Military Justice Improvement Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here to join my colleague Senator Gillibrand in expressing my concerns about how we address sexual assault in the military.

For the past several years, we have all become increasingly aware of the prevalence of sexual assault in our military. Personally, I know I share the outrage of all Americans that one of our Nation's proudest institutions is afflicted by this level of criminal violence. In 1989, Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett III established a policy of zero tolerance for sexual harassment and sexual assault. Two years later, the Tailhook scandal happened at a convention attended by the Secretary and the Chief of Naval Operations.

On June 2, 1992, Secretary Garrett wrote a memo to his military leaders that said:

While each individual must be accountable for his or her own actions, commanding officers have a unique responsibility for leadership in ensuring appropriate behavior and attitudes of those under their command.

In the end, the Tailhook scandal resulted in 90 victims--83 women and 7 men--140 officers facing possible punishment and zero criminal prosecutions for incidents of assault. All of these events occurred under the same zero tolerance policy that military leaders espouse today.

The Tailhook scandal was only the beginning of our awareness of the silent crisis within the military. Since that time, there have been numerous scandals in every service. Yet 20 years later we are not only told that the system works but that the status quo, maintaining the chain of command on this issue, is vital to solving the problem. This, of course, ignores the reality of the sexual assault crisis.

In fact, according to the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact and sexual assault occurred in 2012, and that was an increase of 37 percent since 2010. Clearly, something must change and it must change now.

Thanks to the hard work of Senators Gillibrand, Boxer, Blumenthal, and Hirono, along with so many supporters on both sides of the aisle, this issue is back at the forefront of our national debate. We now have a historic opportunity not only to make additional meaningful commonsense reforms to our military criminal justice system, but I think the Defense authorization bill that we are going to take up before the end of this year, hopefully, has a number of very critical proposals to address sexual assault in our military, and I certainly support those. I was pleased those provisions got unanimous support within the committee. But I do not think we went far enough in that bill.

We also need to send a powerful message to the tens of thousands of victims, many of whom have been suffering quietly for decades, that what happened to them in our military is unacceptable. In too many of those cases it is criminal. And it will no longer be tolerated.

The Military Justice Improvement Act of 2013 addresses what victims tell us is the No. 1 problem in the current system. Victims decide not to report sexual assaults because they fear their commanding officers will not take the issue seriously and they will be retaliated against or nothing will be done.

According to the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, 50 percent of female victims said they did not report the crime because they believed nothing would be done with their report. And 25 percent of women and 27 percent of men who received unwanted sexual contact indicated that the offender was actually someone in their own military chain of command.

Our legislation addresses the chain-of-command issue. It removes the decision of whether to go to trial from the chain of command and puts it into the hands of experienced prosecutors. This is a straightforward change. It is designed to promote transparency and accountability in the prosecution of these crimes.

It would also ensure that impartial individuals specifically trained to handle these cases determine whether they move forward, which permanently eliminates the conflicts of interest that exist in the current system. We need all victims to know that if they come forward, their cases will be handled fairly and impartially.

Several days ago in America, we celebrated Veterans Day. Many of us went home to our home States to honor the men and women who, throughout our history, have served in our military. Our military's traditions of honor and respect are too important to continue to be plagued by the issue of sexual assault. That is why I urge my colleagues to support the Military Justice Improvement Act, because we strengthen our military when victims of sexual assault have the confidence to come forward and report crimes, and when we remove fear and stigma from the process. We strengthen our military when we create a process to deliver fair and impartial justice on behalf of the victims of these crimes.

Every man and woman who wears the uniform deserves these rights, and after more than 20 years of waiting, it is way past time we come through for them.

I yield the floor.

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