Pentagon Admits Lacking Uniform System for Reporting Sex Crimes

The military services have no common system for reporting sex harassment or sex crimes because the Defense Department failed to follow a congressional mandate to compile statistics on all crimes, the Pentagon said Thursday.

“It was a deficiency that we don’t have uniform figures,” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters. “We’re correcting it.”

The lack of military-wide reporting hampered the services’ attempts to respond to the uproar touched off by allegations of rape and sexual harassment at an Army training school in Aberdeen, Md.

Bacon noted that Congress told the military with a 1988 law to compile a uniform “incident reporting base” of statistics on all crimes, but it budgeted no money to do it. The purpose was to compile information necessary to comply with FBI reporting methods.

Bacon said Defense Secretary William J. Perry told the secretaries of the Army, Air Force and Navy on Thursday to find the money to create a common reporting system.

Perry first ordered such a move on Oct. 15, Bacon said, but the department’s bureaucracy has not acted.

Army officials first learned of some of the allegations at Aberdeen in September. Army officials disclosed publicly this month that four Aberdeen drill sergeants and a captain were charged with sex crimes involving at least a dozen female recruits.

Courts-martial are pending against two sergeants and the captain. Charges against the other two sergeants were handled administratively.

A hotline set up by the Army after the Aberdeen allegations were aired has brought thousands of calls from women complaining of harassment and other forms of abuse in the service.