THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 12, 1995 TAG: 9505120448
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
A new study of sexual harassment in the military depicts the problem as far more pervasive than the Pentagon contends, suggesting that up to 90 percent of female veterans under 50 may have been harassed during their service.
Based on a survey of 333 veterans - all patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis - the study found that 25 percent of the women under 50 reported having been victims of rape or attempted rape while in the service. The corresponding figure for older women was 3 percent.
The figures for other forms of harassment were similarly disturbing. Just over half of the women under 50, for example, reported that male co-workers had made sexual comments about the women's bodies. And 22 percent of those women said supervisors had offered favorable assignments in return for sex or threatened to block promotions of women who refused their advances.
The reports of attempted and completed sexual assaults were ``at rates 20 times (higher than) those reported for other government workers,'' wrote the researchers, Drs. Maureen Murdoch and Kristin Nichol of the VA hospital and the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.
The military has been rocked by a string of sexual harassment scandals in recent years. The services have responded with tough if sometimes unevenly enforced rules; they've also opened almost all military career paths to women, who now fly combat planes and serve on every class of ships except submarines.
The harassment figures in the new report ``appear to be far out of line'' with studies done in the Pentagon, Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon told reporters. He stopped short of directly challenging the findings, however, saying the military needs time to study them.
In the last full-scale Pentagon survey on sexual harassment, in 1988, 5 percent of women in uniform reported being victims of rape or attempted rape. A new survey is under way, Bacon said.
``We are very much against sexual harassment and we are working very hard to combat it,'' he added.
The Minnesota study suggested that sexual abuse while in uniform may be linked to an increased risk of depression, anxiety and hospitalization among female veterans.
Publication of the report in the May issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Family Medicine came just one day before the Pentagon is to release a task force's recommendations for changes in the way the services respond to harassment complaints.
Edwin Dorn, a co-chairman of the task force and the Defense Department's top personnel official, said in a speech last month that the group would not recommend that the services end differences in procedures for handling harassment cases.
Instead, he said, the panel will suggest that Defense Secretary William J. Perry set out standard definitions of harassment offenses and let each service decide how it will deal with them.
``We don't think we can standardize everything that is going on in the services,'' Dorn said, ``simply because of the different ways in which they operate.''
The Minnesota report and the Pentagon task force recommendations also come as the Pentagon, and the Navy in particular, prepare for a fresh round of negative publicity over sexual harassment
. A made-for-television movie on the military's most embarrassing harassment scandal, a series of assaults on women at the 1991 Tailhook convention of naval aviators, is to air May 22 on ABC.
KEYWORDS: SEXUAL HARASSMENT WOMEN IN THE MILITARY by CNB