ANNAPOLIS, Md.—A conference later this month should help the nation’s military academies standardize reporting of sexual assaults, a Naval Academy administrator said Tuesday.
The Pentagon requires all four service academies to report “substantiated” sexual assaults. But a report earlier this year said the Defense Department has not defined the term, leading to different standards for what gets reported at each academy.
Officials from the academies will discuss the issue at a conference in Tampa, Fla., from July 22 through 24. Guidelines could come from the Pentagon within the year, said Capt. Ricks Polk, the Naval Academy’s outgoing sexual assault response coordinator.
“A lot of times it’s an ‘only-two-people-in-the-room’ kind of thing, and you’ve got to kind of try and help sort that out,” Polk said at the academy’s Board of Visitor’s meeting in Annapolis.
The academies have faced scrutiny since 2003, when women at the Air Force Academy in Colorado alleged they had been sexually assaulted by fellow cadets over the previous decade and were either ignored or ostracized by commanders when they came forward. Sexual assault allegations have also surfaced since then at the Naval and Coast Guard academies.
A report earlier this year by the Government Accountability Office found the academies have made strides to address sexual harassment problems. But the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, recommended the Defense Department adopt comprehensive and uniform reporting requirements to analyze incident data, survey results and academy programs to better inform members of Congress.
The GAO report examined programs at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.
The Naval Academy recently completed the first year of its peer-led Sexual Harassment and Assault Prevention Education program, which academy officials say has raised awareness and led to better discussions.
In other Naval Academy business, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, the academy’s superintendent, updated the board on efforts to boost minority attendance at the Naval Academy. Fowler, who has described increasing diversity as his top priority, told the board 28 percent of admitted students in the Class of 2012 are minorities, the highest number in academy history.
The academy is working to extend outreach programs through preparatory schools that focus on readying future midshipmen and through members of Congress, who appoint students to the academy. The academy also is working to attract more minority students to a summer program that gave 800 people a firsthand look at the school for a week.
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Associated Press Writer Brian Witte contributed to this report.
