GAO: Naval Academy has most sexual assaults

[unhappycamper]

GAO: Naval Academy has most sexual assaults
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Feb 20, 2008 5:54:06 EST

The Naval Academy had more sexual assault incidents than the other two Defense Department service academies, according to a Government Accountability Office study that examined reports of abuse from 2003 to 2006.

The academy had 55 incidents during that time period, compared with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., which had 45 incidents each, according to the report released Tuesday. The report does not have statistics for the Coast Guard Academy because the school falls outside the DoD’s bureaucracy for tracking sexual assault incidents.

Overall, the report stated that all four service academies are getting better at discouraging and responding to sexual harassment on their campuses, but surveys of midshipmen and cadets show that sexual incidents remain under-reported at the academies, making it difficult for commanders to get a true sense of their scope and severity, a new report shows.

The three DoD academies have added a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator position. And all four academies have “training programs aimed at preventing and responding to future incidents.”

But unlike its DoD cousins, the Coast Guard Academy comes in for special criticism because it doesn’t report its assault statistics to Congress and because, the report says, senior Coast Guard commanders haven’t established clear rules for how they plan to improve oversight on the school.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/02/navy_academies_report_080219w/



uhc comment: Here's today's Army Times report on the Naval Academy --> http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=11725