Service Member On Service Members Crimes Must Stop

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While browsing the yesterday’s Congressional Record today, I know what a dork right, I ran across the floor speech that Senator Hagan gave on the staggering amount of sexual abuse in the military.  Based on a survey of service members from all branches there is an estimate of 26,000 sexual assaults in the military. That is an overwhelming number of service members who have been victimized. As a veteran, I find this number to be very offensive and like Senator Hagen believe that we need to do more to protect our service members. 

I know that there are numerous required training sessions each year that deal with sexual abuse. To the credit of the military they are getting better than they were in the past. The training used to be very generic, done as a formality, and was usually death by power point. However, they now conduct small group discussions led by service members who have received specific training on prevention, identification, and the resources available to victims of sexual assault. My point is that there is a higher quality of training that is conducted now rather than the training that was done 10-15 years ago. 

According to the DoD report that Sen. Hagan quotes, we are seeing a drastic rise in sexual assaults despite the increase in both quantity and quality of the training that is given to service members.  Sen. Hagan gives a couple of harrowing stories of several victims reporting rape and assaults to their commands and not receiving any justice or at least fair shot at receiving justice.  Most of the claims are investigated by the leadership of the victim’s command, in my opinion this causes a giant conflict of interest, as the CO of the unit is responsible for both the successes and failure of his command. If a CO has the ability to find a case as “unsubstantiated” and to keep his own record clean would not some take that road? Even if the CO finds that the allegations are “substantiated” and he refers the case to court martial the CO is able to overturn any convictions. 

This is why I believe that an outside unit should investigate ALL sexual assault cases or even better lets use law enforcement officers that have proper education and training in investigating these types of allegations. Bring in the Criminal Investigations Division or civilian police to do the investigations. We CANNOT allow this type of increase to continue. These people put their lives on the line to defend us and deserve to be able to feel save in their barracks and workplaces.

I urge everyone who reads this to please contact there congressmen or and senators and demand that investigation process be changed to better serve our brave men and women in uniform.

                                    THIS HAS TO STOP!!!!!

For more information please see the following links:

http://www.sapr.mil/index.php/annual-reports

http://www.hagan.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2121

and to add insult to injury

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/jeffrey-krusinski-arrested_n_3225155.html

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/us/army-sexual-assault-investigation/index.html