Pentagon’s pathetic victory lap: Why its supposed military rape “solution” is just spin
Salon reports:
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently grabbed the kind of massive media attention normally reserved for celebrity scandals. “MILITARY SEXUAL ASSAULT REPORTS JUMPED 50 PERCENT LAST YEAR” went viral as soon as Hagel announced the findings of the most recent Pentagon report on sexual assault in the armed forces.
But most of the coverage failed to report anything beyond the Pentagon’s spin on the data, which painted this statistic as a rosy progress report that showed victims were less afraid to report sex crimes. This misses the fact that it remains far easier to get raped in the military than it is to get military justice. When the total numbers are crunched, the bottom line is that less than 1 percent of reported rapists see jail time. And that 50 percent touted by the Pentagon is a mere sneeze in the epidemic of unreported rapes and sexual assaults..
