The following is a guest column written by Col. Barbara Mucker.
The Army has experienced a massive surge in sexual assaults recently, with an almost 300 percent increase in just five years. While there is significant debate over whether the numbers can be partially explained as an increase in reporting versus an increase in actual incident, this is, at best, a secondary topic.
It distracts from the real threat to the Army: A lack of diversity among assailants.
As a lieutenant stationed in South Carolina, several of my soldiers were sexually assaulted. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but now that I am a colonel, I look back over my career and realize that the same pattern has held true throughout. Whether the target was male or female, the assailant was almost always male. I know of no formal study into the matter, but through informal interviews and extrapolation, I put the amount of male attackers as high as 95%. To make matters worse, the tiny number of female assailants tend to focus their affections on other females — not only excluding male soldiers (which is discriminatory) but also creating the impression among those males that they are undesirable.
