Test test. Test test. Test test test. Test test. Test. Test. Test. Test test. Test test. Test test. Test test. Test. Whats going on. Oh, the slides are cut off. Thats right. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, ill tell you what it says, the what we did is we redid that the comparison between the services, controlling for a bunch of differences that exists between the personnel and their experiences in each service. So we controlled for the age of Service Members and their race, their marital status, their education, their afqtc scores, which is a test of skills that enlisted. How many dependents they have. With we had many factors then we had all these military experience factors that we controlled for, including pay grade, entry age and rank and things like that. And then we also controlled for things like the environment in which theyre working in the military. So the fact is like, the percentage of men in the unit and installation as as dr. Scottsdale mentioned this is a known risk factor of proportion of men in your environment contributes to risk. So what we when you we controlled for all of these factors. We were sure we were comparing services on a completely apes apples to apples bases, at least in all the factors that we included in the model. What we found oh, theyre all cut off. What we found is that the differences between the army, the navy and the marines were explained. There were no longer differences between them, but the fact that the air force had so much lower rates was not explained at all. After controlling for all of those factors, after adjusting for them. Women and other services had 1. 7 times the risk of Sexual Assault as women in the air force. And men in other services had 4 to 5 times the risk of Sexual Assault as men in the air force. So what this suggests is theres something that explains quite large differences, four to five times is a big difference in social science research. Going on, theres something that explains the difference between services and we havent been able to identify what that is. Now, sometimes people ask, well, wouldnt if you went to a College Campus, wouldnt you find that there was similar rates of Sexual Assault at a College Campus, is this really a military thing. And i think that evidence like this is one of the best points of data we have that suggests there may be something to look at that causes big differences in risk of Sexual Assault. You dont need to go out and look at a College Campus to recognize that theres Something Big going on that differs by service, and could be understood better. And so one of our recommendations was to try to understand what are the factors to do more research, to understand what are the differences between the air force and the other services, could be that they attract different people and its the differences are just things we dont have we cant statistically control for. But it could also have to do with differences in the way the services are structured or, you know, how theyre organized or how the physical organization, like where people sleep may be quite different across services. I think we think it would be valuable and useful for Additional Research on why there are these large differences in Sexual Assault rates across services. Thats the second finding. The third one okay, is that working, yeah, thats working. The third point i want to make is about the differences between the reserve component members and the active component members. What you can see on this slide is that both men and women are exposed to lower risk of Sexual Assault than men and women in the active component. This is any Sexual Assault. We didnt just ask about experiences with someone in the military sexually assaulting you, its any Sexual Assault in the past year. So what so these are this is another very good comparison. These are all Service Members, one group of whom spends more time in the civilian world socializing with other civilians and in the civilian workplace. And the other spends most of their time in military environments and theres this big difference in risk. We did the same kind of Statistical Analysis and we dont find that any of the variables that we try to adjust for explain this difference. Theres another surprising finding that we had here, which is the high rate at which the Sexual Assault experience by reserved component members occur in military settings or with a military perpetrator. We reduce the size of the reserve component sample just to those people who are part time reservist theyre working 38, 39 days a year for the military. What we find is that 85 of the assaults that they experience in the past year were military related, which is, you know, which is a much higher proportion than might be expected. The lifestyle may be part of the explanation here, we dont know but we strongly recommended that this is another signal or clue about whats going on with risk in the military, that could be further pursued and understood to better drive down risks. Okay. The last thing i want to talk about concerns Sexual Harassment, Sexual Harassment is really quite common in the military. We estimate that about 116,000 active duty members were sexually harassed in the past year and about 44,000 experienced gender discrimination. Its so common that when we ask women of all ranks how common it is, more than 75 say, common are very common. And men, too, agree. They dont they dont agree at quite that rate. But close to 50 of men say its common or very common in the military. We know that Sexual Harassment is associated with a lot of negative workplace out comes involving productivity, retention, morale and other negative, you know, bad out comes, but as the doctor scottsdale mention, theres also evidence that Sexual Harassment is strongly associated with Sexual Assault. What we find in this data is that women who are sexually assaulted were sexually, harassed in the past year, were 14 more likely have been sexually assaulted in the past year. Very Strong Association there. And men who were sexually harassed were 49 times as likely to be sexually assaulted in the past year, as well. That doesnt prove that theres a correlation here. It could yeah, theres a correlation. It doesnt prove that theres a Causal Association between Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault. It certainly could be. It doesnt prove it. But it suggests that Sexual Harassment may be a very good indicator for where theres a problem. And if you and so one of our recommendations was that if the military could identify differences in rates across units, across command or across installations, that might be a way that they could identify those places where risk is highest and look at what are the differences occurring in those places, what are the features of those places that could explain the difference in Sexual Harassment and if theres as the correlation stands, differences in rates of Sexual Assault. So that was those were the four points i wanted to make and i look forward to our discussion in just after the next speaker. [ applause ] [ applause ] shes meritorious awards for sustained extraordinary performance leading multiple highly complex defense reviews. Today ms. Ferrell is presenting the findings of two gao reports, the november 2015 report on Sexual Assault in the military and very recently released 2016 report on hazing incidents involving Service Members. Thank you, ellen. Thanks for that elevation. Thanks to swan for having gao represented here today. We appreciate the opportunity to discuss our recent report on dods updated preventative strategy. Sexual assault is a heinous crimes that devastates victims and has a far reaching negative effect for dod because it under minds the departments core values, degrades Mission Readiness and is free to core, strategic goodwill and raises financial cost. Importantly, data suggests that recorded Sexual Assaults represent a fraction of the Sexual Assault incidents that are actually occurring in dod. Dod data report that reported incidents involving Service Members more than doubled from about 2,800 in fiscal year 2007 to about 6,100 in fiscal year 2014, however, based on a 2014 survey and by my colleagues. They estimated that 20,300 active duty Service Members were actually assaulted in the prior year. Since 2008, gao has issued multiple products and made numerous recommendations related to dods efforts to prevent and respond to incidents of Sexual Assault. For example, relevant to todays discussion is our march 2015 report on military male victims of Sexual Assault. We reported that dod has taken steps to address Sexual Assaults of Service Members generally and they like to refer to it as their policies or gender neutral. To address the Sexual Assaults of Service Members generally, but it is not used all of the data such as analysis that shows significantly fewer male Service Members than females, reporting when they are sexually assaulted to inform their decision making, such as tailoring their training or incorporating activities to prevent Sexual Assault. Gaos analysis of Sexual Assault prevention using the results of the grand study conducted for dod shows that at most, 13 of males reported their assaults were as at least 40 of females reported their incidents. Today i will primarily discuss our report issued in november 2015 on dods updated prevention strategy. Let me start, though, with some background information. For over a decade, congress and dod have taken a variety of steps to prevent and respond to Sexual Assault in the military. In 2004, following a series of high profile Sexual Assault cases involving Service Members, congress required the secretary of defense to develop, among other things, a comprehensive policy for dod on the prevention of and response to Sexual Assaults involving Service Members. In response to statutory requirements in 2005, dod established its Sexual Assault prevention and Response Program to promote the prevention of Sexual Assaults, to encourage increased reporting of such incidents and to improve victim responsibility capability. In 2008, dod published its first Sexual Assault prevention strategy. In april 2014, dod updated its prevention strategy and that updated strategy is the focus of my discussion. I will discuss two objectives from our november 2015 report that addresses the extent to which dod has, one, developed an effective prevention strategy, and two, implemented Activities Department wide and at military installations related to the departments effort to prevent Sexual Assault in the military. For the first objective we found that dod developed its strategy to prevent Sexual Assault using the cdcs framework for effective Sexual Violence prevention strategies. But dod does not link activities to desired out comes or fully identify risk and protective factors. Specifically, dods strategy identifies 18 preventionrelated activities but they are not linked with the desired out comes of the departments over all prevention efforts, a step that is necessary to determine whether efforts are producing the intended effect. Dod strategy includes activities, such as conducting specialized leader Sexual Assault training and establishing collaboration forums to capture and shared prevention, best practices and lessons learned. In a different section of dods strategy, it lists five general out comes of its prevention efforts, such as acceptance and endorsement of the values that seek to prevent Sexual Assault and in an environment in which Service Members networks support a culture of Sexual Assault prevention. Although activities and out comes are identified, dod does not discuss what, if any, connection exist between the 18 prevention related activities and out comes in the departments efforts to prevent Sexual Assault. Without a defined link between activities and desired out comes, dod may not be able to determine which activities are having the desired effect or when necessary to make timely and informed adjustments to its efforts to help ensure it continues to progress toward desired out comes. Also, dod may lack the information that is needed to conduct a rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of its efforts. Further, in adapting cdcs framework to address the unique nature of the military environment, dod did not fully identify risk and protect the factors, ie, factors that may put a person at risk for committing Sexual Assault or that alternative make that harm in its updated strategy. Dod adapted cdcs approach by identifying five domains and environment in which it will focus its prevention efforts and include risk factors for three, individuals, relationships and society. For example, within the individual domain, dod identified risk factors, such as alcohol and drug abuse and hostility toward women as risks that may influence Sexual Violence. However, dod does not specify risk factors for the two domains over which it has the greatest influence. Leaders at all levels of dod and the military community. For example, the strategy does not identify potential risk factors associated with these domains, just as recognizing that the inherent nature of certain types of commands or units may cultivate an environment in which there is an increased risk of Sexual Assault. One such risk factor may be hazing. In our february 2016 report on dods policy to address and track hazing, we reported that initiations and right of passage can be effective tools to instill a decor and loyalty among Service Members and are included in many traditions throughout dod. However, such traditional activities, as well, as more ad hoc activities have at times included cruel or abusive behavior and it is not always been easy for Service Members to draw a clear distinction between legitimate traditions and patterns of misconduct. Also, we reported that hazing incidents may cross the line into Sexual Assault. We noted the Service Officials and male Service Members at veral military installations gave us examples of recent incidents involving both hazing and Sexual Assaults. We found that a series of hazing incidents may es ska late into a sexual escalate into a sexual and Service Officials stated that training on the relationship to Sexual Assault would be particularly beneficial to males in that it might lead to increased reporting and fewe. Dod also included six protective factors identified by cdc in prevention strategy but does not specify how factors such as Emotional Health relate to the five domains. The protective factors that dod included in its strategy are grouped together rather than being listed under the beneath the domain to which they belong. Thus, dod may not be able to accurately characterize the environment in which Sexual Assaults occur or to develop activities and interventions to more effectively prevent them. For the second objective in our november 2015 report on implementing prevention activities, we found that dod and the military services developed and are in the process of implementing prevention focused activities, but theyve not taken steps to help ensure that these activities developed at the local or installation level are consistent with the over arching objectives of dods prevention strategy. As noted previously, dod updated prevention strategy identified 18 prevention focused activities and according to dod officials, two have been implemented in efforts to address the remaining 18 are on going. Dod officials said that the remaining 16 activities identified in this strategy will never be considered complete because as the program develops, the department will consistently revise and renew its approach in these areas. As such, officials said that the status of the remaining 16 activities will indefinitely remain as on going. In addition to the activities listed in dods strategy, installation based personnel have developed and implemented various prevention activities at their installations. Dod acknowledged that the 18 activities in the updated strategy are not the only required prevention activities and encouraged the services to develop their own specific initiatives, however, dod also noted that the objectives of dods prevention strategy are to achieve unity of effort and purpose across all of dod and execution of Sexual Assault prevention focus activities, but they have not taken steps to help ensure that the activities developed at the local level are consistent with the over arching objectives of its strategy. These installation developed activities may not be consistent with dods prevention strategy because dod in the services have not communicated the purpose of the strategy and disseminated it to installation based personnel responsible for developing and implementing cap tytys at captivities at local level. During our cite visits we found that Program Managers were largely unfamiliar with dods prevention strategy and, hence, may not be implementing activities in a manner consistent with the objectives of the strategy. Further, the military service Sexual Assault policies key conduits of such communication have not been updated to align with the guided and updated strategy. We also found, during our visits, to select installations, theres limited collaboration for a number of reasons taking place on the prevention activities developed locally, which could further effect the effectiveness and efficiency of the departments efforts for prevention. For example, during a visit to an army base, Program Officials informed us of an attempt to collaborate with the other services on prevention activities. However, the other services declined to collaborate because the other services whose programs were solely focused on addressing Sexual Assault thought it would be confusing to collaborate with the army since their Program Addresses both Sexual Harassment and assault. In conclusion, since our first report in 2008 on Sexual Assault in the military, dod has made progress in improving its efforts to prevent and respond to incidents across the department. Still, without fully developing its prevention strategy and communicating it throughout the department, dod may encounter difficulties in carrying out its vision to eliminate Sexual Assault in the military. That concludes my remarks. If youre interested in any of gaos reports, you can find them on the internet at www. Gao. Gov. And if you have trouble finding it, then just shoot me an email. I think our addresses are listed in the brochures. That concludes my remarks. [ applause ] now were going to take some questions. I have a couple that i wrote. One of my first questions is to dr. Morela. If you can talk about if you had looked at whether or not Sexual Orientation is a risk factor in the military population, does that put people at more or less risk for Sexual Harassment and assault . We didnt study it. We wanted to have a question on the survey that asked because it is a risk factor in other populations. Its a risk factor its been a risk factor for bullying and harassment and assault in high schools and colleges and prison. And so its its certainly possible that that Sexual Orientation is a risk factor in the military as well. We werent able to at the time there was a policy against dod collecting that information. I think that policy has been changed i think the Behavioral Risk far t Risk Factor Survey that went up did have that risk factor. Audience have any questions . The question i have is male assault. To what extent do you think existing instruments capture male experiences . Survey instruments. We were given an opportunity to completely rewrite the sexual harass m and sexual that had been previously used and one of the objectives we had in designing the new survey questions was to capture both male and female experiences as they relate to the law the prior Sexual Harassment questions that had been used and are widely used concerned concerned a form of Sexual Harassment that was tightly aligned to the law, necessarily, it was more i think the developer dr. Fitzgerald describes it as a kind of psychological construct of Sexual Harassment. It was connected to hostile workplace environment, sexual quid pro quo and gender discrimination, men and women that will capture both male and female experiences. I think we captured a lot of male experiences. Theest matds from our survey, you know, suggest there are more men who are sexually assaulted and harassed than they are women. So we learnly got a lot of them. If i may. The 2014 report that led is a vast improvement over previous efforts by dod to collect information, you still have to be careful in terms of trends. Rand has tried to maintain previous questions with the new questions to get at the heart of the some of the issues more so. But when we looked at male victims, we found that there is data, a lot of data going back years, including on male victims, but dod had not used it. Thats an issue. As you probably know, the report to congress is hundreds and hundreds of pages of data and theres even more behind that, but its being from gao, we like to see decisions data driven and we know that there is a lot of data thats available regarding male victims and dod needs to capitalize on that in order to determine where does that fit in this prevention strategy. My question is a bit twofold. We did participate in the rand 2014 study, so i just would ask why those results werent compared. I know we were pretty well in line with the air force. And, also, realizing, i know we do fall under the department of Homeland Security with the gao, of course, i believe with all the services we suffer the Current Issues and learn from each other. I guess my question is more or less sometimes were compared but sometimes were not. That was my fault. I didnt prepare that for this briefing. Ill say that the coast guard looks very much like the air force, men and women are exposed to significantly lower rates than Sexual Assault, thats not explained by the all those demographic differences that may exist between the services. I apology skriez to to coast guard for not including their data in this. The population with the fewest women, the marine corps aj the populations with the most women, the air force and the coast guard seem to have fewer. So we ruled those two differences out as an explanati explanation. I dont think i think we know that the percentage of men is a risk factor, that does drive risk. It doesnt explain these differences. Usually when gao looks at this issue, it is across dod and the coast guard when we started this in 2008, that was the scope of our efforts. Sometimes we have been focused just on a service, like the air force, after the scandals at the we were asked to look at that potential situation and what the air force was doing. They had about 44 recommendations that they implemented most of those, focused just on basic training and how to prevent Sexual Assault currently weve got a reserve and Army National guard. Prefer when we can really zero in on a service dod being so large, we can usually go deeper when we have a scope that doesnt include everything. But our driven is driven primarily by mandates from congress, gao is part of the legislative branch and we do our work generally, especially with the defense issues, so usually work thats directed in the National Offense authorization, sometimes theres requests, in fact, this work that we have now it started with the request from the House Oversight committee. Thank you. I saw another hand out there. Yeah. From the university of san francisco. I have kind of two different points, one concerns the question we were just talking about, what might explain some of these differences and im thinking if we look at understandings of masculinity and combat, we might be getting somewhere, with that i dont know if you have looked at that at all, you know, the differences in terms of the significance of particular infantry and how does that play into this because, of course, is all over the mas cue line niezed nature of this and that this, you know, all of these other issues that were talking about. So that was my first point. The second one is, in terms of whether you have very first point on the different patterns of reporting and the different language used, again, coming from the feminist literature, i would think that theres, you know, theres something there in terms of how issues around shame, sexual all of these kind of things kind of play into how, you know, men and women report these things differently. Im wondering how much of that has come into you recent. Two of the things we were able to look at is whether the differences can be explained by the proportion of personnel who have been receiving combat pay and so getting combat pay, you know, have higher exposure to those environments, that did not explain the service differences. And simultaneously we also controlled for the number of months deployed, deployed looks different for each service and so that is, you know, its not a perfect control, but. Theres a lot of nuances, you know, to what it means to be deployed in the navy versus in the marines, for instance, quite a different environment and we cant control for that perfectly. Im sorry, the second one was . I totally sh i think thats very likely. I think its very likely that even when. We dont have direct evidence to draw on to answer this question. But my hunch is, yeah, that men are may be may have different kind of shame or wanting to think of it as Sexual Assault. We heard a bunch of examples of the kind of assaults that occur against men. They thought it was the kind of razing or horse play or other kind of this behavior that occur in a unit. I was thinking back when dod could not tell us where the most incidents were happening or the least incident so that we could go to those who had the least number reported and see if they had best practices that should be shared. Dod has come a long way refine gs that data and being able to pinpoint more where these incidents are, who is happening and, as i said, the 2014 report is very robust and rich with data. As far as the males not reporting, its a part of our report noted its part of the culture being in that male dominated environment, which was discussed earlier. Its hazing is a term thats thrown out a lot, especially ive noticed in the last couple of years, but very little is known about hazing because dod doesnt track hazing. Its either each service does it differently, some track substantiated and unsubstantiated cases. Some its only substantiated. Some its just from certain sources it can go to the ig eesz office or it can be a criminal investigation. But we hazing is in 2016 is reminds of me where Sexual Assault and dod was in 2008 that theres not a lot of data out there and theres no oversight in terms of, yes, theres a policy on hadsing, theres boundaries about whats acceptable and whats appropriate, but dod has not been providing the oversight to see if those policies are being implemented as intended. Theres theres a lot of series about hazing and Sexual Assault and male victims but not a lot of data, still, to understand the issues. Thank you. I am retired army nato. Ive been special operations. Ive been in training. I know about hazing and i know about Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment eeo and wrap it all. One of the things im surprised at most of my military leaders, so much of what we do if we top down government leaders. In terms of this overlapping and hazing an Sexual Assault. I was surprised, you know, curious how you uncovered that. The so the survey we did had a question for those people who we identified as having had a past history of Sexual Assault. We asked them a bunch of questions about what they did about it. And who did it to them and one of the questions we asked them, define the concept of hazing and then sit that thats what we meant by hazing and that it said, do you consider this event that you experience to be hazing. So we gave them a definition. And then asked them, does that describe what happened to you. And so men were six times as likely as women to say, yes, to that question. We did invite dod and we were surprised at the lack of interest, as well. We held this event here very close to the pentagon with the express purpose of having as many dod participants as possible, its unfortunate that theres not theres. Few for that. I still have a another hand over here. I think its on. Hi. Is it on. Okay. So i just want to go back to something that you said, which was, you know, more men are sexually harassed than sexually assaulted in the department of defense. And i just want to point out, 85 of the people that are in the services are male, so, of course, the numbers are going to be higher. The incidents are not higher, the percentage of women is much higher than the percentage of men. I want to be clear about that, you know, dod makes a huge effort to try to make it sound as if Sexual Assault. Sexual harassment are gender neutral and they are not gender neutral crimes, theyre not gender neutral in the department of defense. I just want to make sure were clear you know, about those numbers. Thank you for clarifying that. Youre absolutely right. Women are about across the services are about five times as likely as men to be sexually assaulted and four or five times we asked did it occur during basic training, we got some information about how how often this occurs during basic training just like all the prior workplace in gender active component members, we didnt. We didnt survey basic training, but the question is, would integrated training increase rates and so most perpetrators are men, if youre bringing women into a environment that has more men, i think the risk of Sexual Assault, it will increase. Why ask she always late to formation, its because shes on some heavy duty medication. But instead of helping her, they victim miez her and now, shes she went from a super strong woman to a shell of a person who lives off medication with the service dog who cant even go to the corner store without someone there with her. And zero support from the command. So, to me, like this training, i feelg like its a waste of our time, because were sitting here in an auditory yum listening to the power points, but i see people texing, talking to each other, falling asleep, no one is paying attention to these trainings. I want to know whats really going to happen to really Pay Attention to hey, is this happening, is this happening in our our community. This is effecting leadership and like the major said, it comes from the top. Its comes from the commander and it shows that 60 of perpetrators are from a super visor or someone in the high leadership position. So its kind of hard to say, hey, i trust my ceo but he could be the one to harm me. So, thank you for that question. Actually, the next panel is going to talk a little bit more specifically to some of your question there is and what are we doing at an individual, also at an organizational level. The army is going to talk about some new army way, we do recognize that much of the training thats been developed hasnt been as effective as we want it to be and were constantly trying to evolve and develop new ways of tackling this problem. I mean, this is complicated. Yeah. Yeah. There is a con tu yum of harm here that includes hazing and Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault that one of the recommendations to dod that it it will be useful to review the trainings, to make sure that theres prevention occurring on all of these levels and, of course, effective training is the only kind of training that is worth doing. Ill just add that weve made a number of recommendations, including recommendations to measure the effectiveness of the training. Because i know what youre talking about, 200 people crammed into an auditory yum just sitting through a power point slide is probably not going to be effective and there are other ways to deliver the training and make it such. On the Sexual Harassment, we issued a report on that back in 2012 and what we found at this time was that not too much was known about Sexual Harassment commanders climate surveys, which you probably are familiar with, have been in play for years and years and years. And the commanders climate survey, thats, you know, administered at the installation level could be a way to understand more about Sexual Harassment but in 2012 at the sites we visited, the majority of the installations the commander had not administered those surveys to take a temperature pulse read on harassment an issue and their unit that they need to address. Now, theres been improvements, in fact, its now stach rorily required to. Live today on the c span networks at noon eastern. Consumer advocates from the credit card industry will talk about chip netechnology on c sp. Well discuss Agency Operations at the center for strategic and international studies. And democratic president ial candidate. Hillary clinton is campaigning in ohio today. C span will have live coverage that will stop in athens where shell give a speech on jobs and the economy. And the indiana primaries are today with 57 republican delegates and 92 democratic delegates at stake. Well be live tonight with primary results. Candidate speeches and viewer reaction on c span