Even if it’s not being billed as “sexual harassment training.”
During her six years in the Army, including a deployment to Iraq and promotion to staff sergeant, Antonieta Rico says she saw survivors of sexual assault and harassment who came forward labeled as troublemakers and leaders who preferred hiding problems to protect reputations rather than confronting them. She recalls being one of a handful of women in an anti–sexual assault and harassment training when the trainer, a more senior male officer, offered up this scenario: “ ‘So, if you saw a naked, drunk girl on the bench outside your barracks, would you hit that? You’re not supposed to. But I probably would,’ ” she recalls him saying. “That gets to the root of the problem right there. No one takes it seriously,” she says.
After years of intense scrutiny brought on by the Tailhook scandal of 1991, in which investigators brought more than 140 cases of sexual misconduct against those who assaulted more than 80 women, and after decades of congressionally mandated surveys and annual sexual assault trainings and countless unflattering media accounts, the U.S. military’s problem with sexual misconduct is hardly a secret. One in five active-duty women are sexually harassed every year, as are 7 percent of men. The number of alleged assaults reported militarywide shot up 10 percent in the past year. And while military leaders attributed the jump to more targets being willing to come forward, the 6,769 people who reported being assaulted represent the highest number of reported assaults since the military began tracking them in 2006.
These incidents reflect a workplace environment—the U.S. military is the largest employer in the world—where hostility to the presence of women runs deep. It’s not just that women, until recently, have been considered unfit and barred from combat roles. Think of grunts deriding those who “fight like a girl,” or officers who blithely talk about whether they should “open the kimono.” Sexism and harassment are so common that they have become expected, says Ellen Haring, a retired Army colonel who now serves as director of programs and research for the Service Women’s Action Network, or SWAN, a group working to eradicate sexual assault and harassment from the military. “Sexual harassment has become normalized behavior,” Haring says. “There’s a lot of groupthink in the military, so a lot of behavior we think is unacceptable anywhere else, they’ll say, ‘It’s to toughen you up. Make you ready for combat.’
“I don’t think it’s much better than when I joined in 1984,” she adds. “We’ve at least acknowledged sexual harassment and assault and are providing support for victims. But we don’t know how to stop it.”
The military’s sexual misconduct problem is also structural: It took until 2013 for Congress to decide that felony sex offenders should no longer receive waivers to join the military. It took two years longer to prohibit using the “good soldier” defense in sexual assault cases—though it’s still permissible in domestic abuse cases. Military leaders have repeatedly vowed to change—Secretary James Mattis recently promised to redouble efforts to prevent the destructive “cancer” of sexual assault—and through the years have tried trainings, reformed the system so victims wouldn’t have to report to officers who may have abused them, and even created a hologram project to highlight that men, too, are victims of sexual abuse and harassment.
Yet, as the numbers show, that’s not been enough. And as more women put their lives on the line for their country, there’s more urgency than ever for leaders to make good on their promise to root out sexual harassment and assault in this testosterone-fueled culture.
Now the Army is experimenting with something new: sexual assault and harassment training that isn’t actually billed as sexual assault and harassment training at all.
Read more of my story on the Army’s new sexual harassment training on Slate here