UNITED STATES
The Associated Press
March 15, 2018
By Reese Dunklin and Justin Pritchard
The three military fathers sat at the commander’s conference table on the U.S. Army base in Germany, pleading for help.
They told the commander that their daughters were among a half-dozen girls sexually assaulted by a boy in their first-grade class at the base school. The principal had known about the boy’s behavior for months, they said, but the abuse continued.
The girls’ parents had already turned to Army police, military child-abuse authorities and sex-assault specialists. The response throughout the U.S. military’s vast support structure was always the same, they said: Sorry this has happened; there’s nothing we can do.
“It gives us a sense of hopelessness,” one of the fathers, a soldier, said. “We can only do so much as parents.”
Tens of thousands of children and teenagers live and attend school on U.S. military bases while their parents serve the country. Yet if they are sexually violated by a classmate, a neighborhood kid or a sibling, they often get lost in a legal and bureaucratic netherworld . That’s because military law doesn’t apply to civilians, and the federal legal system that typically handles civilian crimes on base isn’t equipped or inclined to prosecute juveniles.
The Pentagon’s response to addressing this problem stands in contrast to how it cracked down on sexual assault in the ranks following congressional scrutiny more than a decade ago.
“If this would have been a soldier, things would have happened much differently,” the soldier’s wife said.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense said it “takes seriously any incident impacting the well-being” of soldiers and families and promised, without elaboration, “appropriate actions.”
The military’s school system — the Department of Defense Education Activity, or DoDEA — said it had “zero tolerance for sexual assault” and that an investigation of what happened at the German base school showed staff “took the appropriate actions to best meet the needs of all students involved.”
Yet, in a military that prizes procedure and protocol, the Pentagon’s school system has no specific policy to respond to student-on-student sexual violence. It doesn’t accurately track the incidents and affords students fewer protections than those assaulted in U.S. public schools, an Associated Press investigation found.
Three sets of parents interviewed for this story spoke on the record. But AP does not name victims of sexual assault without consent and, to protect their daughters’ identities, extended that anonymity to their parents.
“The one place you can feel safe with your child going is school,” said another mother whose daughter was among those who reported being attacked, “and then you can’t even trust school.”
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