In his daily email yesterday, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins expressed concern about the rising rate of reported sexual assault in the military….which he blamed on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
President Obama is finally admitting that sexual assault is a serious problem in the military–but what he hasn’t conceded is that his policy on homosexuality helped create it. According to a new Pentagon survey, most of the victims were not female (12,000 incidents), but male (14,000)–highlighting a growing trend of same-sex assault in our ranks. Although the Defense Department says it “recognizes the challenges male survivors face,” one of the biggest problems is their silence in reporting it. The Washington Times, one of the first to highlight the discrepancy, explains that the Pentagon’s attention is largely focused on the females experiencing abuse “overlooking the far greater numbers of men, who, according to the survey, are being victimized but not reporting it.”
How could this happen? Well, for starters, the Obama administration ordered military leaders to embrace homosexuality–completely dismissing the concerns that it could be a problem to have people attracted to the same sex, living in close quarters. What’s more, explains Marine Capt. Lindsay Rodman, the statistics aren’t reliable and may be hiding thousands more cases of service-based abuse. “The truth is,” she writes in the Wall Street Journal, “that the 26,000 figure [of victims] is such bad math–derived from an unscientific sample set and extrapolated military-wide–that no conclusions can be drawn from it.” Except one, perhaps, which is that groups like FRC were right to be concerned about the overturning of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Sexual assault of males in the military is a serious problem. But it hasn’t been caused by President Obama’s “policy on homosexuality” and neither is there any documentation of “a growing trend of same-sex assault in our ranks.”
Not only is the rate of sexual assault much higher for women in the armed forces than for men, since they make up a much smaller percentage of the active-duty force, but the recent increase in sexual assault has primarily impacted female servicemembers. According to CNN, “The Defense Department data from 2010 to 2012 found that the prevalence of unwanted sexual contact increased for active duty women and remained unchanged for active duty men.”
Yesterday, Perkins’ colleague Jerry Boykin similarly blamed the increase in reported sexual assaults on the repeal of DADT and the policy allowing women in combat.
