A Defense Department survey on sexual assault has left many service members livid.
Every two years the Pentagon asks hundreds of thousands of its members to complete an anonymous survey on the issue, but this year it was much more graphic in nature in an attempt to obtain accurate results.
“We’ve had a number of complaints,” said Jill Loftus, director of the Navy’s sexual assault prevention program, The Associated Press reported Friday. “I’ve heard second- and third-hand that there are a number of women, officers and enlisted, who have gotten to the point where they’ve read the questions and they’ve stopped taking the survey. They found them to be either offensive or too intrusive — ’intrusive, invasive’ — those are the words they used.”
Military members who talked with AP said that they felt re-victimized by the language. The the Rand Corp., which crafted the survey, stood by its product.
“This is a crime of a very graphic nature,” Nate Galbreath, the senior executive adviser for the Pentagon’s sexual-assault prevention office, told AP on Friday. “For us to improve our understanding, it sometimes requires asking tough questions.”
Andrew Morral, the other project leader, told AP that without using precise language, the Pentagon would get “ambiguous results.”
AP was able to obtain copies of the survey. One of the questions asked is: “Before 9/18/2013, had anyone made you insert an object or body part into someone’s mouth, vagina or anus when you did not want to and did not consent?”
Roughly 560,000 active duty, National Guard and Reserve members were invited to fill out the survey, AP reported.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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