Top Admiral Seeks End to Navy Sex Abuse

The U.S. Navy’s senior officer, clearly troubled by reports of sexual harassment in the service, said Friday that sweeping changes are needed in Navy culture and traditions to end what has become a serious problem.

In the naval command’s most extensive comment on the subject, Adm. Frank B. Kelso, the chief of naval operations, unveiled a program of training and discipline intended to curtail sexual harassment. And he suggested for the first time that the Navy may need to make a historic decision to allow women to serve on all warships.

The absence of women on most U.S. warships--one of the Navy’s most time-honored traditions--has contributed to “a male culture,” Kelso told several reporters he had invited to meet with him. “You have to consider,” he added, that so long as women are barred from serving aboard ships that could see combat they could continue to be treated with less respect than men.

In a widely publicized incident eight months ago, scores of Navy and Marine Corps officers at a meeting in Las Vegas of naval aviation boosters allegedly grabbed and fondled more than two dozen Navy women. Kelso said that even his wife has asked: “What is it about the Navy?”

The issue of women serving aboard fighting ships is itself significant among many Navy women, most of whom think that the restriction is unfair. But Kelso did not go so far as to say that he has decided to propose changing the restriction.

Kelso’s demeanor Friday was notably different from his usual button-down style. He made many references to his own personal experiences and changes in attitude as a Navy officer.

“When you get to be my age, you fix a lot of the way you think in life,” the 60-year-old officer said. “This is one of those kind of issues.”

Kelso likened the challenge of banishing sexual harassment to the Navy’s race relations and drug problems of the 1970s and 1980s. Only a long commitment to increased training, awareness and discipline will turn around the Navy’s mounting record of harassment, he said.

He announced a service-wide initiative to train officers and sailors to spot and correct the harassment of women and to drum those out of the service who “persist in harassing women.”

His package of training and discipline initiatives is designed not only to sensitize officers to the definition and effect of sexual harassment but to “give commanders the tools” to punish it.

He said that he has “sent out about as strong a direction” as he can that “I want the world to change. We need to change our culture and everybody’s got to get involved in doing that. . . . You’ve got to recognize and go ahead and raise your standards and say that’s not the kind of conduct we’re going to live with.”

Kelso said that Navy rites involving excessive consumption of alcohol, as well as the attitudes of naval officers who spend six months a year at sea, are partly to blame for insensitive behavior toward women.

While the program is intended to eliminate sexual harassment in the long run, Kelso conceded that in the near future it is likely to further harm the Navy’s image because it will result in more reported cases of harassment from Navy women whose leaders encourage them to make complaints.

Kelso’s comments came as Navy commanders considered punishment for as many as 70 Navy and Marine Corps officers allegedly involved in last September’s events at a convention of the Tailhook Assn. in Las Vegas. According to a recent memo by Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III, six officers are suspected of participating directly in an all-male gantlet that groped and fondled at least 26 women--more than half of them naval officers--who were trying to pass by. Many other male officers were either present or in “other areas where inappropriate conduct occurred,” Garrett told Navy and Marine leaders in the memo.

Barbara Pope, assistant Navy secretary for manpower, said at a hearing earlier this week that, despite efforts of some naval officers to hinder further investigations, a number of officers probably will receive punishments ranging from a letter of reprimand to court-martial.

“We have not accepted any of this,” said Pope, who called the Tailhook convention “a watershed event” in a hearing Tuesday. “It is not over yet.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee has put additional pressure on Kelso and the Navy to address the issue of sexual harassment by placing all Navy promotions on hold until senators are satisfied that the service has dealt with the issue.

An internal Navy study completed in 1991 indicated that 75% of Navy women and 50% of Navy men believed that sexual harassment was occurring within their commands. Anecdotal evidence suggests that incidents of sexual harassment in the Navy are both frequent and often extremely graphic.

A 1990 Defense Department survey found that 64% of women in the U.S. military believed that they had been sexually harassed. While the problem is widely perceived as worse in the Navy than in the Army or Air Force, Kelso said Friday that he does not think the problem is more serious in the sea service. But he noted that public reports of the problem have made the issue a vexing public-relations liability, as well as one that is eroding the morale and effectiveness of Navy women, who make up 10% of the Navy’s personnel rolls.

“If you measured it in publicity recently, we certainly would unfortunately win the hit parade,” said Kelso.

Under Kelso’s initiative, all Navy units are reviewing such traditions as their initiation rites and their unit insignias for behavior or symbols that might be offensive to women. At least two flying units have changed the emblems that appear on their planes and the patches on their flight suits so that they no longer depict curvaceous women in the pin-up poses of World War II vintage.