Why are Army leaders failing so abysmally to implement a successful SHARP?

The reprisal isn't just from the chain-of-command. It can come from the offender themselves.

At one point I had a barely 23 year old NCO who had just arrived to our unit who, 3 days into being on our roster, made comments and non-verbal gestures towards myself while pouring hand sanitizer over his forearm. This individual was aware that only he and I were alone in the office and I quickly removed myself from the situation. Several days went by while I thought over what had occurred. Was I just harassed? Should I report it? If I do, what will happen? What if nothing happens? Will people just assume it was more extreme than what happened? Two weeks went by where I worked with this person who continued to act and behave in odd manners, generating a hostile work environment. Finally I went to the unit SHARP and explained to them what had occurred. They informed me that they would speak to him and my leadership regarding the issue.

The following day I was hunted down by my NCO-IC and a different SHARP rep to ask me in a very peculiar manner if I felt safe several times before I responded with "If you are this concerned over my safety, maybe I should be too?" Turns out my leadership along with a SHARP rep spoke with the NCO regarding the matter, which he admitted to doing and stated he was just joking. After they explained to him it wasn't a joke and how serious the issue was he blew up in a rage and issued death threats against myself and the NCO-IC. Several escorts were assigned to him and it came to light that he had transferred to us from another unit for a similar issue that had occurred. This was a person who was merely being told "Don't be saying this stuff, don't do this stuff" and he turned it up to 11. In his mind he had given the Army the best years of his life so my life was forfeit for daring to bring the incident forward.

With the Army just shuffling problem children around, I don't know where this person went to or if they are still in the Army but I will always remember the first time I received a death threat that didn't come from a child over Xbox live and what has become another nail in the coffin that is my service in the US military.

The answer is quite simple...restore the ethics and morals that founded this Republic...you know..."ONE NATION, UNDER GOD"...the military isn't a standard job and the blatant "PC" perversions enacted and forced upon soldiers is ludicrous. Remove God and you remove personal accountability in the vast majority of people...especially when you a a hen into barracks of aggressively trained roosters...common sense tells you that's not gonna end well...

I don't think it is a "winnable" program. We give safety briefings every week but some knuckle head has to get shitcan drunk and drive a vehicle. We have suicide prevention training but we still have Soldiers taking their own lives. We do IA awareness training but we still have Soldiers plugging iPods and phones into government computers. We do a heck of a lot of training with no results or sometimes the problem gets even worse.

We are a cross section of the population. There are bad people in the population, there are going to be bad people in the Army. I am all about educating the Soldiers. If a one hour powerpoint stops someone from killing themselves or sexually assaulting someone it's worth it. Like many others have said I think it boils down to leadership and the climate within the command. It definitely helps if our Soldiers have some morals and values.

1) Most SHARP training is check the block
2) The chain of command gets in the way more than it helps
3) Unequal justice system. Senior personnel are coddled and allowed to retire while junior personnel go to jail. (if it is a Junior person Commands want the MPs to cart the offender out in cuffs. If you really want to make an impact have them cart a GO out of his/her office
4) take the CoC out of it completely. Its a CRIME! Let Law Enforcement do our job. and Tell Commanders to stand down.

As I have said repeatedly, we keep putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. Get an unbiased commission (if that is possible) to discover why this has gone on so long and consistently for a few decades. Any time you have a systemic problem like this one, in the civilian world, you first get to the root cause of the problem and take action to fix it. Unfortunately, that could be detrimental to those with an agenda.

What I'm about to say is going to make me sound cold hearted. end caveat.

The "Service" (et al, as an Organization) doesn't care about Individuals. It cares about Mission. People within the Service care about their troops. The closer you are to the People under you, the more like you care. There's a bond or a relationship. The farther away, the more "machine-like" the bureaucracy becomes.

SHARP is "grit" in the machine. Identify and remove. Perpetrators and Victims alike from a "bureaucractic" standpoint. Managers (as opposed to Leaders) don't want it mucking up their finely tuned and oiled machine. They just want it gone.

Now, we much look at the issue realistically as well. Are we going to END "SHARP" violations? No we are not. Anyone who says we are is smoking something and needs to report for an immediate piss test. Of course the (unrealistic) GOAL is to end violations, however the real goal is to reduce them continuously, and get 100% reporting.

My "opinion" is that the Military (unlike the Civilian world) has been getting better at the reporting side. This accounts for "some" of the increases we see on our side of the fence. Better reporting in a smaller subset makes for larger %.

Now as for "further victimization." We get into real Subjective territory here because of the Investigative Process which requires the Victim "to relive the events" however that is necessary as part of our Justice system. It creates a "perception" of further victimization, without defining what that victimization is. I'm not saying other things aren't happening, but we need to clearly define them before we make assumptions. There are clear policies in place, and whether the policies are proactive or reactive in nature plays a heavy role as to whether or not they are function correctly.

Some of the Preventive Training isn't worth the paper it's written on, while the Reactive Investigative and Punitive parts are limited by the UCMJ.

I feel our approach is wrong. We can't treat this like marksmanship training. This isn't a skill to improve, or a college class. It's about who a person IS, at a fundamental level. Sexual Harassment/Assault is not an Army issue, it is a parenting issue. Good, decent, well raised human beings do not require training to know that these behaviors are wrong and morally reprehensible. If they need to be taught that at this stage, there is nothing we can do for them. They are broken, defective human beings.. Their formative years have been wasted. All we can do is identify them and remove them from the service.

There is no amount of training that will undo 17 + years of bad parenting.

CPT (Join to see) Does the military really understand accountability and responsibilies?

My longest standing point on this subject is that we view sexual harassment/assault as a "military problem". This is incorrect. This is a problem with society as a whole, not just within the military. What the military is doing with SHARP is attempting to correct a problem that originates outside the gate. None of us were born into our respective military uniforms. We all spent the first 18+ years of our lives out there in the civilian sector where we developed our personalities, habits, world-views, etc. Environment has a direct impact upon how an individual develops. Most, I believe, develop positively, but there are many who do not.

In the military we are attempting to undo nearly two decades of society's programming of each individual. In this day and age where pornography of all sorts is only a mouse click away, it shouldn't be surprising that many people develop the wrong ideas about human sexuality. Pornography is never, never positive. It's an exploitation of people and teaches young, impressionable minds the wrong messages about human relationships.

Real change needs to start outside the gates of our bases and in the homes of future service men and women. Once that change begins out there in the rest of the world, our fight to eliminate sexual harassment/assault in the military will become much easier. Until that day, all the SHARP classes in the world won't stop a determined sexual predator out for his own gratification.

The problem with your logic is that you're using a percentage to gauge success. "Why have only X% of female Soldiers reported a sexual assault? How do we make that number higher??". The measurement of success of a preventative program should be the ever DECREASING number of SHARP cases. For example, I used to work manage an IT department that had annual goals based on "fixing X problems a day". The problem with that metric is that if you are doing your job correctly and succeeding at it...your problems SHOULD be going away making that magic X number decrease year over year.

Aside from making every officer make SHARP an annual goal, mandatory training of every Soldier and pouring millions into awareness program...how are they failing again? What do you suggest the Army does that they haven't done already? There is an entire program driven from the top down that spends enormous resources making sure female Soldiers are given anything they need.

To label SHARP as a "abysmal failure" is just wrong. Today's Soldier spends way, way more time in SHARP training than they do in CLS, BRM, PT, MAC, MOS training, hooah schools, or training other basic Soldiering skills.