THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030462
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 84 lines
By reputation the most lecherous of the military branches, the Navy actually is doing better than its sister services in attacking sexual harassment, according to a new survey of more than 47,000 uniformed personnel.
The study, partially released Tuesday at the Pentagon, suggests that harassment remains a major problem for the military; 78 percent of the women and 38 percent of men who took part said they'd received unwanted sexual attention from someone at work or in a work-related situation in the past year.
The problems reported ranged from crude jokes or remarks, reported by 70 percent of the women and 35 percent of men, to sexual assaults, reported by 6 percent of women and 1 percent of men.
More detailed results provided privately by Pentagon sources indicated that the problem is most severe in the Army and the Marine Corps and that the Navy's aggressive efforts to combat its well-publicized troubles with harassment are bearing fruit. For example:
Seventy-one percent of Navy women in uniform for six to 10 years said that harassment occurs less often now than it did a few years ago. Fifty-one percent of Army women held that view about the problem in their service; 59 percent of Air Force and Marine women said harassment is declining.
Sixty-two percent of Navy women said the leaders of their bases or ships are making honest and reasonable efforts to stop harassment. By comparison, 45 percent of Army women and 51 percent of Marine and Air Force women expressed that view.
Ninety percent of Navy personnel reported receiving training within the past year on identifying and dealing with harassment. That was 26 percentage points above the Air Force total, 15 points above the Army and 8 points above the Marine Corps. The Navy also reported higher levels of training on the legal and career consequences of harassment and on service policies covering it.
Sixty-two percent of Navy women said their training in reducing or preventing harassment has been moderately or very effective. In the Army, which did second best in that department, 51 percent of women rated their training effective.
When they make harassment complaints, Navy women are less fearful of reprisals than are their counterparts in the other branches. Fifty-seven percent said they ``feel free to report sexual harassment without fear of bad things happening to me,'' compared with 50 percent in the Army and Air Force and 53 percent in the Marines.
Overall, Air Force women reported fewer instances of harassment than their counterparts in the other branches. And Air Force personnel were significantly more likely than others to recommend an Air Force career to their female friends.
But the Navy's dramatic improvements drew the most praise from outside observers.
``At the senior leadership level there is a real commitment to making a change and getting rid of sexual harassment,'' Denver attorney Susan Barnes told the Associated Press. Barnes, head of of WANDA's Fund, a legal advocacy group for women in the military, credited the late Adm. Mike Boorda, the Navy's chief of operations until his death in May, with leading a ``strong and thoughtful effort . . . to integrate women into surface warfare.''
``It's nice for them to get some good news,'' agreed Sue Tempero, former chairwoman of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, a Pentagon advisory group. ``But it's a long process.''
A Navy spokesman said the results are consistent with surveys the service has done internally since it stepped up efforts to combat harassment after the 1991 Tailhook Association scandal. Those studies have shown steady improvement in the Navy's response to harassment, the official said, even as the service continued to be dogged by other prominent harassment cases.
Still, not all the news in the survey results was good for the Navy. Seventy-one percent of its respondents said they would recommend to a male friend that he join the Navy and 59 percent said they would make that recommendation to a female friend; the Army and Air Force did better in both groups.
Though he emphasized the overall improvement on sexual harassment the new survey found compared to a study done in 1988, Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn said the Pentagon is ``not at all satisfied. . . . This is not a made-up problem. It's a substantial challenge to good order and discipline.''
Dorn briefed reporters on the study's overall findings but declined to release or discuss the service-by-service results in detail. ``The numbers are still being scrubbed,'' he said, promising a more thorough briefing within six weeks.
The findings released Tuesday were leaked, in skeletal form, to ABC News and The Washington Post last month and commented on privately then by senior Defense Department officials.
KEYWORDS: SEXUAL HARASSMENT U.S. NAVY by CNB