Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ), the first woman in the Air Force to fly in combat, told a hushed Senate hearing on Wednesday that she had been raped by a superior officer, one of multiple times she was sexually assaulted in the military. “I thought I was strong, but felt powerless,” McSally told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee. “The perpetrators abused their position of power in profound ways.” McSally offered one of the most powerful testimonies to date in the growing and heated debate over how to adjudicate claims of sexual assault in the military, the New York Times reports.
McSally, a former member of the House who lost a Senate race and then was appointed to the late John McCain’s seat, did not offer details about the assaults or name the officer. She said she did not immediately report the attacks because she “didn’t trust the system at the time.” Later, she was so horrified about how her account was handled that she thought about quitting the Air Force. “Like many victims, I felt like the system was raping me all over again,” McSally said. The Defense Department received 6,769 reports of sexual assault involving service members in fiscal year 2017, nearly a 10 percent increase over the 6,172 reports the previous year. According to 2016 data, annual rates of sexual assault over the past decade have decreased by half for active-duty women and by two-thirds for active-duty men. Sexual assault claims remain challenging to prosecute in the hierarchical culture of the military, which is governed by centuries-old systems of law and justice. Often cases are reported long after the fact — if at all — making them even harder to prosecute. McSally told CBS she considered sexual assault in the military to be a national security threat.