Marine reports sexual assault on the rise, say officials

NORFOLK, VA., the number of sexual assaults, informed the Navy has grown 50 per cent last year, Navy officials said that Wednesday is a sign that a growing number of sailors feel more comfortable reporting an assault and create something you can do on the matter when they do.

The Navy said that it is the pace to finish the fiscal year 2013 this month with about 1,100 allegations of sexual assault. That depends on the 726 sexual assaults recorded in the previous fiscal year.

Rear Admiral Sean Buck, assault prevention top sexual and official response, Navy told reporters at Norfolk Naval Station that the increase was had with officials of the Navy how intensified efforts sailors that sexual assaults are being treated seriously. They also noted that there are many resources available for victims.

A report of the Department of Defense released in may estimated that through all the military branches, 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted in the previous year. At the same time, only 2.949 sexual assault was officially reported throughout the Department of Defense, according to the report.

The survey said that there were a variety of reasons military didn't report a sexual assault to a military authority. The belief that could not be done if an assault was reported was one of the most common responses between respondents.

These estimates and a string of high-profile sexual military assault cases this year helped to fuel a renewed call to action in Washington to combat sexual assaults, that leaders have marine repeatedly said that it is a priority.

The Navy has suffered a campaign of awareness and prevention of sexual aggression aggressive over the past several years and recently announced changes in the way that sells alcohol based in an effort by curb behaviors that can lead to sexual assault.

"" We would like the needle to move tomorrow or tonight. ""But the feeling is that you have to be able to allow certain programs to put in place for mature, be spoken and will act accordingly, said Buck

Much of the efforts of the Navy focuses on educational campaigns, letting you know what constitutes a sexual assault sailors and where victims can report an assault and find the resources they need. It is led to the sailors more reports of sexual assaults, which Buck is a good thing as the Navy works to eradicate it from the fleet.

"What we try to do is to close that gap between anonymous surveys where sailors say that victims of sexual assaults in the past lead sailors really forward to the report," said Buck. "The initial goal is to close that gap where the number of reports in fact equal to the number of responses to the survey and then finally having two of those numbers reduced to zero."

The Navy released updated figures after Buck in an annual training conference for about 150 Navy sexual assault response coordinators. Coordinators, mostly civilians, are the bases around the world to ensure that victims have access to medical treatment, counseling, legal advice and other support services.

In the last fiscal year, coordinators also trained more than 2,000 commanders in their roles and responsibilities within the program of prevention and response to sexual assault of the Navy.

Buck said that sailors feedback is very positive.

"They are grateful for the attention of leaders and are also very aware of how broad the subject is discussed in Navy of war, from the workplace to the Pentagon, all the way up the hill from the Capitol,", said Buck.

__

Brock Vergakis can be contacted at http://www.twitter.com/BrockVergakis

Also in HuffPost:

Subscribe to window._taboola = window._taboola | []; _taboola.push ({mode: 'autosized-1r-organic', container:'taboola-autosized-1r-organic '}); _taboola.push ({mode: 'autosized-1r-sc', container: 'taboola-autosized-1r-sc'}); window._taboola = window._taboola | []; _taboola.push({flush:true});

Bloodhound Gang's Russia Concert Cut Short After Officials Boot Band For Defiling Country's Flag Onstage

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

MOSCOW — The American rock group Bloodhound Gang was kicked out of a Russian music festival and pelted with eggs after videos emerged of its bass player shoving a Russian flag down his pants at a recent concert in Ukraine. Russian prosecutors are even considering whether to open a criminal case in the matter, which comes amid a rise in U.S.-Russian tensions.

Videos posted online of Wednesday's concert in the Ukrainian city of Odessa show bass player Jared Hasselhoff pushing the Russian white, blue and red flag down the front of his pants and pulling it out the back. He then shouted to the audience: "Don't tell Putin," a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The incident outraged the Russian government. Maria Minina, a spokeswoman for the weeklong Kubana festival in southern Russia, said Saturday that the band's headlining performance the previous evening had been canceled because of its treatment of the flag.

The American band is known for its sexually explicit songs, including "The Bad Touch," with its unforgettable lyrics: "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky tweeted Friday night that he had spoken with officials in the southern Krasnodar region, known as Kuban. "Bloodhound Gang is packing its bags," he said in the Twitter post. "These idiots will not perform in Kuban."

Hasselhoff was questioned Saturday by police, according to the Russian Interior Ministry, which said prosecutors have been asked to decide if the musician could be charged with defaming the Russian flag.

The bass player apologized late Friday at a news conference held at the music festival in the city of Anapa, the local Yuga.ru news portal reported. He was quoted saying that he had meant no offense and explaining that it was a band tradition for everything thrown from the stage first to be passed through his pants. Hasselhoff said he decided to throw the flag because some fans had seemed disturbed to see it hanging on the stage.

The scandal caused by the American band in Russia comes at a time of heightened tensions between the two countries over National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who was given temporary asylum in Russia last week to help him evade prosecution in the U.S.

As the Bloodhound Gang members were driving to the Anapa airport on Saturday, activists from a pro-Kremlin youth group threw eggs and tomatoes at their vehicle, Yuga.ru reported.

The band members were taken off their afternoon flight to Moscow after they had already boarded the plane, Russian news agencies reported, citing airline officials. After being questioned by transport police, they took a later flight, the reports said.

Related on HuffPost:

Subscribe

IRS Scandal: Misfired 2010 Cincinnati Email Alerted Washington Officials To Tea Party Targeting

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 22: Lois Lerner, former Director of Exempt Organizations, left, listens to her attorney, right, as Internal Revenue Service officials face the House Oversight Committee on May, 22, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

By Kim Dixon and Patrick Temple-West

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being place on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators.

Transcripts of the interviews, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provided new details about Washington managers' awareness of the heightened scrutiny applied by front-line IRS agents in Cincinnati to applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups with words like "Tea Party" in their names.

A political furor over the practice has engulfed the tax agency for nearly a month since a senior IRS official publicly apologized for it at a conference. Since then, the IRS' chief has been fired by President Barack Obama, the FBI has mounted an investigation and Congress has held numerous hearings.

The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.

In April 2010 Hofacre had been put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor.

She was asked to summarize her initial findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. However, she sent her email to a larger number of people in Washington by accident.

"Everybody in DC got it by mistake," Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.

The Cincinnati office, where IRS reviews of applications for tax-exempt status were centralized, used a "be-on-the-lookout" (BOLO) list that included the words "Tea Party" and "Patriot" for flagging applications for extra review.

This practice has drawn criticism. However, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which closely studied the matter, has said no evidence exists that the list was created by high-level IRS officials, or political officials in the U.S Treasury or the White House.

Lois Lerner, the IRS official who set off the controversy, has said that she first learned of the BOLO list in June 2011, and that she ordered the partisan criteria to be removed immediately. The Treasury inspector general backed up that statement.

Neither Hofacre, nor a second IRS worker in Cincinnati, Gary Muthert, knew who asked for the partisan names to be added to the BOLO list in the first place, the transcripts showed.

Still, Muthert said that when his supervisor in Cincinnati initially asked him to look for "Tea Party" applications, "he told me Washington, D.C. wanted some cases," according to his interview with congressional investigators.

Hofacre, however, indicated that a Cincinnati official told her to use the criteria. That official "told me what I needed to put on this particular BOLO list," Hofacre said, referring to the list for Tea Party cases only.

Hofacre lashed out at Washington officials for attributing the extra scrutiny to the staffers in Cincinnati. "It was a nuclear strike on us," she told congressional investigators. (Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)

Related on HuffPost:

Get Alerts