West Point alum Donna McAleer was at her Utah home last week when she got a call asking if she'd "seen the latest."
A male Army sergeant, a friend told her, had just been charged with secretly photographing and videotaping at least a dozen female cadets at McAleer's alma mater.
Many of the women were naked; some images were taken in a bathroom at the U.S. Military Academy in New York. The revelations followed a rash of recent incidents, among them stunning reports that at least three ranking male officers overseeing military sexual assault prevention programs have themselves been charged in the past month with crimes ranging from sexual battery to stalking.
"How many of these stories are we going to hear?" asks McAleer, a field admissions officer for the academy. "I want to be able to, with confidence, encourage people — daughters and sons — to serve their country."
As the nation prepares to honor the war dead this Memorial Day weekend, a seeming epidemic of sexual assault and abuse reports has severely shaken that confidence.
A new Pentagon study estimates that 26,000 people in the Armed Forces were sexually assaulted last year. It's not entirely clear top brass understands the scope of the crisis: Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh suggested in recent Senate testimony that the spike in reports of sexual assaults in the military could be blamed on the "hook up mentality" of the country's young people.
Welsh has since apologized, but not before fanning outrage that's been building on Capitol Hill and beyond over the military's long failure to repair a system that has placed service members, especially women, in more danger of sexual assault than battlefield injury.
Obama's View
From President Obama's commencement address Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy:
Every day, our civil servants do their jobs with professionalism — protecting our national security and delivering the services that so many Americans expect. But as we've seen again in recent days, it only takes the misconduct of a few to further erode the people's trust in their government. That's unacceptable to me, and I know it's unacceptable to you.
And against this backdrop, what I said here four years ago remains true today: Our military remains the most trusted institution in America. When others have shirked their responsibilities, our Armed Forces have met every mission we've given them. When others have been distracted by petty arguments, our men and women in uniform come together as one American team.
And yet, we must acknowledge that even here, even in our military, we've seen how the misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide. In our digital age, a single image from the battlefield of troops falling short of their standards can go viral and endanger our forces and undermine our efforts to achieve security and peace. Likewise, those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that make our military strong. That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth.