Washington, March 7: A Republican Senator has revealed that she had been “preyed upon and raped” by a superior officer while she served in the military.
Arizona Senator Martha McSally, who is also the first woman in the Air Force to fly in combat, made the revelation Wednesday during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on sexual assault in the military, CNN reported. McSally said to witnesses present: “So like you, I am also a military sexual assault survivor,” but McSally said that she did not report and did not trust the system to do so.
Te Senator said she almost left the Air Force over her despair. “Like many victims, I felt the system was raping me all over again. But I didn’t quit, I decided to stay,” she said.
She called the issue of sexual assault in the military a “deeply personal” topic for her. “We’ve come a long way to stop military sexual assault but we have a long way to go.” McSally, a former member of the House who lost an Arizona Senate race last year, did not offer any details about the assaults or name the senior officer, reports The New York Times.
A Pentagon report for fiscal year 2017, the most recent available, found that the Defence Department received 6,769 reports of sexual assault involving service members as either victims or subjects of criminal investigation, which was nearly a 10 per cent increase over the 6,172 reports made the previous year.
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