National Journal: Gender Bias in Military Sexual Assaults Mars Debate
The National Journal reports:
Lawmakers working to combat the alarming escalation of sexual assaults in the military are running into a lack of appreciation that the problem is not just a “women’s issue.”
Although a greater proportion of women in the military are victims of sexual misconduct (about 6.1 percent, compared with 1.2 percent of men), a fact often lost is that more than half of the victims are actually men. That is because there are so many more men than women in the armed services.
Indeed, men were the victims of 14,000 out of 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military last year, according to a survey released last month by the Defense Department. Those statistics are estimates based on a survey of military members, because the problem of sexual misconduct is chronically underreported. Less than 10 percent of victims report their abuse and men are far less likely than women to come forward.
