Gathering Intel: Looking at Military Sexual Assault in a Global Perspective
Hello everybody! As the first week of research has commenced, I will detail some main findings from examining military sexual assault across nations, the initial step of my research.
Firstly, I observed a difference in the accessibility of military sexual assault and trauma rates between countries. Finding the official reports of these cases was easier for some countries such as the U.S.A. who have annual reports published and easy access online from the Department of Defense. On the other hand, there are several countries, mainly consisting of eastern countries, that don’t have official reports published or easily accessible which led me to go to secondary sources like news outlets for the information, hindering the validity for those data points but indicating a view towards this issue from those nations.
For this reason, getting data from eastern countries has proven to be more difficult in comparison to the western countries.
It was also important to note that these numbers and rates were only the incidents reported, and many cases go unreported from cultural stigmas and fear. As a result, I also found that mental health problems were significantly high for this particular group. I will expand on these aspects of the issue in the coming weeks.
As of now, I am continuing to collect data on the rates of military sexual assault for nations and make any possible correlations that point towards a certain trend afterwards. I also plan on finalizing my list of countries that I am looking at for eastern and western cultures by next week which I’ll communicate in my next post.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week!
– Srimayi
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