To get a sense of the politics underlying the Department of Defense’s latest major report on sexual assault—which, released Thursday, weighs in at 1136 pages—turn immediately to page 12, where you will find the following slightly desperate-sounding argument that the DOD is showing leadership on the issue:
While the Department has been acutely focused on addressing sexual assault internally, senior leaders, Service members, and even veterans have recently taken a public stand on sexual assault - and related issues of sexual harassment and intimate partner violence - in multiple venues external to the Department. In the past couple of months alone, the Secretary of Defense reviewed the relationship the Department has with a professional sports league over concerns regarding its handling of domestic violence, a famous entertainer’s performance was cancelled at a military installation due to his inaccurate and insensitive commentary on rape, and a group of 60 veterans apologized via public letter to a female pilot from the United Arab Emirates when an inappropriate, sexist joke was made about her on an American news channel. These are just a few examples of the change in attitudes and behaviors the Department seeks to inspire in its personnel as it advances a broader national and international discussion on dignity and respect for all.
The assertion about the "famous entertainer’s performance" (Cee-Lo Green, apparently) being cancelled is footnoted. The source cited, in what—to the best of my knowledge—is a first for a major report from the American military, is Jezebel.com. This is where the authors of the 2014 Report to the President of the United States on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response are getting their news. Jezebel’s top two headlines, at the moment of writing, are "Pregnant Woman Verbally Destroys Abortion Clinic Protesters" and "The Hunger Games Porn Parody Was Not What I Expected."
The ideology that underlies the report’s premises is not just detectable in secondary details and footnotes, however. The report begins with a statement of purpose that ought to raise grave concerns among those whose politics are distrustful of utopian goals:
Sexual assault is a significant challenge facing the United States military and the nation. Academia is wrestling with campus sexual assault, professional sports leagues struggle with intimate partner violence, and societies across the globe contend with horrific accounts of sexual violence that appear in daily headlines. For the first time in history, sexual assault has become a part of the national conversation, and a collective awareness and desire for action has emerged. Given its history of leadership on other social problems, the Department of Defense recognizes its vital role in advancing the campaign to prevent this heinous crime.
To this end, the Department’s aim is to reduce, with the ultimate goal to eliminate, the crime of sexual assault in the Armed Forces.
Emphasis mine. Literally (I hope) everyone deplores even one case of sexual assault, in the military or anywhere else. Rape certainly occurs in the military, and it should be treated with deadly seriousness, with a policy of aggressive prosecution and, upon conviction, the harshest possible punishments—life imprisonment seems appropriate. But we should take a moment to reflect that anyone who believes that "eliminating" the crime of sexual assault in the U.S. Armed Forces—an organization with 1.4 million active duty members—is a realistic possibility is, well, crazy. Bonkers. Nuts.
Moments like this require stating the obvious, as a great journalist once observed. A dark and unfortunate truth of human nature is that, in groups of a certain size, there will always be some amount of rape, not to mention murder, other forms of violent assault, kidnapping—one could go on. A government agency is as likely to reduce the rates of any of these crimes to zero as it is to end poverty, or drug abuse—both of which our government has tried, and failed, to end, for many decades now.
There has been a substantial upping of the rhetorical ante in this report. Past submissions have tended to be dryly bureaucratic in their language (to be sure, there is also plenty of that here) but now a particular progressive and politicized lingo is the norm. This shift is not only rhetorical. Proposals for achieving the utopic goal of zero-ing out sexual assault in the military make reference to the "social-ecological model" for preventing crime, which "considers the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors."
The report also relies on the concept of the "continuum of harm," a theory of sexual-assault prevention that holds that rapes can be eliminated by cracking down on "gender focused jokes," "seductive behavior," and "vulgar pictures." Let’s hope 18-year-old infantrymen don’t follow the link to Jezebel and read that story about the Hunger Games parody.
But what about the numbers? The report contains, as have past installments from the DOD, two sets of figures about the rate of sexual assault: reported assaults, and a statistical estimate of the prevalence of sexual assaults in the military. The first number is a real one—actual human beings who went to the authorities and leveled serious accusations about other human beings. For 2014, that number is 4,608.
The second number, an estimate derived from an anonymous, online survey, is much higher and much less reliable. It is certainly the case that sexual assault is an underreported crime, but there is no way to know if it is underreported to the extent that these numbers suggest. For 2014, that number is 19,000.
The military is citing this second number as a success, because in 2012 the same survey produced a figure of 26,000. But the same survey conducted in 2010 produced a result of 19,300, and in 2006 it gave us the incredibly alarming figure of 34,200. Again, this is a good time to state the obvious: How can anyone trust such a wildly fluctuating yo-yo of a figure? Does anyone really believe that there were 34,200 rapes in the military in 2006, but 19,300 in 2010, then up by seven thousand again in 2012, and now back down again to 2010 levels?
Of course not. Obviously there are things wrong with the survey. For one, it asks its respondents not about sexual assault, but about "unwanted sexual contact," which might mean lots of things. For another, because it is an optional and anonymous survey, there is a "volunteer" problem—those with strong feelings about sexual assault are more likely to take the survey. Though, to be fair, neither of these issues quite explain the fluctuations, which remind one of nothing so much as Winston Smith’s attitude towards government statistics in Orwell’s 1984:
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared.
The DOD leaked this latest report to CNN the night before its official roll-out, in the hope that the Cable News Network would oblige them with a lede that suited their preferred narrative: that the rate of "prevalence" was down—to 19,000—while the number of reports was up. CNN obliged, reporting, "Fewer members of the military are being sexually assaulted and more victims are coming forward, the Pentagon said in a long-awaited report obtained by CNN on Wednesday."
But as the news cycle carried on throughout Thursday, the story got away from the military. The Washington Post’s headline and lede focused on the fact that the "number of U.S. troops filing reports of sexual assault rises 8% in the last year." The New York Times followed suit with a similar approach, headlining its piece, "Reports of Sexual Assaults in Military on Rise."
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was not far behind, tweeting that the DOD’s "new sexual assault statistics represent [a] clear failure of modest reforms put into place last year." Live by the fuzzy numbers, die by the fuzzy numbers.
In fairness, the critics have a point. The military wants to claim that the decrease between the survey numbers from 2012 to the present represents progress—but this is nonsense, just as the increase from 2010 to 2012 in the survey numbers was nonsense, as was the prior decrease from 2006 to 2010. Those numbers are meaningless regardless of whether they show positive or negative developments.
Sensitive to these concerns, Congress and the DOD have directed the RAND Corporation, which has taken over the survey, to change its methodology. The new survey effort, which began this year, no longer asks about "unwanted sexual contact" but poses uncomfortably graphic questions about sexual acts to the survey takers.
The early numbers from the new approach—which increases the sample size and addresses the ambiguity problem, but not the "volunteer" problem of the old survey—are strikingly similar to the justly maligned older methodology. This is interesting, and those interested must await the full breakdown of the numbers, which is still forthcoming. For now we must be satisfied with the preliminary results, which are included in the present report.
Updated Fri., Dec. 5, 7:15 a.m.: The original version of this piece stated that RAND's discussion of their new study had been included twice in the overall report. This was an error--in fact, one RAND discussion addressed the Department of Defense, and the other, the Coast Guard.