Revealed: US Soldiers Sexually Abuse Many Of Their Fellow Service Members’ Children Each Year

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has released a document to the Associated Press (AP) News Agency that details how members of the country’s military sexually abuse their fellow officers’ children.

According to the document provided by DoD, the incidents involve sexual assault in which the children of servicemembers are victims. Such incidents have occurred hundreds of times each year. The abuse is committed most often by male enlisted troops. The enlisted troops take advantage of their friendship with their fellow servicemen to sexually abuse their children.

The AP reports that figures in the document offer greater insight into the sexual abuse of children committed by servicemembers, but are kept secret from the public due to lack of transparency into the military’s legal proceedings.

Statistics in the document suggest that there were at least 1,584 substantiated cases of military dependents being sexually abused between fiscal years of 2010 and 2014. Out of these cases, enlisted service members sexually abused children in 840 cases. Family members of the victims accounted for the second largest category with 332 cases.

Most of the enlisted offenders were males whose ranks ranged between E-4 and E-6. In the Marine Corps and Army, for example, it is said those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. The victims were overwhelmingly female.

Even for this document to be given to the AP, the news agency had to put pressure on DoD officials, using undercover techniques and threatening to expose the sexual rot in the military.

In the document, the ages of the offenders and victims, the locations of the incidents and the branch of service that received the report of sexual abuse were even omitted. And the AP comments that this shows how secret the US military has become over the years.

But DoD official defended why they kept those details secret. The Department said in a statement that “information that could unintentionally uniquely identify victims was withheld from release to eliminate possible ‘re-victimization’ of the innocent.”

It is said the cases represent substantiated occurrences of child sexual abuse reported to the Defense Department’s Family Advocacy Program (FAP), and it unclear how many of the incidents have resulted in legal action against the offenders. The FAP said it does not track judicial proceedings.

In November 2015, an AP investigation revealed that there are more inmates in military prisons for child sex crimes than for any other offense. But the military’s opaque justice system keeps the public from knowing the full extent of their crimes or how much time they spend behind bars.

To make the investigation more credible, the AP managed to identify an officer who has been sentenced to 30 years in jail by a military court for sexually abusing his fellow military officer’s 3-year-old daughter.

According to the account of the story, Cpl. Aaron C. Masa became fast friends with a fellow Marine (name withheld) during field training in North Carolina. But behind Marine’s back, Masa was sexually abusing his friend’s 3-year-old daughter. It is said Masa took sexually explicit photos of the girl, and sexually abused her many times. Masa himself pleaded guilty to the charges before the military court. The AP managed to identify Masa by the dates and events in the document that matched records from Masa’s court-martial.

Meanwhile, in the light of this disturbing revelation in the military, three Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii have urged the Defense Secretary, Ash Carter to lift what they called the military justice system’s “cloak of secrecy” and make records from sex-crimes trials committed by the military readily accessible to the public.

The senators also said child sex-assault cases are not included in the DoD’s annual report to Congress on sexual assaults, and that DoD may be underestimating how many sexual assaults are occurring in the country’s military.

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