Sexual assault in the military has plagued the Pentagon as high-profile cases and new data showed the extent of the problem, reports the New York Times. Few military experts went as far as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump did this week, when he suggested that the integration of women into the armed forces was an underlying cause of sexual assault.
Trump defended his 2013 Twitter post saying, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” Lawmakers and military experts said Trump had displayed ignorance of the Pentagon’s decades-long struggle to curb such assaults and the military justice system that is in place to prosecute them. “That’s more than victim blaming, and it misunderstands the historical role of women in the military,” said retired Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor of the Air Force. “We couldn’t run a military without women,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He said an argument that the proximity of women was to blame for sexual assault could be applied to women on college campuses and in workplaces, where they are also assaulted. “Quite frankly, it’s absurd,” he said. New York Times