Sexual assault in the military is on a rising trend in the US despite concerted effort to deal with the issue. While many cases of sexual assault happen around the country, only a few of the victims manage to report their cases to the relevant authorities for remedy. With this in mind, the proposed research will seek to study and report the challenges to reporting sexual assault in the military. The researcher will conduct a systematic review of papers published on the topic over the last two decades. The articles for inclusion will be obtained from EBSCO, ProQuest,
ScienceDirect, PubMed/Medline, JSTOR, Scopus, LexisNexis, and Web of Science. The study will also use articles searched using the Google Scholar search, the university library, and professional and humanitarian websites that contain information related to the question of study. The search strategy used to look for the articles for inclusion will be sexual assault AND military, and the findings will be filtered according to their relevance, years of publication, and Boolean operators. The research will only include papers published in English or those that provide corresponding interpretations into English, those that investigated the barriers to reporting sexual assault, and those that used military and ex-military respondents. The validity of the findings will be controlled through the scrutiny of the methodologies of included studies, especially with the objective of ensuring that only Randomized Controlled Trials and other studies with rigorous methodologies are included in the study. It is anticipated that the researcher will find a series of issues that hinder the reporting of sexual violence in the military, including fear, bureaucracy in the leadership structure, lack of awareness of the channels to follow while reporting, and the perception that only so much would be done to address reported issues among other challenges.
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Key Terms: Sexual Assault, Military, Reporting, Barriers
The negative physical and mental health issues associated with sexual assault make the issues important to the society. The problem also attracts significant levels of attention when it affects the military because of its special importance to national security. The proposed literature review identified that women are the most vulnerable to sexual assault, especially because there has been little focus on this group. Most of the studies reviewed in this proposed study are qualitative, and they explored different barriers on reporting sexual assault and violence among military and ex-military personnel. The study found that most of the challenges that affect these groups face are related with the fact that there is little policing on the issues, especially as it concerns the study population (Bean-Mayberry et al., 2011). It has been proposed therefore, that affected stakeholders, especially policymakers in the work on ensuring that they improve the ease with which cases of sexual assault is done and to remove the barriers that cause some of the victims to fail to reporting their cases to the relevant authorities (Wolitzky-Taylor et al., 2011). For example, it is important that the leadership challenges, especially those that prolong the reporting process are eliminated and the most vulnerable populations are empowered to feel the responsibility of reporting cases as soon as they happen. Furthermore, it is critical for policy to prioritize public education to enhance the respect for human rights, especially in matters sexual violence.
References
Bean-Mayberry, B., Yano, E.M., Washington, D.L, et al. (2011). Systematic review of women veterans’ health: update on successes and gaps. Women’s Health Issues; 21(4S): S84–S97.
Wolitzky-Taylor, K. B., Resnick, H. S., McCauley, J. L., Amstadter, A. B., Kilpatrick, D. G., & Ruggiero, K. J. (2011). Is reporting of rape on the rise? A comparison of women with reported versus unreported rape experiences in the National Women’s Study-Replication. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(4), 807-832.
