Enacting Best Practice: commanders no longer prosecuting sexual assault cases

“On my first full day as secretary of defense, I committed that we must do more as a department to counter the scourge of sexual assault and sexual harassment in our military,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III stated in a memorandum published on July 2, 2021. In the months following his initial statement, Secretary Austin’s commitment to this issue has yet to waver.

A variety of alterations to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) were recently proposed by Austin’s Independent Review Committee. The commission was formed and immediately dedicated to a 90-day internal review beginning on March 24, which was solely focused on the issue of sexual assault in the military.

Much of the information gathered by the committee was inclusive to survivors, meaning that data was borrowed from the lived-experience of those individuals in order to decide where changes had to be made.

The most notable of the proposed modifications is based on the best practice for handling sexual assault, which entails a removal of prosecution decision-making powers from victims’ commanders. A shift in prosecution decision-making power was determined as a way to prevent the possibility of a power differential from marring a victim’s chances of receiving due justice.

According to the statistics developed by the IRC, nearly twenty thousand service members experience sexual assault each year. Of those 20,000, less than 8,000 are reported.

Of the nearly 8,000 reports that occur on average, only 5,000 of them are categorized as unrestricted – meaning the victim has said that he or she wants a fully-wrought investigation.

The commission’s director, Lynn Rosenthal, has stated that the discrepancy between cases that end up reported and unreported is the “chasm” that the committee has focused on curtailing.

After removing the role of commanders in cases of sexual assault, the committee plans to create an independent legal body that operates adjacent to the command structure of the military.

This reorganization is intended to guarantee that victims have someone who is 100% on their side, rather than someone who may downplay the severity of their situation as a result of a variety of conflicting interests.