Sexual Assault of Sexual Minorities in the U.S. Military
Abstract
Although Congress, the public, and the military have focused on the problem of sexual assaults of service members, much of this focus has been on the sexual assault risk faced by women: The risk to women is many times greater than the risk to men. According to the2018 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (the 2018 WGRA; also referred to in this report as Breslin et al. [2019]), 6.2 percent of women across U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) services were sexually assaulted in the past year, compared with 0.7 percent of men; this is approximately a nine-fold difference in risk. In civilian populations, however, there is another group found to experience especially high rates of sexual violence: Individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB). For instance, a nationally representative survey of sexual violence found that lesbian women had a lifetime risk of sexual violence that is similar to heterosexual women, but that bisexual women were more than twice as likely to have been raped and nearly twice as likely to have experienced other sexual violence (Walters, Chen, and Breiding, 2013). The same survey found that gay and bisexual men had twice the rate of lifetime experiences with sexual violence other than rape relative to heterosexual men, although rapes were too rare to be estimated precisely for gay and bisexual men. Other large survey efforts have found that LGB people all face sexual assault risks that are considerably greater than heterosexual individuals (Canan et al., 2019; Ford and Soto-Marquez, 2016; McKay, Misra, and Lindquist, 2017). Therefore, there is reason to suspect that a disproportionate share of sexual assaults in the military might target LGB members. In this report, we examine evidence from the 2016 and 2018 WGRA survey results to assess the problem of sexual violence against LGB individuals and others who do not describe themselves as heterosexual.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 25, 2021
- Accession Number
- AD1134696
Entities
People
- Andrew R Morral
- Terry L Schell
Organizations
- RAND Corporation