SAN DIEGO, July 4 (UPI) -- The U.S. Navy wants commanders to "feel very uncomfortable" about sexual assaults, happening at a rate of more than one a day, military officials said.
"My goal is to make every single commander that has a sexual assault occur at their command feel very uncomfortable and wonder, 'Why is this happening in my command?'" Vice Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert said in a speech in San Diego.
A new policy change requires every non-private sexual assault report to be copied to an admiral.
A total of 558 were reported in 2009, up from 418 in 2007. In the Marine Corps, a Navy component, the number jumped to 331 from 213 in the same period.
Assault victims are mostly women, ages 20 to 24, in the lowest four ranks of service, the Navy said. Attacks typically occur on weekends, with alcohol driving most of them.
"If you see a young lady from your ship, and she's at a bar doing Jell-O shooters, and you understand that it looks like her judgment is impaired, you have an obligation to her to step in and in a polite way and a nice way and a non-threatening way say, 'Hey, we've got early duty tomorrow,'" Jill Loftus, director of the Navy's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response office, said at a Navy "bystander intervention" seminar in San Diego, a pilot program also done in Virginia and Hawaii.
"Not only are you protecting the sailor who might be a victim, you are also protecting someone who might be a perpetrator who's using bad judgment," The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted Loftus as saying.
Her office, with a $2.8 million annual budget, was created in September after reports of a rising number of assaults in the nation's military colleges and in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The pilot program will be studied before officials decide if they should roll out the seminars to the entire fleet.
