The Army saw a drop in sexual assault reports, while other services went up

Yahoo

01-05-2025

Reports of sexual assault dropped 13% in the Army in 2025, but the other three large services reported increases — 4.4% in the Navy, 2% in the Air Force and a small rise of less than 1% in the Marine Corps, according to the Department of Defense's annual report for fiscal year 2024.
In all, uniformed service members reported 6,973 cases of sexual assault across the military with the largest share of reports made by troops younger than 24.
The large drop in the Army's reported assaults drove the total across the military down 4%. The overall decrease continues a downward trend reported by the Pentagon in fiscal year 2023, when sexual assaults were down across the military services for the first time in a decade. In all, almost 700 fewer sexual assaults were reported in 2024 than in 2022, when reports were the highest in 10 years, according to Pentagon data.
The DOD did not do a prevalence analysis — a statistical estimate that uses the number of reported assaults to estimate a likely number of assaults that go unreported — for the most recent year but in fiscal year 2023, but officials estimated that the nearly 7,300 sexual assault reports received that year represented only a quarter of the estimated 29,000 service members likely impacted by sexual assault. A non-DOD analysis by Brown University researchers determined that total might have been as high as 73,700 assaults.
Dr. Nathan Galbreath, director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office told reporters at a Thursday briefing that the DOD plans to conduct a prevalence survey with troops in late fiscal year 2025 'to update our past year estimates of both sexual assault and sexual harassment.'
'We intend for this number to decrease over time through our prevention efforts,' Galbreath said. 'We encourage greater reporting of sexual assault [in order] to connect victims with care and also to have the opportunity to hold offenders appropriately accountable.'
The majority of sexual assault reports continue to be filed by troops between 18 and 24 years old, Galbreath said. In the Air Force, where 16-19 year olds make up less than 4% of the service, they accounted for nearly a quarter of sexual assault reports.
In fiscal year 2024, 3,233 cases of sexual assault fell under DOD jurisdiction, while 1,059 were pursued by local authorities. Out of those taken up by military lawyers, 66%, or 1,380 cases, had 'sufficient evidence' for disciplinary actions which led to more than half of the offending service members facing administrative actions and discharges. For the 31% of service members who were court martialed, three-fourths of those ended in a conviction — an increase of 2% from the year before.
Around 15% of offenders received an Article 15, or non-judicial punishment. Most of these cases involved abusive sexual contact which is 'the least severe of the charges that constitute a crime under Article 120,' the Uniformed Code of Military Justice's charge for rape, Galbreath said.
A third of sexual assault cases did not receive disciplinary action because of insufficient evidence or because the victim declined to continue the UCMJ process. Only 1% of DOD cases lacked evidence or were found to be false.
In fiscal year 2024, there were 3,014 sexual harassment complaints filed, which was lower than the previous three fiscal years but substantially higher than 2018 to 2020. Nearly three-fourths of complaints were filed by women and 54% came from enlisted women between private and corporal or specialists.
Of the 463 substantiated cases with disciplinary actions, 22 led to a court-martial. More than half of the offenders were given adverse or administrative actions, while a quarter got non-judicial punishments and 9% received 'other corrective actions.'
In February, sexual harassment was added to the list of enforceable UCMJ charges that troops can face. The new charges are handled by the military services' Office of Special Trial Counsel as part of a military justice system overhaul that removed prosecutorial decisions out of troops' chain of command to expert counsel.
Galbreath said they expect that the OSTC will consider the new charge 'in their factors of what can be prosecuted under in cases that have been provided to them.'
The OSTC began handling criminal cases like sexual assault, harassment, murder, and child abuse in 2023, but it will take nearly three years until the DOD can judge the office's impact, Galbreath said.
Dr. Andra Tharp, director of, the Office of Command Climate and Well-Being Integration said orders to cut thousands from the Pentagon's civilian workforce could impact previously planned hirings for the service's sexual assault and harassment prevention program.
'Each of the military departments did have targets that they were aiming to hit in terms of hiring each year so any kind of pause is going to impact their ability to hit those targets,' Tharp said. 'We're really trying to get our arms around the total impacts of that.'
Tharp said when the DOD hiring freeze went into effect, it put a hold on 300 prevention positions posted on USA Jobs. However, Tharp said that her office is advising the services to seek hiring exemptions for the positions. So far, she said, she was aware that the Air Force had received approval for the exemptions.
The workforce cuts could also throw a wrench in the military's goal to move towards more full-time civilians in prevention positions by fiscal year 2027. The services intended to reduce the number of active service members working with the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Program as a collateral duty, a move that would 'return over 600,000 hours of initial training time and nearly 500,000 hours of continuing education hours every two years back to commanders,' Galbreath said.
However, under the 2027 plan, the DOD will still have around 3,400 collateral duty personnel on ships, subs and in other hard-to-fill locations who will receive the same training and proficiency requirements as full-time civilians.
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