By Philip Ewing – Military Times–female marines
An internal Navy Department investigation has found widespread problems with the Navy and Marine Corps’ programs on sexual assault prevention, top service leaders said Tuesday in Washington, where they began a two-day summit aimed at finding new ways to stop sex assaults in the naval services.

Almost three out of five sailors and Marines believe sexual assault is a problem in the force; far too few victims actually report they’ve been attacked; too few crimes are prosecuted; and unit-level training is inconsistent, said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, whose speech opened the conference at the Washington Navy Yard.

Many sailors and Marines don’t know the difference between sexual harassment and sexual assault; many don’t know how to report either one if it takes place; and many are simply bored by the training that is supposed to help prevent attacks, Mabus said.

The details came from an ongoing Naval Inspector General study, Mabus said, due to be completed in October, which apparently depicts a Navy and Marine Corps in which sexual assault is a major unaddressed problem. Mabus called on Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway and leaders throughout the services to eliminate it altogether.

“The message must be the same at every level of the chain of command. It must be the same from me, through the CNO and CMC to our ship captains and battalion commanders; from them through their chiefs and staff NCOs down to every corporal and petty officer third class — who must themselves reiterate the point to every seaman apprentice and private on the front lines,” Mabus said. “Sexual assault is unacceptable. Let me repeat myself, there is no place in the Navy and Marine Corps for a sexual assault offender.”

Conway and Roughead both said they worried the services had become complacent about training sailors and Marines in preventing sexual violence and hadn’t considered the need to make it interesting and relevant for audiences at different levels.

“As soon as you start talking about ‘the annual training’ as ‘something that needs be done,’ I’d say you’re dealing with a high probability of failure,” Roughead said. “Because if you simply say, ‘We’re going do to annual training for everybody,’ being a bureaucratic organization, we will do just that: We will check the box and move on,” Roughead said.

That applies not only from the abstract position of Big Navy, but all the way down to the deckplates, he said.

“If a sailor, who I consider to be the most perceptive creature on the face of the Earth, sees something that’s just being done just to check a box, that’s exactly how they’re going to treat it, and it really needs to be much more thoughtful than that,” Roughead said.

The preliminary findings of the IG investigation prompted Mabus to create an office of sexual assault prevention within the Navy Department, which will be charged with developing new training and other measures to prevent sexual violence.

Specifically, the Navy and Marine Corps will likely adopt a “bystander intervention” program, in which sailors and Marines will be trained on the warning signs of potential sexual assaults and how to intervene to stop them.

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