Males at Lackland reporting assaults lacking

Another view by Lily Casura: Where are the male victims at Lackland?
Lily Casura
For the Express-News
Monday, January 7, 2013

Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland's sexual assault scandal is troubling. But what's even more troubling is how doubtful it is that all the victims involved have come forward.

The victims — 56 to date — have all been women. And that's just not likely or reasonable to expect.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly equal numbers of men and women experience sexual assault in the military, despite different proportions in the Air Force. From 2002-2008, the VA detected 61,126 male and 59,680 female cases of military sexual trauma (MST).

The Air Force, with 332,320 personnel and 63,131 women, is approximately 19 percent female. Yet at Lackland, with 35,000 recruits in basic training every year, and an 80:20 ratio of men to women, 100 percent of the victims so far are women.

Lackland's command, to its credit, seems diligent and thorough about rooting out unwanted sexual conduct and prosecuting perpetrators. But something doesn't add up. Is it the Air Force?

According to an exhaustive survey conducted in 2010 of active-duty personnel, with almost 24,000 service members from every branch responding, Air Force airmen were the least likely to experience unwanted sexual contact, whether women (2.3 percent) or men (0.5 percent).

If those percentages hold true, we would still expect to find 161 women at Lackland and 1,400 men as victims. Yet we've heard from no men at all.
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