E-Mail This Article to a Friend TOO MUCH INFORMATION Army’s new sex-assault database BY DEIRDRE FULTON

The US Army’s attempt to address rape and sexual assault within its ranks is admirable — and necessary, given the shockingly high rates of these types of crimes within the military as a whole. (1700 cases of sexual assault were reported in 2004 in all four branches, a 25 percent increase from 2003. Breakdowns for each branch were not available.) But a proposed sexual-assault database — ostensibly intended to track sexual-assault trends — that the Army is scheduled to implement on November 25, may prove to be a step in the wrong direction.

Women’s organizations and victims’-rights advocates are speaking out against the Sexual Assault Data Management System Files, claiming that the new information clearing-house will jeopardize privacy and confidentiality, and therefore discourage victims from reporting their cases.

"The database almost seems designed to prevent women from reporting sexual assault, which would not be inconsistent with the military’s past posture," says National Organization of Women (NOW) president Kim Gandy.

According to a notice published in the Federal Register on October 25, the database (which will be used only by authorized personnel) will collect everything from victims’ names, social-security numbers, and demographic information, to military data, DNA-processing results, and medical-treatment reports. (This is much more detailed information than is collected by civilian centers such as the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.) It will also include information about investigatory and disciplinary proceedings. The database will not include information about offenders who are dealt with administratively (as many are), however, nor will it collect detailed information about alleged assailants.

Its purpose, Army spokesman Hank Minitrez wrote in an e-mailed statement, is in line with the Department of Defense’s "ongoing commitment to eliminate incidents of sexual assault.... [I]t is our intent that continued command emphasis and training initiatives help soldiers recognize sexual assault as a crime that needs to be reported and create more of a willingness to report incidents."

But not everyone with these concerns gathers data this way. "You don’t have to collect someone’s name and social-security number to collect trend information," says Anita Sanchez, spokeswoman for the Miles Foundation, a Connecticut-based nonprofit organization that offers services to armed-forces members who are victims of sexual violence. "We collect numbers," she says of the foundation’s aggregate-data collection. "We don’t attach numbers to names. And that’s what they’re trying to do with this database."

On November 17, NOW sent an e-mail urging its members to contact the Department of Defense with comments about the database; 3000 people used NOW’s automatic comment generator to do so. Minitrez could not say how many comments had been received; nor could he confirm whether or not the database will launch as planned.

Last year, Congress mandated that the Department of Defense fix its broken policies related to sexual misconduct. Among other provisions, the military was required to come up with law-enforcement and health-care protocols for dealing with victims of sexual assault, confidentiality guidelines, a revamped definition of what constitutes sexual assault, and more thorough reporting methods. Since then, the military has instituted more training, education, and prevention strategies across the board, and applied them to commanders on down to junior enlisted officers. Still, many of the requirements, including the law-enforcement and health-care pieces, remain unmet.