those were likely reasons, the Pentagon would be saying so. Those explanations make much better PR. And I’m pretty sure there are enough military statisticians that can figure out if the increase is attributable to more women in the military.
Also, one way to determine causes is to look at proposed solutions. Here are Acting DOD Secretary Patrick Shanahan’s:
• seeking a stand-alone military crime of sexual harassment
• developing new tools to measure the problem
• launching a program to catch serial offenders
• improving assessments of the character of military applicants
• training for junior officers and junior enlisted leaders and focusing on prevention.
I suppose someone could quibble that developing new tools means the current tools, i.e., the survey, aren’t accurate. I don’t think so. I think if that were the case, Shanahan would have said the jump is attributable at least in part to faulty surveys. He sure wouldn’t have said
I’m glad Shanahan isn’t trying to shrug off or minimize the enormity of the issue. The military’s strategies have not been working.
Never mind. I’m tired of playing No True Scotsman with the right.
Every time I’ve had one of those performance reports which include coworkers being asked about your work, I could tell exactly who had said what. References to specific details, writing style… un-anonimizing anything that’s not purely multiple-choice is real easy.
And things such as “someone made a really nasty off-color joke in front of me, I complained about it and was told to ‘suck it up’” being moved from the official suck it up list to the official unacceptable list means a double increase (not necessarily two fold, but on two fronts): both because incidents which previously not have counted now count, and because people feel more confident that their complaints will be taken seriously, whether they involve off-color jokes, down-naming, leers… it will not be met with a ‘suck it up’. I’d attribute much more of the variation to those two factors than to a rise on the amount of jerks who feel they can be jerks openly (which yes, is also a factor, but nowhere near as high).
The most attractive enlisted women are of course the most frequent victims. However, what I have heard is that because the military has so many more men that women, for the people who actually handle sexual assault cases in the military, it is more frequent for the victim complaining to be a man.
I would assume that the current “jump” is an increase in reporting as well.
I would assume that the (almost all men) committing the assaults almost always do so on the spur of the moment, without a significant amount of forethought or planning. So measures to increase the punishments or counsel people not to do it I would not expect to be effective.
I don’t think draconian punishment is effective, either - if anonymous surveys are true, a large (30%+) of men would commit an assault if the scenario were right. So removing offenders from the pool doesn’t help if almost the majority of the pool are potential offenders.
What is effective is preventing the situations where these kinds of assaults are even potentially possible. Less alcohol, less scenarios where servicemembers are in groups together away from supervision, etc.
“30%+” does not equal “a majority”, and education does work. Mind you, if the education consists of someone reading off a bunch of slides, that’s not going to work as well as targeted or individual training (or “counseling” if you prefer) done by someone who actually understands and believes what (s)he’s saying, but that also applies to basic math.