Good afternoon Chairmen Hall and Michaud, Ranking Members Lamborn and Brown, and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs and the Subcommittee on Health. Thank you for the invitation to participate in today's hearing on military sexual trauma.

My name is Scott Berkowitz and I am the founder and president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN. RAINN, the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization, founded and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline. The hotline is a partnership of 1,100 local rape crisis centers across the U.S., and has provided free, confidential counseling and support to more than 1.4 million victims of sexual violence. We also run the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline, a web-based service that provides help to the generation of victims who are more comfortable typing than talking. RAINN also educates more than 120 million Americans each year about sexual assault prevention, prosecution and recovery.

When I first testified to Congress on this issue, about 6 years ago, a DoD task force had just published an exhaustive study of the problem. Unfortunately, that wasn't an uncommon occurrence, as one of your colleagues vividly demonstrated when she lined up the reports from more than a dozen DoD task forces from the preceding two decades.

Most of these task force reports had shown an understanding of the issue and proposed a number of reforms that would help address the problem. And all had been shelved soon afterwards, left undisturbed until the next commission was created and its staff started searching through the archives. While there were many smart, committed people within the military services who had worked for years to address the sexual assault problem, they lacked the institutional support, leadership commitment and resources to fix it.

So while we were hopeful about the 2004 report, optimistic that this time would be different, the odds weren't on our side.

The good news is: it looks like this time we may have a chance to beat the odds. That's not to say that the problem has been solved - in fact, we're a long, long way from that. But over the last six years, I have been pleased to observe that the Pentagon, led by SAPRO and the services, has taken the problem seriously and made some tangible progress.

The Problem in Context

To understand the remaining challenges, we need to understand the problem in context. In one sense, the military isn't unique. Nationally, about 80 percent of all rape victims are under age 30. So the problems faced by the military are, in fact, quite similar to those faced by large colleges and universities. It is unfortunate, but, for the moment, true:

Where there are many thousands of young people, there are surely a large number of rape victims. While there's no question military culture is unique—and presents unusual challenges to providing services for victims—that unique culture itself is certainly not the cause of the sexual assault problem.

Much research, and our own experience serving rape victims, has shown us that they respond to their crime quite differently from victims of other crimes. Mental health professionals widely agree that rape is the most traumatic violent crime. The FBI ranks it as the second most violent crime, trailing only murder. In other words, it is the most violent and traumatic crime a victim lives to remember.

And remembering comes naturally to victims of rape. Sexual assault can be devastating to victims, causing post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, eating disorders, sleeplessness and other mental health issues. Victims, particularly those who do not get help, are many times more likely to become addicted to drugs or alcohol or even to attempt suicide. Embarrassment and shame are near universal.

In the civilian world, these reactions help explain why most rape victims are so reluctant to report their attack to police, or even to their own friends and family.

While the percentage of civilian rates that are reported to police has increased by one-third in the last 15 years, the majority of victims - about six out of ten - still do not report.

Now, add to this mix the fact that in the military, filing an unrestricted report, the kind of report that could lead to prosecution, will mean that everyone knows - and I do mean everyone, from your superiors to your bunkmates. And add in the fear of retaliation or ostracization, and the fear of the impact it might have on your career, which only serve to amplify the resistance to reporting. If most civilian victims are unwilling to report even without all those extra concerns, without the fear of sabotaging their career, it's going to remain difficult to get military victims to report.

Lessons from the Civilian World

Of course, there's no single, simple solution to this problem. But we can start by applying a few key lessons we have learned in the civilian world.

• Number One: Victims who receive prompt, quality, confidential crisis intervention return to full strength more quickly, and are ultimately more likely to report their attack to law enforcement officials.
• Number Two: More reports to law enforcement leads to more prosecutions.
• Three: The result of more prosecutions is fewer sexual assaults. Increasingly, the data are clear: Rapists are serial criminals. There aren't an enormous number of rapists in our midst, inside the military or out. There are a relatively small number of rapists, collectively committing an enormous number of rapes. So every time we can convince just one more victim to come forward, leading to a successful prosecution and serious punishment, we may be preventing dozens of rapes down the line.

Victim Services & Confidentiality

So how do we get more victims to come forward for help? Former Congresswoman Tillie Fowler, who chaired the investigation into the Air Force Academy, told me at the time that every victim they interviewed?every single one -told the panel that they would never access help without the guarantee of confidentiality.  This response matches RAINN's own research. In the course of developing the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline, the consistent message from victims was that the service must guarantee confidentiality, even anonymity. This led us to go to great lengths to create a safe technology that victims would trust.

DoD has made some progress on this score, with the introduction of restricted reporting, which allows the victim to access services without an official report that engages the chain of command. Those we have spoken to within the services believe restricted reporting has been a qualified success. It has encouraged more than 3,000 victims to come forward and get help, about 15 percent of whom later decided to make an unrestricted report and pursue prosecution.

Still, the safety of a restricted report is incomplete. Victims' communications with military victim advocates do not enjoy the rape crisis counselor privilege that is found in most state laws, leaving open the possibility that the victims advocate could later be forced to testify against the victim in court. That possibility is sure to discourage some victims from coming forward, which is the reason most states have passed some kind of rape crisis privilege law. I understand that DoD recently submitted this change to OMS for the president's approval, and I hope the administration acts swiftly to approve and implement the change.

At the same time, DoD has determined that mandatory reporting laws for medical personnel, in California for example, supersede the protections victims enjoy under restricted reporting. The result is that victims in those states are forced to forego the medical care they urgently need -even treatment for major injuries, and testing for STls and HIV—unless they're willing to sacrifice the confidentiality promised by restricted reporting. If they do choose medical care -and, by the way, RAINN strongly recommends that all victims receive a medical exam as soon as possible following the crime —they may trigger a chain of events that ends in civilian law enforcement informing military law enforcement, resulting in the very chain-of-command report that restricted reporting was meant to avoid. We encourage Congress to investigate this issue and determine a whether a federal solution is feasible.

Fortunately, there are steps Congress can take to address these remaining barriers to victims receiving confidential help.

Another part of the solution is to make good use of the extensive civilian services offered by the National Sexual Assault Hotline, the Online Hotline, and local rape treatment centers across the nation. By functioning outside the chain of command, civilian services can offer the confidentiality and security victims desire and deserve, while simultaneously advancing the military's goal of encouraging more victims to report their attack to military law enforcement. They are by no means a replacement for military-based victim services. Rather, they are a bridge to such services, and an alternative for those victims who are unwilling to ask for help through official channels.

Leadership & Prevention

While time constraints limit the recommendations I can share regarding prevention programs, I do want to mention the most important kind of prevention program. The most effective prevention—the one without which all other efforts are sure to fail—is discipline and leadership.

To be effective, any prevention program must be able to credibly communicate leadership's personal commitment to zero tolerance of sexual assault and to the punishment of all who commit such crimes. Our soldiers are smart enough to know the difference between orders they need to obey and lectures they must endure and then are free to ignore.

Without sincere buy-in from leadership, without real evidence that zero tolerance means zero tolerance, any prevention efforts will fail.

As you would expect in an institution as large as the US military, there are plenty of examples of leadership both good and bad. DoD leadership needs to continue to find ways to ensure that the commanders who take this seriously are recognized and rewarded.

And recalcitrant commanders need to be identified and reformed, by training when possible; by the threat of poor performance ratings and limited upward mobility when necessary.

If DoD leadership makes it clear that sexual assault is a force readiness issue that deserves the time and effort of those in command, that attitude will filter down through the commanding officer of a unit to the soldiers he or she oversees. Commanders who are vocal about and maintain a focus on their commitment to preventing sexual assault will positively influence their units.

This point is highlighted in the DTFSAMS report, which noted that commanders themselves identified this as an issue that needed to be addressed. According to the report, interviews with commanders concluded that they "need better training on sexual assault prevention and response."

As continued improvements in prevention programs and victim services show results, we all have a duty to ensure that the public and the media understand that a higher number of reported rapes in the military is almost certainly a sign of success, not of increased danger in the ranks. Such an increase is most likely evidence that we're successfully increasing the percentage of victims who pursue justice. That's also an important point when assessing commander performance. Commanders must not fear that an increase in rape reports on their base will be held against them. Rather, they should be accountable for instituting an effective program that encourages increased reporting.

I'd like to add one point about process. There have been news reports recently about DoD's plan to restructure its personnel office. I defer to DoD as to whether that's a good idea. But I am concerned about one idea I've heard floating around - the idea of putting DoD's sexual assault programs under its domestic violence programs. While on the surface it sounds plausible to combine sexual assault with domestic violence, or even sexual harassment, the effect of that could be to set back efforts to prevent sexual assault and help victims.

Sexual assault is a very different issue than domestic violence. The relationship between attacker and victim is different; the factors that influence the decision to get help or report to law enforcement are different; the entire nature and cause of the two crimes are different. Equating the two issues might seem like an efficiency move on paper, but doing so has the potential to de-emphasize sexual violence and hamper prevention and victim-service efforts. Now that we've started to make progress, it's the wrong time to backtrack like that.

In summary, the problem of sexual assault is not unique to the military, nor is the reluctance of victims to report the crime. To successfully combat this problem, we must continue to improve services on base. We must provide Service members with alternative, confidential services off base. We must implement effective prevention and education programs on every base. And all this must be backed up by personal commitment by base commanders and Pentagon leadership to zero tolerance and routine prosecutions. The result will be fewer sexual assaults, healthier and safer soldiers, and an improved public image of the greatest military the world has ever seen.