I always thought they were awful. It's been a while since I've been in the military, but the whole "if you claim you have been sexually assaulted and want an investigation, you have to give up all your personal info." Basically just asking for retaliation. The other option was "give up no info, and there's no investigation." Like what was the point?
I haven't actually handled a sexual assault prosecution since the early 2010s, which was before Special Victims Counsel, but after the introduction of SARCs and Victim/Witness Advocates and provisions like expedited transfers for victims of sexual assault.
DoD has taken a lot of deserved flak, but I think there's been
attempts at progress.
You don't create, advertise, and fill a billet for a GS-12 Victim/Witness Advocate coordinator in the Staff Judge Advocate Office unless you're
trying to do something.
I'll say that, based on my admittedly limited experience, I saw three kinds of sexual assaults: (1) family-on-family, which is not a uniquely DoD problem, as tragic as it is; (2) improper superior-subordinate relationships, which ran the gamut from violent to consensual but were always coercive -- and that's a leadership/culture problem; and (3) junior enlisted in the dorms/barracks.
I'm estimating here, but a full 90% of our cases were the third variety.
That's why so much of sexual assault prevention training focused on bystander intervention and pulling young co-workers away before things got bad.
As far as the restricted reporting vs. unrestricted reporting, the point of the former was to get counseling and other benefits without having law enforcement investigate or have the command notified... which, I get it: that places autonomy on the victim, but at the same time, you've still got the perpetrator out there possibly doing the same thing.
That's also why the SARC had situations on file and would sometimes reach out to restricted (confidential) reporting victims and say, "He did it again. Do you want to change your report to unrestricted now?"
It's a mess, but I'll unequivocally say there
has been an attempt at fixing the problem. But until the data's collected, I have no idea if it's been effective to any statistically significant degree across any domains or in any situation.
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