Instances of sexual assault within the US military may be as much as four times higher than official Pentagon figures suggest, according to a study released Wednesday.
The Costs of War Project, a nonpartisan research group affiliated with Brown University, combed through independent data and determined that the true figures are likely two to four times as high as the numbers reported by the Pentagon in the more than two decades of conflict that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"This author's review of all available independent data demonstrates that the range of two to four times higher is a conservative, mid-range, and likely accurate estimation (on the high end are estimates suggesting prevalence is ten times higher than DoD figures)," Jennifer Greenburg, the author, wrote in her detailed 42-page report.
"These numbers, bad as they are, follow over a decade of interventions intended to address the sexual assault crisis, including 10 DoD Inspector General engagements, 60 Government Accountability Office recommendations, over 200 government panel and task force recommendations, over 150 Congressional provisions, and more than 50 Secretary of Defense initiatives," she added.
Greenburg said the military's decision to prioritize force readiness "above all else" allowed sexual assault to "fester" within the military, "papering over internal violence and gender inequalities within military institutions, and thus we must consider this problem to be a cost of war."
The study comes after the Pentagon said in March 2023 that 21% of female service members reported cases of unwanted sexual contact, a significant increase from the last time the survey was conducted in 2018.
A law signed by US President Joe Biden in 2021 sought to facilitate reporting sexual assault by removing military commanders from the reporting process
The Vanessa Guillen Act was named after a service member who was brutally murdered in 2020 after she told family members that she was the victim of ongoing sexual harassment. Her dismembered remains were found near Fort Hood, the base in the state of Texas where she had been stationed, two months after she went missing.
The report makes specific mention of Guillen, saying that in the wake of her death, "thousands of soldiers proclaimed #IAmVanessaGuillen in a social media campaign that ultimately shamed the military into investigating her disappearance."
"The sheer number of military personnel who publicly shared experiences of sexual harassment and assault in that campaign speaks to how Guillén's case, far from an isolated or exceptional incident, was representative of an epidemic of military sexual harassment, assault, and violence—an epidemic that got worse when the post-9/11 wars began," it said.
