In early 2014, the Department of Defense (DoD) asked the RAND National Defense Research Institute (NDRI) to conduct an independent assessment of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military—an assessment last conducted in 2012 by the department itself through the Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (WGRA). The 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study (RMWS) is based on a much larger sample of the military community than in previous surveys—men and women, active and reserve components, and including the four DoD military services plus the Coast Guard—and is designed to moreprecisely estimate...

Volume 1 of this series,Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military: Design of the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study, was released in December 2014, along with the top-line results. Volume 1 details the context and many of the methods we used for the RMWS, including discussions of the challenges associated with measuring sexual assault and sexual harassment, the strategies we used to improve the precision with which we estimated these phenomena, the development of the survey questionnaire, the survey sampling design, and the weighting methods. Volume 1 also contains the survey questionnaires. In this chapter, we provide...

The RMWS survey contains a detailed assessment of sexual assault designed to correspond to the legal criteria specified in Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). To be classified as having experienced a sexual assault, respondents must first have indicated that they experienced one of six anatomically specific unwanted behavioral events. If they indicated that one of these events occurred in the past year, they were then asked a series of additional questions designed to assess (a) if the event was intended for either a sexual purpose, to abuse, or to humiliate, as indicated in the UCMJ,...

In this chapter, we provide estimates of the proportion of the active-component force that experienced one of two forms of sexual harassment (a sexually hostile work environment orquid pro quoharassment) or gender discrimination in the past year. According to DoD directives, both sexual harassment and gender discrimination are sexbased military equal opportunity (MEO) violations. For those who experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination in the past year, we report the characteristics of the events and the offender(s),¹ the effect on workplace productivity and intentions to stay on active duty, disclosure choices, responses to reports of MEO violations, and...

The long form of the 2014 RMWS assessed beliefs and attitudes toward safety, perceived frequency of MEO violations and sexual assault, attitudes toward reporting, perceptions of unit leadership, satisfaction with sexual assault prevention training, and expectations for justice following sexual harassment or a sexual assault. These questions were asked only of the active-component sample. What follows is a description of the reported beliefs and attitudes held by different subgroups.¹ Additional descriptive details can be found in the Annex to Volume 2.

Most active-component service members report feeling “safe” or “very safe” from being sexually assaulted at their home station (approximately...

Service differences in rates of sexual assault and sexual harassment violations follow broadly similar patterns for active-component men and women.1 Specifically, Air Force men and women experience lower rates of past-year sexual assault and harassment than members of each of the other DoD services. These differences are statistically significant, and some are descriptively large. For instance, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps men are between 3.3 and 5.1 times as likely to likely to have experienced a past-year sexual assault relative to Air Force men. Similarly, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps women are between 1.6 and 2.7 times as likely to...

For historical purposes, we compare results from the portion of the 2014 survey fielded using the prior WGRA form to the earlier WGRA results collected using the same survey questions and analyzed using comparable methods.

Figure 7.1 illustrates trends in past-year unwanted sexual contact measured using the WGRA methodology.1 In 2012, 6.1 percent of active-component women were classified as having experienced unwanted sexual contact in the past year. In 2014 (Table 7.1), this number dropped to 4.3 percent, which is approximately the same as the percentage recorded in 2010 (4.4 percent) and significantly below the 2006 rate (6.8 percent).2 Past-year...

The RMWS study included about 13,500 respondents who were service members in the reserve component, including members of the selected reserve from the Army Reserve, Army National Guard, Navy Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and Marine Corps Reserve (results for the seventh reserve component, the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, are described in a separate volume). Similar to the prior versions of the Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Reserve Component Members (WGRR), members of the individual ready reserve and retired reserve were not sampled.

Because a full WGRR was already planned for 2015, RAND’s study was not designed...

The 2014 RMWS survey was designed to address some of the criticisms made of the 2012 WGRA and prior versions of that survey and to make the focus of the survey more clearly on crimes under the UCMJ and violations of equal opportunity laws and regulations. Relative to the 2012 WGRA, the RMWS had many more respondents, a higher response rate, and an analytic sample that is representative of the population on a wider set of risk factors for sexual assault or harassment. The new RMWS survey instrument collects more-detailed information about these events, uses simpler questions, more clearly restricts...