Why do cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault continue to take place in the Army despite all the training and the education?

It's a matter of culture. The Army has a culture of its own, and it creates and maintains that culture through the conduct of its leaders, not any classes. Those classes instruct leaders and Soldiers on policies and rules, but it's the leaders who develop the culture. However, Soldiers don't walk into the Army with Army culture and a few months of Basic training will not indoctrinate Soldiers on how to behave off duty. That takes time, mentorship, and maturity for young Soldiers to be molded and shaped into adults who live or at least abide by the Army values.

Then there's alcohol.... Alcohol throws fuel into the fire for everything and tosses all good sense out the window. The first thing that becomes impaired with alcohol is our sense of judgment, and our ability to tell that our judgement is impaired. The majority of misconduct cases have alcohol involved in them. Alcohol is involved in something like 80-90% of misconduct, and especially in sexual assault cases.

Sexual harassment is a different beast, not one that you can blame on alcohol. I'm not a SARC and I've never looked over the statistics for sexual harassment. But, from what I've seen SH comes down to a lack of respect. Of course, there are still predators and no amount of training will ever eliminate them, but the cases I've seen, 90% came down to disrespect. Often the person didn't think what they were doing was sexual harassment. For instance, in an earlier thread, one NCO was asking about another NCO who was flagged for a SH investigation. He thought the investigation was BS because the NCO made some remark about a female to another Soldier. He felt it wasn't SH because it wasn't said directly to her. It was a lack of knowledge and respect. Or you'll see Soldiers treating a coworker differently and making sexual remarks because they are a female. Again, it's a lack of respect. They wouldn't talk to their sister this way and they wouldn't let someone speak to their mother this way because they respect those people. You can't take someone off the streets and make them develop respect for females that they didn't have three months ago just by going through basic training. It takes time for the Army culture to penetrate into new Soldiers

My personal thought on this, are that is just how these individuals were raised. Unfortunately, not everyone in America is raised in a good home environment. This includes Soldiers that enlist in the military. Being that this is now their first time away from home, they revert back to how they were raised. I think for the most part the military is good for teaching and training some of these individuals what right looks like, but there are still many that still do not care and will do whatever they want to do. I think this will be a fantastic discussion to have in your BLC class, i would love to hear some the comments given. Good luck to you and please let us know how all of this turns out for you.

This is a good question to start a debate. I have been in a while and have seen the emphasis of this become a major effort. I have also worked in law enforcement as a civilian. I would say that it is not that the Army isn't trying to address this enough but we have predators in the Army. We don't have the means to catch them until it's too late. This was most evident with the Fort Hood NCO charged with taking advantage of female Soldiers that were victims of sexual assault. To me it is far fetched that a Soldier got to a position like that and did those horrible acts without any prior incidents. I have heard stories of female Soldiers face challenges where harassment was exposed but it didn't get some much traction. No commander wants to say that it happened under their watch. I have also know some female Soldiers that cried wolf after issues were brought up. With males and females are in the same place stuff like this will happen. I have even had a female DA Civilian at Benning try to ask if I was going out that weekend and ask for my number. I was shocked but I didn't report anything. We obviously don't want to make a "big deal" about it. But regardless of how much training Soldiers have it won't stop a predator that is already in the military from devious acts. You have to think how much this happens in high school and college. They don't stop when they join the military. Making things even worse that these predators don't see an issue with it and don't see it as an issue which makes them think no one else will care.