A Plague of Sexual Harassment

The number of U.S. soldiers accused or under investigation for allegedly sexually harassing women subordinates continues to grow, as does the number of alleged victims. By one count, 10 of the 13 Army bases in the United States where men and women train together have now been affected by the harassment scandal, as well as an expanding number of posts overseas. What began as an apparently localized incident involved a gross abuse of authority is rapidly taking on the dimensions of a seemingly endemic problem.

In many cases the illicit activities engaged in by men in command involved not just inappropriate touching or suggestive comments, but the vastly more serious crimes of rape, forced sodomy and the threat of further physical violence to coerce the silence of the victim. Hundreds of apparent gross abuses of authority are under investigation. Scores of noncommissioned officers have already been found guilty of sexually related crimes. The careers of men the Army spent a lot of money to train are being abruptly ended. Far worse, the lives of women who have been victimized by their superiors have been ineradicably marked.

The Army was slower than the other services in setting up hotlines over which complaints of sexual harassment incidents can be reported and, apparently, was also less vigorous in informing women soldiers of their rights to be free from sexual predation. It’s paying the cost for that now, in a scandal that almost daily grows larger as publicity about the abuses first reported last November continues to encourage new complaints.

Should the practice of training men and women together, which some see as opening up greater opportunities for sexual harassment and abuse, be ended? Some in Congress are already calling for a return to gender-separation in training units. That would be one way of getting around a problem. But it would also represent a grievous admission that the Army was otherwise unable to control the irresponsible and intolerable behavior of some of its NCOs and officers. Enough exemplary convictions in courts-martial for sexually related crimes, enough prison terms and dishonorable discharges for sexual predators in uniform, seems to us the surest way to make such an admission unnecessary.