MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome. Before we get started on today's on-the-record interview, I want to cover some ground rules. Today we will cover details on the department's release of the Fiscal Year 2024 Department of Defense Annual report on Sexual Assault in the Military. We are recording the interview and will publish a transcript later today.
Today we have Dr. Nathan Galbreath, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, SAPRO, Dr. Andra Tharp, director of the Office of Command Climate and Well-Being Integration, and Lisa Davis, deputy director of the Office of People Analytics.
To start, Dr. Galbreath will provide some opening comments. Then our SMEs will run through the briefing slides provided, followed by questions. Once we get to the questions, please limit your questions to one question and one follow up.
Dr. Galbreath, over to you.
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning as we update you on our progress countering sexual assault in the military.
The warfighter ethos values respect for one's comrades in arms, and sexual assault and sexual harassment are antithetical to that ethos, and they divide the force. The DOD's unwavering commitment to preventing these crimes is essential to maintaining a unified, mission ready military.
As most know, Congress requires a annual report on sexual assault each year, and the contents of that report change from year to year depending on whether or not we have the results of a prevalence survey to report, go ahead and advance the slide to slide number three.
However, the information that we provide each year includes the number of sexual assaults reported to DOD for the fiscal year, as well as the military justice outcomes of cases that reached their final disposition during the fiscal year. We also provide the number of sexual harassment reports, domestic sexual abuse reports and child sexual abuse reports.
We'll also be discussing activities we undertook during the year to prevent sexual assault, to improve care for victims, and to conduct oversight of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, or SAPR, as directed by Congress.
Just to level set everyone, I'd like to remind you that we assess overall progress in the sexual assault prevention response mission with two primary metrics. We assess the prevalence of sexual assault, and that is the rate and number of service members experiencing a sexual assault in the past year as estimated by scientific survey. We intend for this number to decrease over time through our prevention efforts.
Secondly, we assess the sexual assault reporting rate, and that is the rate and number of sexual assault reports made by service members. At this point in our program, we encourage greater reporting of sexual assault to connect victims with care and also to have the opportunity to hold offenders appropriately accountable.
Now, with that said, we did not conduct a scientific prevalence survey of the military force. We did, however, conduct a couple of other surveys of particular populations within the military, and we'll share with you some of those points as we go through the briefing.
Now, to comply with the law, we will be going out to our people during the fourth quarter of FY '25 with the required biennial prevalence survey to update our past year estimates of both sexual assault and sexual harassment.
As I previously mentioned, this slide illustrates the two primary metrics that we use to assess progress with the SAPR program. Across the top of the slide with the diamond points are the prevalence estimates and estimated total number of service members indicating one or more experiences of sexual assault in the year prior to being surveyed.
As you go across the top and over to the right, you can see in FY '23 we estimated that sexual assault prevalence decreased compared to FY '21, largely due to a statistically significant decrease in sexual assault experienced by female service members. Now, of those 29,000 service members, 15,000 were female and 14,000 were male, comparable numbers. Again, we'll be updating the estimate in FY '25 and reporting the results of the survey to you in next year's report.
Across the bottom of the slide on the red line are the total number of restricted and unrestricted sexual assault reports made by service members. Last year, we estimated that the nearly 7,300 reports represented about a quarter, 25 percent, of the 29,000 service members impacted by sexual assault. However, most of these reports were made by women, as men tend to report at much lower rates.
This year's 6,973 reports from service members, as shown to the far right of the red line, represents a 4 percent decrease in reports from FY '23. However, DOD received more than just these reports of sexual assault this year. As shown in the bottom right hand gray box, we also received about 500 reports from service members seeking assistance with a sexual assault that occurred prior to service, 641 reports from civilians and foreign nationals alleging a sexual assault by a service member, and a few others for which we were missing some relevant data, but for a total of 8,195. This is also a 4 percent decrease compared to the 8,515 total reports we received in FY '23. Next slide, please?
Congress also requires us to report the outcomes of unrestricted reports investigated by DOD criminal investigators. As you can see here, of the nearly 4,300 case dispositions reported in FY '24, 3,233 cases were within DOD's jurisdiction to take some kind of disciplinary action. This year, as you can see on the light green line on the left side of the screen, about 66 percent of cases received some kind of disciplinary action. And as you can see, that's been about the same percentage for the past ten years or so. More on those cases in just a minute.
On the light blue line underneath, about a third of cases could not receive disciplinary action, mainly because there was insufficient evidence of a crime to prosecute. Some cases in this category also could not go forward because the victim declined to participate further in the justice process.
Now, on the dark blue line at the bottom, you can see that 1 percent of cases were determined to be unfounded or false, meaning that evidence existed to indicate the accused did not commit the crime or the crime did not occur. To take a deeper look at the 66 percent of cases up there on the green line where disciplinary action could be taken, please follow the teal arrow up and over to the right hand side of the chart.
Here you'll see that, of the 2,128 cases that received some kind of action, 748 cases received disciplinary action or non-sexual assault charges, such as a false official statement, simple assault or underage drinking, crimes of that nature. For the 1,380 cases, evidence supported discipline for a sexual assault charge in '24.
If you take a look at the trend lines below, you'll see that the dark blue line shows that 54 percent of cases in '24 received an administrative discharge or some other kind of admin action. The red line shows that 31 percent of cases were preferred to court martial, and that's the initial step in the court martial process. Of those cases that actually went to court proceedings, however, about 74 percent of cases ended in a conviction, up slightly from 72 percent in FY '23.
Finally, the green line shows that 15 percent of cases went to non-judicial punishment. The vast majority of these cases involved abusive sexual contact, and that's the least severe of the charges that constitute a crime under Article 120.
This next slide shows the sexual harassment reports received in FY '24. And it's important to note that only sexual harassment complaints lodged with a military equal opportunity professional are officially tracked by the department. So, when complaints are handled at the lowest interpersonal level, as advised in policy, they're not officially tracked and thus not included on this slide.
Let's start with the top left quadrant. Findings indicate the number of sexual harassment complaints has increased over time as our policy program and data tracking mechanisms mature. And since 2021, sexual harassment complaints have been fairly steady at about 3,000 a year.
In FY '24, the services received and processed 3,014 sexual harassment complaints as shown in the top right quadrant. 65 percent of those complaints were formal, while 29 percent were informal and 5 percent were anonymous. Only formal complaints are fully investigated and adjudicated, so we'll now focus on those.
Of the 1,969 formal sexual harassment complaints lodged in FY '24, 53 percent were resolved while 17 percent were pending resolution, though the disposition of 30 percent were unknown at the time of the data collection. Of the resolved formal sexual harassment complaints, over half were substantiated after a thorough investigation, while 39 percent were unsubstantiated.
We see similar patterns over time in regards to who is filing formal complaints and who is often implicated. As shown in the bottom left-hand quadrant, the majority of the complaints in FY '24 were lodged by women and the substantiated offenders were most often men, with most complaints involving junior enlisted personnel.
In regards to accountability, almost two-thirds of substantiated offenders received an adverse administrative action as shown in the bottom right quadrant. Nearly 1 in 5 received some form of non-judicial punishment, while few received other corrective actions such as courts martial. Across this time period, we did not receive any complaints lodged for retaliation as a result of reporting sexual harassment.
I will now turn it over to Dr. Tharp, who will summarize our prevention efforts in 2024. Dr. Tharp? Next slide, please?
DR ANDRA THARP: Great. Good morning. The DOD's sexual assault and harassment prevention efforts are nested within the department's integrated prevention approach, which means we are simultaneously addressing the factors and conditions that contribute to sexual assault, sexual harassment and other harmful behaviors.
A substantial amount of work is underway, and FY '24 marked significant milestones in a few key areas. A more fulsome report on command climate and integrated primary prevention is forthcoming, but today I'll highlight a couple areas of particular importance to sexual assault and sexual harassment prevention.
First, one of our key actions is to decrease the likelihood that these events occur by fostering strong command climates. In FY '24, we continued to fortify the command climate assessment process by providing actionable data to local leaders and equipping them to take action. We had over one million responses to the annual Command Climate Assessment Survey, which provides a range of leading indicators for assault, harassment, suicide readiness and retention.
Paired with this data, we continued to hire local experts, the Integrated Primary Prevention Workforce, to support leaders in understanding local data and taking effective action to stop these events before they occur. These experts are critical to maintaining mission readiness. In early 2025, we had approximately 1,400 personnel in place. We are on track to have personnel in the field to support leaders at all levels over the next several years.
A cornerstone of integrated prevention is efficiency. To this end, the third action area underway is to ensure that what we're doing works and to stop those activities that don't move the needle on assault or harassment. So, we're conducting evaluations to assess impact and return on investment.
Taken together, these actions pair data with experts with proven tools to support leaders as they build strong command climates where sexual assault and sexual harassment are not tolerated and our service members can remain focused on the mission.
With that, I'll pass it back to Dr. Galbraith.
DR NATHAN GALBREATH: Thank you, Dr. Tharp. SAPRO consistently looks for ways to improve the quality and accessibility of victim assistance. As most of you know, we've been working for several years to move away from a collateral duty or, in other words, part-time personnel to provide victim assistance. As the Government Accountability Office notes, between 2004 and 2019, Congress passed 249 statutory requirements governing sexual assault prevention and response. There have been many more since that time.
As a result, part-time personnel cannot effectively learn and deliver the kind of victim assistance needed to help victims recover. In fact, our survey of sexual assault responders this year again confirmed that our full-time sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates deliver the vast majority of services to victims.
Exceptionally few collateral duty personnel assisted victims, with the median number of victims served being zero. As a result, we have worked with the services to develop plans to reduce the number of part-time certified advocates by over 15,000 by FY '27. This will return over 600,000 hours of initial training time and nearly 500,000 hours of continuing education hours every two years back to commanders for focus on the primary mission. We will still have about 3,400 collateral duty personnel on ships, subs and hard to fill locations, but these individuals will have the same training and proficiency requirements as our full-time personnel.
Another initiative underway came as a result of another five year study of our active duty force. We followed the military personnel who indicated on our 2016 survey that they'd experienced some kind of sexual assault that year. We also followed a comparison sample of military personnel who said they didn't experience sexual assault. At the end of five years, service members who experienced sexual assault were more likely to separate, experience a demotion, miss a promotion and have a derogatory clearance action entered into their security file compared to their non-victimized peers.
In addition, service members indicating a sexual assault experience were also more likely than those not victimized to have a psychological diagnosis, have more mental health appointments, and be prescribed psychiatric medicine. As a result, we're working to develop a recovery program that our sexual assault response workforce can use with reporters of sexual assault. This program will teach healthy coping skills that our people can use on day one to help reduce troubling symptoms and get our people back on a path to recovery.
Finally, the representation provided by our Special Victims Counsel program is one of the highest rated and most used services by victims. However, we've noticed some reductions in victim satisfaction over time on the last two force wide prevalence survey administrations. In the responder survey we conducted this year, we found that special victim counsel respondents said they were carrying more cases than they maybe should, and also were experiencing burnout and vicarious traumatization.
As a result, we'll be asking the military departments to review and update where needed their resourcing and training of these important personnel to help reduce some of the stress that they're experiencing.
SAPRO was tasked by law with oversight of the SAPR program, and in FY '24 we chose to go somewhere we'd never been, and that is to deployed locations supporting Operation Atlantic Resolve in Eastern Europe. I toured several bases in Romania and Poland in November of 2023 to review how prevention and victim assistance was being delivered in these austere locations.
We found several excellent practices that we decided needed to be common practices for the combatant commands. As a result, we met with senior leaders from European Command, Africa Command and US INDOPACOM to discuss what capability would be needed to be — to better coordinate victim assistance in contingency and wartime environments.
This next year, we'll be working with the geographic combatant commands and their support agents to ensure that victim assistance occurs wherever we have people deployed and to coordinate across services so that we can optimize resource use in austere conditions.
Finally, we're working to improve participation in the function of the Catch a Serial Offender program. As you know, CATCH allows participants to submit information about an offender and, if there's a match with another participant's offender, both are notified and reminded of their opportunity to participate in the military justice process. Now that there are 3,000 entries in the system, the process of matching has become quite time intensive.
In addition, only about a third of people that request a password for a CATCH submission actually go on to put something in. As a result, we're working closely with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who runs the program for us, to see what kind of automation might be possible. In addition, we're working to streamline the process of making a submission to see if we can encourage a greater percentage of people to follow through with an entry.
So, to sum up this morning, I just want to emphasize that the department remains committed to sexual assault prevention and response, and the data that we've shown you in this year's report provides clear evidence of the nexus of sexual assault to readiness.
First, healthy units have fewer sexual assaults and other harmful behaviors. Second, service members experience sexual assault, leave the service at higher rates than those that don't experience sexual assault. Every victimized service member represents not only a life that is forever changed, but also the erosion of our readiness to execute the nation's national security objectives. We will continue to take decisive action to counter sexual assault, which in turn strengthens our fighting force.
So, that concludes my comments for this morning.
MODERATOR: Thanks, Dr. Galbreath. We're going to go to questions. As a reminder, please limit to one question and one follow up. And we'll go with Anne, ABC.
Q: Hey, thanks for doing this. So, you had mentioned that sexual assault — or sexual harassment complaints are — the only ones that are tracked are lodged with the equal opportunity professionals. And Secretary Hegseth last week directed equal opportunity program leaders to dismiss any complaints that aren't accompanied by actionable credible evidence. Do you expect that this would impact your ability to track these numbers at all?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: Not at this time, largely because, at the end of the day, the standard of proof remains the same with regard to any sexual harassment complaint. So, to that end, all complaints are reviewed, the evidence is analyzed, and a legal officer often opines on whether or not action can be taken.
Q: So, you don't see — just to follow up, you don't see any change to that bar, that that — going forward in the future because of his memo?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: No.
Q: Ok, thank you.
MODERATOR: Next is Ellee, CBS.
Q: Hi. Thank you guys for doing this. Kind of following on Anne, can you talk about whether or not there have been any impacts on the SAPR program because of DOGE or because of any civilian cuts? And can you just explain, this restructuring was in place before this administration and not as a result of anything put out by this administration?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: Sure. So, all of us have had to follow the president's direction and take a look for, you know, how do we do this job more efficiently. Can we — and how do we make best value of our taxpayers' dollars? And so, we're all looking for ways to become more efficient. And so, that is our program as well, and so we're currently going through that drill ourselves.
In addition to that, we are currently going back out to the services to identify how many folks in their prevention and response workforces were impacted by some of these off ramps. I don't have that number today, but we are currently following up on it. That being said, all victim services are 100 percent available, that we have sexual assault response coordinators, victim advocates at every installation around the world.
And not only that, but if folks want to have — want to find out what their reporting options are and what care is available in their locations, the DOD Safe helpline remains available 24/7, 365 to take those calls and requests for assistance.
With regard to the restructuring, the restructuring of our workforce and the sexual assault response workforce has existed for the past four years. And this is something that we saw as a great efficiency and something even recommended by the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the military. So, it existed before this administration. Thank you.
Q: Just to follow up, you don't know how many cuts, but there will be cuts within the SAPR program?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: They're not cuts. These are the off ramps provided to people in the workforce like the delayed resignation program. So, again, we have sent numbers — we sent a request out to the services to find out what those numbers might be, and then there was a second round of the DRP. So, again, we're — we've gone back out to find out what those numbers are. And we'd be happy to share those once we have them. So, don't know what they are today.
Q: Thank you.
MODERATOR: Ok, for the next question, Patty, Task and Purpose.
Q: Hi. Thank you for taking my question. For the harassment section, when — with the note of it being majority enlisted women E1 to E4, do you have a similar breakdown for sexual assault in terms of demographics?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: We do. And if you take a look in — when the report comes online, it'll be in the statistics section. That's usually Appendix B of the report. And we give you a similar breakdown by age, by rank and other demographic factors. And most sexual assault reports are filed by individuals between 18 and 24 years of age.
Q: Ok, thank you. And I know this is before the UCMJ, the new Article 134 comes — came into effect. But do you expect to see any changes in terms of the sexual harassment UCMJ actions because of that?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: We do. As people begin to charge under that, we expect to see, you know, the special trial counsel, who makes those decisions, to at least consider that in their factors of what can be prosecuted under — in cases that have been provided to them.
Q: Ok, thank you.
MODERATOR: Next, Heather, USNI.
Q: Thanks so much. So, looking at the numbers for how many cases have gone to court martial versus administrative action, it looks like you're seeing a trend of less cases going towards court martial and a pretty big increase going towards administrative actions. I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what's leading to that and why we're seeing a decrease in the number of cases going to court martial.
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: Sure. There's a lot of things going on at once here. Back in 2012, I believe the — they changed the Uniform Code of Military Justice to give commanders an increased number of ways to charge for sexual assault. And so, there were a lot of cases that commanders decided they wanted to put forward into court martial. And so, that's why you kind of see those high numbers about a decade ago.
Over the course of time, cases that — and this is something that you can read more about from the Defense Advisory Committee on the Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Adult Sexual Assault Crimes, or the DAC-IPAD. Their analysis found that many of these cases probably shouldn't have gone to court martial, but they were sent to court martial anyway by commanders. As a result, with some of those cases being overturned on appeal and also changes in decisions by judges that influenced prosecution over time, you see some of those decreases.
And as a matter of fact, if you look in the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military summary of their recommendation for why there should be a special trial counsel, they summarized the fact that this — these — the sending of cases to court that probably shouldn't probably reduced some confidence in the military justice process.
And so, to that extent, that justification was used to recommend that special trial counsel be the decider — deciders of special victims crimes, which — of which sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse are included in that um.
And then finally, I think what you see going on is that our special victim counsel is there and informing victims of their options on how they can participate in the justice process. And so, some of the changes over time also reflect that change in participation in victims as well.
Q: Just quickly to follow up, so I know that this is a fiscal year versus a calendar year, but are you starting to see any of the results from the special trial counsel and how that's affecting the cases that go to court martial?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: It's too soon to tell. Our special trial counsel tell us that it's going to take about three years for us to be able to really have a good feeling for how their presence is changing military justice.
MODERATOR: Next question, Tom Vanden Brook, USA today.
Q: Hey, good morning. You mentioned — you noted that there's a 4 percent decrease in the number of reports this year, and that's not your desired end state. What accounts for that decrease, please?
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: I can't tell you year to year, Tom. I wish I could. Overall, I would tell you that we're still reporting at historically high rates. And so, even though we'd like to see the number of reports increase, I'm still very satisfied that — that our military members know that they can come forward, they can — they can report in any number of ways and get the help that they need to recover.
MODERATOR: Haley, CNN.
Q: Hi. Thanks for doing this. You mentioned the hiring freeze and how that is putting a pause, obviously, on building out the workforce a bit more. Can you go into that a little bit? Is there — do we — do we have any numbers as far as how many people were expected to be hired this year that are now on pause to be brought in, or are they receiving any kind of waivers? Are you seeking waivers? Any kind of detail there would be helpful.
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: Sure. Hey, Dr. Tharp, would you mind taking that please?
DR. ANDRA THARP: Sure. Good morning. So, for the prevention workforce, each of the military departments did have targets that they were aiming to hit in terms of hiring each year. So, any kind of pause is going to impact their ability to hit those targets. As Dr. Galbraith mentioned, because there have been kind of multiple waves of off ramps from the first DRP to probationary to hiring freeze to second DRP, we're really trying to get our arms around the total impacts of that.
We do know, for example, that when the hiring freeze went into effect, there were about 300 prevention workforce positions posted on USA Jobs that are — that are essentially on hold. That said, we are hearing from some of the military departments, such as Air Force, that they've been successful in getting exemptions to continue to move forward, so we're tracking that closely.
But it's kind of all happening right now. So, we're really trying to assess what the total impacts are. But in the meantime, we're using this time to ensure that we really have rightsized this workforce, that we have the right people, the right talent in the right place. And we're creating contingency plans just to ensure that we don't kind of lose ground while we're making these adjustments.
DR. NATHAN GALBREATH: And for the sexual assault response workforce, those are our sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates, just yesterday I sent out some information to the military departments encouraging them to use this opportunity to seek exemptions through their military secretaries, to continue to engage in their transition work with the sexual assault response workforce from collateral duty to full-time duty.
And to that end, our direct hire authority remains in effect for both the prevention and the response workforces. And so, to that end, that's a decision to be made at the military department.
MODERATOR: Thanks, everybody. Thanks again for all of our SMEs that joined us today. Thank you for joining us as well. At the conclusion of this roundtable, the embargo lifts. If you have any follow up questions, please feel to reach out to us. The report will publish later today on SAPRO.mil.