Military sexual assault is rampant, with nearly one in three female veterans raped

Evidence

Around two thirds of incidents of unwanted sexual contact take place on military installations, and the problem has become a veritable pandemic. According to a 2003 Army-funded study of female veterans who were in the military between the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War, almost one in three was raped during her time in the military. That’s almost twice the rate found across the United States over women’s entire lifetimes, even though the women veterans were in the military for, on average, just two to six years. Of those reporting an experience of rape in the military, 37 percent reported having been raped two or more times; 14 percent reported having been gang-raped. And 80 percent of female vets across the military have reported being the victim of sexual harassment. The most recent Pentagon data show that in the 2014 fiscal year alone, an estimated nineteen thousand service members experienced a sexual assault. That figure represents 4.3 percent of female and 0.9 percent of male service members (although these statistics include neither sexual assaults committed by intimate partners nor assaults committed against children). — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 572

Categorization

• SHARE: A statistic this stark almost certainly deserves wider distribution.