AP: Pentagon struggles to assess, stamp out retaliation in sexual assault cases
The Associated Press reports:
It’s not against the law or military regulations to choose not to sit with someone in the dining hall or to unfriend them on Facebook, but in the traumatic aftermath of a sexual assault, a victim could interpret those moves as retaliation.
In these days when a tweet or Instagram photo can be wielded as weapons, the Pentagon is struggling to define retaliation and rein in bullying or other behavior that victims perceive as vengeful. At the same time, military leaders are expanding efforts to better train their lower- and midlevel commanders to detect and deal with retaliation, while also insuring that other, more innocent actions are not misinterpreted by assault victims.
On Friday, the Pentagon released a deeper analysis of the sexual assault survey data made public last December. That report acknowledges the difficulties in gathering data about retaliation, including problems with how some of the survey questions may have been misinterpreted and that incidents of retaliation may have been over counted.
