Jackie Speier: “I thank Ms. Tsongas and the ranking member, Mr. Smith, for bringing this motion. Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the…”

“I thank Ms. Tsongas and the ranking member, Mr. Smith, for bringing this motion. Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to say a few words here. This is a cancer that is eating up our military. For 25 years, we have debated and discussed and reported on it, and yet the numbers are staggering. By DOD's own estimates, 19,000 men and women in the military each and every year are sexually assaulted or raped. Only 13 percent actually report these sexual assaults and rapes, and 90 percent of them are involuntarily honorably discharged. There is a message in the military: Shut up, take an aspirin, go to bed, sleep it off. These very modest elements are really very important, but if we're really going to deal with this issue, if we're truly going to say that you are no longer going to be more likely to be a victim of violence in the military by a fellow officer than by the enemy, if we're really going to be able to change that construct, then we're going to have take the reporting of these crimes away from the chain of command and put it in a separate office where we will have experts, both military and civilian, that will be able to prosecute these cases and actually investigate them. Right now there's a huge conflict of interest. I spoke on the floor this morning about Petty Officer De Roche who was raped by two officers in Thailand when they were on port of call. She was raped twice by each of these men. She then went to report it and was told to leave it alone.…”