I come to the floor today to speak on the tragedy, on the ongoing crisis of sexual assault in our armed forces and what I believe we must do. There are several options before us, each of which have been the subject of lengthy and passionate debate, a debate that I think is healthy, and needed, and welcome in this chamber.
I commend my many colleagues, Chairman Levin and Senator Inhofe, Senator McCaskill and Senator Ayotte, for the very real progress, the very significant steps taken both in the base bill, the NDAA and in the amendment offered by Senators McCaskill and Ayotte. Serious and important steps forward to protect victims, to ensure that commanders are held accountable and to criminalize retaliation.
A wide range of important and significant reforms that will make real progress towards addressing the ongoing decades-old scourge of sexual assault in the United States military.
As was said recently on the floor by another of my colleagues, this disagreement today is over one of more than a dozen important and needed reforms. But in the end, we have to decide, and I believe the measure offered by Senator Gillibrand of New York, of which I am a cosponsor, is the right additional path forward.
Because at the end, here’s the bottom line: sexual assault has been a disease, a corrosive and widespread and horribly negative influence on our military that has simply not been effectively treated. And I think this significant, this dramatic step is the needed driver for extensive reform. I understand that the chain of command is essential, that it is central to the proper functioning and order of the military, especially during wartime. In fact, the chain of command is nearly sacred. But ensuring that our spouses and our siblings and our children can serve with honor and not have to face another enemy within our ranks is sacred.
This is, in the end, a debate about justice. Justice within our own armed forces, justice so that we can fulfill that sacred duty of protecting men and women in uniform as well as they protect us. And despite many years of good-faith efforts by leaders in our armed forces to work within the parameters of our current system, literally tens of thousands of sexual assaults are still occurring annually within our armed forces.
That is, frankly, unacceptable and reflects a fundamental breakdown in order and discipline that we cannot tolerate anymore. This current system, in this important and vital way, is failing. I understand the intense desire our leaders feel to fix what was broken and for our military leaders to atone for taking their eyes off the ball, to paraphrase the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But once again this debate is not about them, their commitment, their strategy, or their determination. It is about justice, and justice should be blind. Whether someone receives it should not depend on whether or not he or she serves in the military rather than in other workplaces.
And we know the chilling facts, according to the Department of Defense’s own Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 50 percent of female victims state they did not report the crime in the first place because they believed nothing would be done and a quarter, or 25 percent, who received unwanted sexual contact indicated the offender was in their chain of command.
In my view, we strengthen our military when victims of sexual assault have the confidence to come forward and to report crimes, and when we remove fear and stigma from the process. And we strengthen our military when we’re able to deliver fair and impartial justice on behalf of victims. When we know the military chain of command in this one area is failing, we should not continue to tolerate an exception we wouldn’t make in other settings.
Mr. President, I came to this decision with great reluctance. Recognizing, as many in my family have, that the importance of the chain of command, the importance of respecting the unique and different traditions and structure of the military, is something that we should only come to with great hesitation.
One of the responsibilities of serving in the Senate that I take seriously is my annual responsibility to review and approve candidates for the military academies who are selected by my independent military academy advisory board. And personally calling the top candidates to inform them that they will be the ones – of the dozens and dozens of highly qualified competitors – they will be the ones selected to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, the Air Force Academy, to Annapolis to the United States Naval Academy, or to the United States Military Academy at West Point. This was a moving experience each of the three years I’ve had the chance to do that.
But this past year, the three top candidates for West Point, for Annapolis, for the Air Force Academy were all women – impressive, compelling, determined to serve our nation – and meeting with them and their families, the nervous and proud parents and these confident cadet candidates is also a great thing to experience and it reminds me always of my responsibility to them.
I promise their parents that we will support and respect them and their service, and when we speak to the cadets and thank them for their willingness to serve, I’m reminded we have a responsibility to not send them into an institution where they’ll face threats that we can and should address. I believe I have a responsibility to send them into an institution I know is well equipped to respond strongly and swiftly to threats to their safety.
Yet today, I’m not able to uphold that responsibility because we have not protected our men and women in uniform from sexual assault.
I thought of my picks for the service academy when I heard another senator say to General Dempsey that that senator would not advise a parent to encourage his or her daughter to join the military.
What made this decision, this difficult decision for me to join Senator Gillibrand on this particular amendment was an unfortunate – it was a tragic case.
Last spring while I was trying to decide which path to follow in this bill my office received a gut wrenching call from the father of a young woman serving honorably in our military. He was calling against his daughter’s wishes and only as a desperate last resort. She had been the victim of sexual assault and, like so many others, reported it to her commanding officer up the chain of command. But like too many others, the case went nowhere. Her by the book reporting and patient waiting for results was met by delays, excuses, nonresponse, and ultimately during these repeated delays she was physically assaulted after she had warned leadership she feared for her safety.
We took action and ultimately, in this instance, justice was done.
But a chain of command like that isn’t strengthening unit cohesion and morale, it’s harming it.
And so after this particularly troubling case I made a decision to join Senator Gillibrand as a cosponsor, to say, Mr. President, to all of us, how can we accept this? How can this situation that’s gone on for years be tolerable? How can we justify the status quo?
I am grateful for the leadership of the many senators on the Armed Services Committee and throughout this body who have taken real steps to add significant improvements to the UCMJ and to the code that underlies our military and the requirements for leadership and service to take on and tackle these very real problems of sexual assault in the military.
In my view, taking decisions out of the chain of command should only be done in the most serious of circumstances, but that is exactly what we have here.
We wouldn’t find justice if this was the way that any other workplace in America operated. How can we argue that we have justice today for these thousands of victims in our military?
The men and women who dedicate themselves to keeping us safe and protecting our rights deserve equal dedication on our part to their safety and to those same rights.