Air Force Under Fire in Rape Report Investigation

Air Force officials reaffirmed their “zero tolerance” policy on sexual misconduct Thursday as a team of officials from the Pentagon investigated reports that dozens of female cadets were raped while attending the U.S. Air Force Academy.

In what is shaping up to be one of the largest military sex scandals since Tailhook rocked the Navy 12 years ago, five senior civilian and military experts spent a second day gathering facts as part of a review of procedures at the prestigious academy and other Air Force officer training programs, officials said.

“I have three young daughters and a son, and I view each and every one of these assaults as if it had happened to my little girls. It cuts right down to my heart,” said Brig. Gen. S. Taco Gilbert III, commandant of cadets at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“Our fellow Americans send their sons and daughters here with an expectation of safety and security, and that is paramount to me.”

But some military observers said the allegations of female cadets raped and then rebuffed by superiors they told came as little surprise, because military institutions continue to trail their civilian counterparts in preventing or dealing with sexual assault. Rape kits, skilled nurses to administer them and an expectation of confidentiality -- now commonplace in nonmilitary settings -- remain largely unavailable in the service.

“The mind-set is still not geared toward the victim, it’s geared toward the military,” said Kate Summers, advocacy director at the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit group in Connecticut that provides assistance for victims of violence associated with the military. She noted that a study ordered by Congress in response to a growing number of sex-related crimes in all branches of the service produced several recommendations in 1999. But, she said, “very few” have been implemented.

Signs of trouble at the academy began to surface in recent weeks with a series of reports by local Denver station KMGH-TV and Westword, a weekly newspaper. The case of one former cadet -- who said she was raped and her allegation ignored by academy officials -- came to the attention of Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. He notified the Pentagon.

A working group of more than a dozen military and civilian officials has been chartered since January to investigate; five were dispatched this week to Colorado Springs, home to the youngest of the military’s four academies, where 4,000 cadets -- about 18% of them women -- study to become Air Force officers.

The academy has had in place since 1993 a sexual assault prevention and awareness program that begins with orientation and continues through each cadet’s four-year career. It includes a hotline for anonymously reporting sex crimes.

The Pentagon’s investigation was described as “open-ended” as officials attempted to measure the scope of the problem and determine a course of action.

But already, members of Congress were beginning to react, prompting calls for a review of policies on sexual misconduct implemented after the 1991 Tailhook affair, when Navy and Marine pilots groped and fondled Navy women during a convention at a Las Vegas hotel.

“The Pentagon has apparently failed to protect women in the service,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo). “The leaders of the Air Force Academy and the Pentagon must be held accountable for their refusal to protect women cadets ... and must provide explicit steps on how they will prevent these crimes from occurring in the future.”

Allard has called for Senate hearings into sexual assaults at all military academies.

Sexual assaults have plagued the services since women were integrated into the ranks in the 1980s. The combination of a male-dominated population trained for aggression, machismo, unflagging camaraderie and a high threshold for suffering produced a culture ripe for sex crimes and intolerance toward those who reported them.

Few court-martial convictions resulted from the Tailhook scandal, but several Navy careers were ruined in its aftermath. A series of procedures were adopted by the Navy -- from yearly sensitivity training to raising the status of women by mainstreaming them into the fighting forces.

“People need to know the chain of command will be receptive to their concerns,” said Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli of Navy public affairs in Washington. “A number of people’s careers were ruined because it took them awhile to get that.”

The Navy has judged the reforms to be generally successful. But some experts said the problem of sexual assault persists in the services. They drew inferences from the allegations now swirling around the Air Force Academy. Some faulted the services for failing to take stronger action to prevent sexual abuse or properly deal with it when it occurs.

But others said the reports of sexual assault were no different from what can be found at virtually any civilian college.

“The fact of sexual harassment and acquaintance rape has to do with the higher education experience, not with the military,” said David Segal, director of the center for research on military organization at the University of Maryland. “Unfortunately, it is very common.”

Richard Kohn, former chief of Air Force history at the Pentagon, agreed: “When you put a small percentage of women in a college environment that’s also a military environment, where the juices run with youngsters trying to adjust to growing into adulthood and into military officers ... you are going to have problems,” he said.

The difference, however, comes in the way the allegations are handled, an area where the military has apparently failed to keep pace with civilian reforms, Kohn and others said.

“What’s disturbing about the Air Force Academy’s story -- if proven to be true -- is that there may have been officers in responsible positions inside the academy who did not take immediate and very harsh actions to punish and investigate,” Kohn said.

Although most of the allegations pre-date Gen. Gilbert’s 18-month tenure as commandant, he worked to restore potentially lost faith with an e-mail sent recently to every cadet, reaffirming the institution’s values.

“I value every cadet here as a future leader of America,” Gilbert wrote. “We are an organization that builds people up, not tears them down.”