New Army game trains leaders to handle sexual assault in ranks

The Army is launching an interactive video game focused on training leaders to deal with sexual assault and harassment in their ranks, just in time for Sexual Assault Prevention Month.

Acting Army Secretary Patrick Murphy and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Thursday kicked off Sexual Assault Prevention Month during a ceremony at the Pentagon.

The ELITE-SHARP Command Team Trainer will be available April 1 on the Army’s MILGAMING website alongside the ELITE Lite counseling tool, which was the basis for the game, according to information from the Army.

The Army has used the ELITE, or Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment, platform for about 18 months as a way to train junior officers and noncommissioned officers on how to conduct more effective counseling, according to the Army.

Soldiers using the ELITE-SHARP Command Team Trainer will interact or train with a standardized avatar. The game provides command teams with animated scenarios on sexual assault and harassment and highlights the right and wrong ways to handle such situations, according to information from the Army. There also is a portion of the game where commanders interact with virtual soldiers who have been victims of sexual assault or harassment.

It should take command teams about 90 minutes to complete the ELITE-SHARP Command Team Trainer training.
The game moves away from the typical PowerPoint or classroom training soldiers usually get, Maj. Greg Pavlichko, chief of the Army’s Games for Training program at the Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, said in a statement.

“We’re getting away from non-professional role players and just getting beaten to death with slide shows, and making it more engaging,” Pavlichko said. “Plus, for a lot of younger people, gaming is kind of innate and organic to them, so they understand it right away.”
The Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention office in September 2014 asked for the ELITE counseling tool to be further developed into a SHARP-specific tool, according to the Army.

The request stemmed from a realization that many command teams didn’t fully understand what they were supposed to do when dealing with a sexual assault or harassment report, Pavlichko said.

“You’d have an incident, the commander and first sergeant would respond to the incident in a way that was not in accordance with policy or law, and then you’d have a breakdown with the court case,” he said. “Or they would kind of do what they thought was right, but not necessarily what the law or Army policy said you need to do.”