Witnesses at a Senate panel investigating sexual assault in the military were, from left, Anu Bhagwati of the Service Women’s Action Network; BriGette McCoy, who was raped when she was 18 while with the Army in Germany; Rebekah Havrilla, a former Army sergeant who was raped by a superior officer; and Brian K. Lewis, a former Navy petty officer who was raped by a superior.
NY TIMES
Choking back tears and in voices edged with rage, two women and a man who served in the American military told a Senate panel on Wednesday how they were raped by superiors and then ridiculed or ignored by military officials from whom they sought help.
The three former service members, the first military sexual assault victims to testify before a Senate panel, described a pervasive culture of harassment and danger in which victims had little or no redress.
One spoke of a rape she endured during her first months of service, and another told of a sergeant who stripped naked and danced on a table during an official sexual harassment training session. After spending a year repeatedly harassed, Rebekah Havrilla, a former Army sergeant deployed to Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007, was raped by a superior a week before returning home.
“I chose not to do a report of any kind because I had no faith in my chain of command,” Ms. Havrilla said. When she sought help from an Army chaplain, she said, he told her “the rape was God’s will” and urged her to go to church.
The hearing, the first the Senate has held in nearly a decade on sexual assault in the military, reflects the increasing attention to the issue because of revelations about pervasive sexual harassment at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and throughout the military.
The Pentagon estimates that roughly 19,000 service members are assaulted annually. A small fraction of the incidents are reported because most victims fear retaliation or ruined careers, and only about 10 percent of those cases go trial. One in three convicted military sex offenders remain in the service, something many policy makers want immediately corrected.
“The issue of sexual violence in the military is not new, and it has been allowed to go on in the shadows for far too long,” said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who convened the hearing as chairman of the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee.
The focus on the topic, which Ms. Gillibrand chose for the personnel subcommittee’s first hearing in the current Congress, also demonstrates the tenaciousness of the women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, now at a record seven, who have worked to bring sexual misconduct in the military to public attention.