One of the big headlines recently has been about sexual assaults in the military. It has been reported that last year there were 26,000 sexual assaults in the military. As is the case in the civilian community, many of them are not reported.
And we have been writing about sexual assaults on college campuses for years. There are several things that they have in common, but in this article we will discuss some things they have in common that you may not have thought about including possible solutions to the problem.
Some obvious things that sexual assaults in the military and sexual assaults on college campuses have in common are:
- The perpetrator is known to the victim in the vast majority of cases.
- Even though the victim reports the crime very little, if anything, ever gets done to prosecute it.
- Victims are frequently forced to continue to work with their assailants.
- Peer pressure on a college campus and in the military go a long ways towards providing a negative view regarding reporting these crimes to the proper authorities.
We have always recommended that women in any kind of a situation carry a self-defense product with them, such as a pepper spray or even a stun gun. The ones that we like the most are ones that are on Keychains, that way they are with you almost all the time. Even a personal alarm in the right circumstances can be a great deterrent to an assault.
A pepper spray can immobilize an assailant for as much as 45 minutes, allowing the victim time to seek help. A stun gun is just as effective at immobilizing an assailant but only does so for about 10 minutes.
Here are some of the things that you may not have thought about when it comes to comparing sexual assaults on college campuses and in the military.
The first is that they are closed institutions-meaning that both the military and college campuses have their own internal police departments. No other institutions that we are aware of have such an arrangement.
When a sexual assault occurs on campus, students are advised to report it to the campus police, which seems reasonable enough. But what students don’t realize is that these campus policemen work for the University and thus have the University’s best interest at heart.
Likewise in the military if a sexual assault occurs, the logical place to report it is with the local military police. The military police work for the base commander and do his bidding.
In both instances these crimes which are considered felonies anywhere, seldom get the attention they deserve.
On a college campus, campus police are under enormous pressure from the administration to make sure the campus seems safe and thus not report the crimes as they occur and as required by federal mandates like the Clery act and Title IX. Huge amounts of money in new admissions not to mention the reputation of the institution are at stake.
In the military, careers are often at stake. When an assault appears on a service man’s record, he is marked for the rest of his career so superior officers tend to look the other way.
Senior military officials and college administrators are reluctant to change the system as it exists today because then they lose control. The best thing that could happen for victims in both college campuses and in the military would be to take the reporting of these crimes and have them independently investigated by local law enforcement authorities. Only then will the truth come out, something that neither the military nor college officials seem terribly interested in. They are more concerned with protecting respectively the College’s reputation and the military chain of command.
Be sure to take a good look at all of our Defensive Pepper Sprays to see which one suits you best.