Teal ribbons stand at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., Apr. 23, 2024, as a reminder of sexual assault awareness and prevention month. A new report from Brown University asserts that the true number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military could be up to four times higher than Defense Department estimates. (Sean Ross/U.S. Air Force)
The official Pentagon tally of sexual assaults in the military during the past 20-plus years likely undercounts the actual number by at least two to four times, researchers say in a new study.
The Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute compared Defense Department data with figures compiled by independent sources between 2001 and 2023 to calculate its findings.
Last year alone, there were nearly 74,000 such assaults in the armed forces, compared with the Defense Department’s official tally of around 29,000, according to the study, which was released Wednesday.
The range of two to four times higher was described as “conservative” and “likely accurate” by the report’s authors, who added that high-end estimates suggested a prevalence 10 times higher than DOD figures.
The findings come after more than a decade of efforts to address the prevalence of sexual assault in the military, including several dozen initiatives by defense secretaries and hundreds of recommendations by government panels and task forces.
Despite these efforts, military officials put an overarching emphasis on training and deploying troops to Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of confronting “a clear institutional problem of sexual assault,” according to the report.
“During the post-9/11 wars, the prioritization of force readiness above all else allowed the problem of sexual assault to fester, papering over internal violence and gender inequalities within military institutions, and thus we must consider this problem to be a cost of war,” the report said.
The authors argued that a slight decrease in the number of cases in 2023 as compared with that of 2021, the final year of the war in Afghanistan, “is further evidence that the previous 20 years of institutional focus on training and deploying troops to Afghanistan … contributed to a permissive environment for sexual assault.”
The report estimates there were over 75,500 cases in 2021, with DOD putting the figure for that year at about 36,000, roughly the same level as when the war began in 2001.
Over the course of the war, on average, nearly one-quarter of all active-duty women and almost 2% of all active-duty men experienced sexual assault, according to the report’s calculations.
Black women and LGBTQ+ service members were more likely to experience sexual harassment and assault than others, the report said.
The Costs of War study follows a 2021 Congressional Research Service report that said there was some evidence that most sexual offenses in the military were not being reported.
DOD officials in past years have conceded that the true number of sexual assaults was likely higher because of those who didn’t file a report.
Vanessa Guillen, the 20-year-old Army specialist whose murder after a sexual harassment report led to significant military reforms. Sexual assaults in the military are vastly underreported, according to a new Brown University study, which put the number at two to four times higher than official estimates. (U.S. Army)
Also in 2021, lawmakers approved a bill that took away the decision on whether to prosecute cases of rape or sexual assault from military commanders.
It was named the I am Vanessa Guillen Act, after a 20-year-old Army specialist who was murdered at Fort Hood, Texas, after reporting sexual harassment.
