By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 27th, 2010
The Defense Department and the U.S. Coast Guard need to further improve their prevention and response tooccurrences of sexual assault, according to expert testimony recently given to Congress.
The testimony was composed of statements from Brenda Farrell, Director of Defense Capabilities andManagement, and Randolph Hite, Director of Information Technology Architecture and Systems.
The statements were given before the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on National Security andForeign Affairs, a branch of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The testimony was printed on February 24th by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Below the American Spark prints a summary of this revealing testimony, also provided by the GAO andfound on its website:
“This report discusses our efforts to evaluate the Department of Defense’s (DOD) and the U.S. CoastGuard’s oversight and implementation of their respective sexual assault prevention and response programs.Our findings build upon our previous work related to sexual assault in the military services.
“DOD and the Coast Guard have taken a number of positive steps to increase program awareness and toimprove their prevention and response to occurrences of sexual assault, but additional actions are needed tostrengthen their respective programs.
“As we have previously reported, sexual assault is a crime with a far-reaching negative impact on the militaryservices in that it undermines core values, degrades mission readiness and esprit de corps, subverts strategicgoodwill, and raises financial costs.
“Since we reported on these implications in 2008, incidents of sexual assault have continued to occur – in fiscalyear 2008, DOD reported nearly 3,000 alleged sexual assault cases, and the Coast Guard reported about 80.However, it remains impossible to accurately analyze trends or draw conclusions from these data becauseDOD and the Coast Guard have not yet standardized their respective reporting requirements.
“DOD has taken steps to implement our August 2008 recommendations to improve its sexual assaultprevention and response program – however, its efforts reflect various levels of progress, and opportunities existfor further program improvements.
“To its credit, DOD has implemented four of the nine recommendations in our August 2008 report. Further,while the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has introduced some changes in DOD’s annual report toCongress, it has not completed the process of developing a standardized set of sexual assault data elementsand definitions.
“We also found that OSD cannot assess training programs as we recommended, because OSD’s strategicplans and draft oversight framework do not contain measures against which to benchmark performance, andDOD has not implemented our recommendation to evaluate processes for staffing key installation-levelpositions because, according to OSD officials, they were advised that the Defense Task Force on SexualAssault in the Military Services would be making related recommendations.
“Finally, OSD officials stated that they will not address our recommendation to collect installation-leveldata–despite its availability and the military services’ willingness to provide them–until they have implementedthe Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database to maintain these data.
“While the Coast Guard has partially implemented one of our recommendations to further develop its sexualassault prevention and response program, it has not implemented the other.
“In August 2008, we reported that the Coast Guard’s sexual assault prevention and response program washindered by several issues, and we made two recommendations to strengthen its program’s implementation.
“Further, the Coast Guard lacks a systematic process to collect, document, and maintain its sexual assaultdata and related program information, and it lacks quality control procedures to ensure that program databeing collected are reliable.
“Additionally, while the Coast Guard’s instruction requires that all Coast Guard Sexual Assault ResponseCoordinators be trained to perform relevant duties, officials stated that they have not developed a curriculum orimplemented training for the Coast Guard’s 16 Sexual Assault Response Coordinators, as they had electedalternatively to develop a training curriculum for other program personnel.
“Thus, to ensure that the Coast Guard can provide proper advice to its personnel, in our February 2010 reportwe recommend that it establish and administer a curriculum for all key program personnel.”
