Military Sex Survey Gets A Little Too Raunchy With Questions, Service Members Claim

A scandalous military sex survey has participants mortified with its use of graphic language in questioning service members on sexual activity.

The Defense Department approved the survey and dispersed it to servicemen and women, CBS reports, noting that 11 of the 34 questions were particularly raunchy.

This was only one of the sample questions the news site shared.

“Before 9/18/2013, had anyone made you insert an object or body part into someone’s mouth, vagina or anus when you did not want to and did not consent?”

“We’ve had a number of complaints,” said Jill Loftus, the Navy’s director of the sexual assault prevention program. “I’ve heard second- and third-hand that there are a number of women, officers and enlisted, who have gotten to the point where they’ve read the questions and they’ve stopped taking the survey. They found them to be either offensive or too intrusive — ‘intrusive, invasive’ — those are the words they used.”

There were 560,000 invites sent out to service members, who received the option of filling out the questionnaire. This represents a huge leap from the military sex survey given two years ago. (That number was around 120,000.)

The jump shows that the Armed Forces are getting more serious about snuffing out sexual assault within the military. However, the means for many are not justifying the ends.

Some have said that reading the questions made them “feel victimized all over again.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel addressed the problems of sexual assault within military ranks in an earlier CBS interview.

“Yes, we’ve had problems, we haven’t fixed sexual assault harassment in the military but we are fixing it,” Hagel said. “We are getting to where we need to be — that is, no sexual assault, no sexual harassment.”

Rand Corp., the creators of the survey, are joined in the awareness effort by Loftus, which admitted that it sent a “less specific” version of the survey to Navy and Marine servicemen and women throughout the year.

So why is this year’s military sex survey so dirty?

Nate Galbreath, senior executive adviser for the Pentagon’s sexual-assault prevention office, explains.

“Research has told us, if I ask someone, ‘Have you ever been raped?’ they will say, ‘No,'” Galbreath said. “If I ask that same person, ‘Have you ever been forced to engage in sexual activity against your will?’ they might say ‘Yes.’ It’s because of the loaded terms like rape and sexual assault that it’s not very clear to a lot of people what we may be asking about.”

Do you think the military sex survey goes too far in its questioning?

[Image via Flickr Creative Commons]