More reform of child sexual assault is needed

 For the second time this year, an independent federal review criticized the US Department of Defense for how it reacted when children on military bases sexually assault each other.

A report released by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General on Wednesday said leaders played down the incidents, failed to cooperate with civilian law enforcement and until recently failed to provide services. support for victims.

More than a million school-aged children live with military families, many of whom are on U.S. bases where, as in mainstream society, children and teens sometimes sexually assault their peers. An Associated Press investigation found that these incidents were generally lost in a legal and bureaucratic underground world, where authorities failed to help victims and offenders rarely suffered consequences beyond their ban on leaving the community. based. The Pentagon did not know the scale of a problem that it did not do much to monitor.

Congress responded by demanding a series of reforms starting in the fall of 2018. To build on the initial reforms, the Department of Defense should create military-wide policies and limit the discretionary power of school administrators. Pentagon-funded facilities that educate students about facilities around the world, the Inspector General's office recommended.

The Senate Armed Services Committee also called for the Inspector General's review. It was an external review that the Pentagon did not want.

Civilian judicial authorities and facility commanders generally failed to hold juvenile offenders accountable, ”the inspector general's report said.

Military authorities began to make changes, with an emphasis in the military and elsewhere on revising written policies on how to handle and track reports. The Family Advocacy Program, the military equivalent of social services, says it now offers counseling to victims of such assault.

Administrators of basic schools, which educate more than 70,000 children, have also revised their policies. The report found that school staff often had poorly characterized sexual assaults internally and rarely informed outside authorities of cases.

The Inspector General's office identified 600 cases of misconduct between 2015 and 2017 that met the Pentagon school system's criteria for a "serious incident" report. Yet campus administrators failed to submit reports on 522 cases to headquarters, according to the Inspector General's office. Administrators were even less likely to notify law enforcement or base commanders, who were not notified in 593 of 600 cases.

Unlike the AP investigation, this tally included incidents other than sexual assault. In one unreported case, a student threatened a child saying, "I'm going to bring a knife to school tomorrow and cut your head off."

A senior administrator of the Defense Ministry's educational activity, known as DoDEA, told the Inspector General's office that directors have "professional discretion" in deciding what to report. School staff reportedly said the policies "did not contain enough detail" to know when to do so, while others said "they were not aware" of the requirements.

The Office of the Inspector General recognized DoDEA's improvements to its policies to ensure that sexual assault is reported, but recommended further changes to limit the discretion of school officials and clarify when law enforcement agencies are alerted.

“Military children shouldn't be any less safe than civilian children, and this is how the DoD school system appears to work,” Armed Services Committee member Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said. “I want to make sure those who have not reported sexual misconduct against children. "

Many other assaults took place outside the school. During these investigations, law enforcement authorities failed to reliably brief their civilian counterparts, who have jurisdiction over civilian family members on the bases.

In half of the 126 criminal investigations sampled in the report, military law enforcement authorities apparently failed to notify the FBI or the US Department of Justice, as they reported.