Fri 28 January 2022:
On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order making sexual harassment a crime under the military justice code. The Pentagon has struggled with sexual harassment in the US armed forces.
The move is part of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon’s annual budget package, and is intended to honor Vanessa Guillen.
Guillen, a 20-year-old army soldier, was sexually harassed and murdered in 2020 by another soldier. Guillen had told her family that she did not believe the military command would investigate her complaint.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the order “honors the memory of Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen,” whose death is “catalyzing national attention to the scourge of sexual violence in our military and helping advance bipartisan military justice reform.”
Biden tweeted earlier in the day that he was “signing an Executive Order to make sexual harassment an offense in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
The order is also meant to “strengthen the military’s response to domestic violence and the wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images,” he said.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had previously appointed an independent commission to make recommendations on how to best deal with perpetrators of sexual violence in the armed forces, as well as how to more effectively prosecute them.
The commission concluded that the only solution was to remove decisions about sexual assault prosecution from the military chain of command.
Instead of administrative penalties, as was previously the case, perpetrators may now face prison time.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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