Critical of Military Efforts on Sexual Assault -- yet again!

The Christian Science Monitor is the latest national news source to write a simplistic criticism of military efforts to the problem of sexual assault in the ranks. The Monitor does, at least, acknowledge that the services are trying, but they get facts wrong, like most of these reports. Most importantly, they make no real effort to find any actual facts about the civilian world. The only statistic they use is that "40 percent of civilian sexual-assault allegations are prosecuted," a "fact" apparently gleaned from members of Congress. That "fact" is unsupported by most of the civilian research on the subject. 

The Article is at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0829/Why-Pentagon-s-progress-against-sexual-assault-is-so-slow .
My response is among the comments, and is reproduced below.
"What "data shows that 40% of civilian sexual assault cases are prosecuted?" RAINN, the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network estimates the following, based upon Justice Department, FBI and other federal databases: "out of every 100 rapes: 46 get reported to police. 12 lead to an arrest. 9 get prosecuted. 5 lead to a felony conviction. 3 will spend even a day in prison." It is commonly accepted by victim rights organizations that 1 in 4 college women will be sexually assaulted during their four years in school. The 2010 anonymous DoD Workplace & Gender Relations Survey found that 4.4% of military women were victims of unwanted sexual contact in the year before the survey. In four years, that would be 17.2%, assuming no soldier was a victim more than once.

There is no good way to determine actual numbers in the civilian world, because there are a number of ways that law enforcement hides the ball on prosecution and arrest rates. See, Spohn & Tellis, "Justice Denied? : The Exceptional Clearance of Rape Cases in Los Angeles, 74 Albany Law Review 1379 (2010-2011). In addition even well-designed studies of civilian prosecution rates use a variety of definitions of sexual victimization, and are hard to compare to each other or to the military. The military, at the direction of Congress, keeps actual records. While this makes it easy to research and to write critical stories about military success or failure at dealing with the problem of sexual assault, failing to seek out comparable civilian statistics is not good journalism, and does not fully inform your readers.
Taking your civilian statistics from two well-meaning members of Congress without stating who provided those statistics to them might not yield the most objective or useful information.
Full disclosure: I spent 28 years (ret. 2010) as a prosecutor in CT. I now work as a civilian for the Army, educating lawyers on ways better to prosecute and defend sexual assault cases. I never served in the active military."

--jim clark