U.S. military is hiring thousands of psychologists to help reduce sexual assault

The U.S. military has launched an ambitious effort to hire and train more than 2,000 experts focused on preventing sexual assault and other harmful behaviors within its ranks. The move comes after an estimated 25% increase in military sexual assaults, which affected about 35,900 active duty service members in 2021, up from about 28,600 in 2018 (2021 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Military Members, Office of People Analytics, 2023opens in new window).

“We had already seen an uptick in prevalence in 2018, and then once again, that number increased,” said Nathan Galbreath, PhD, acting director for the Department of Defense (DoD) Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO). “This was certainly concerning to us and also to the secretary of defense,” who launched an Independent Review Commission (IRC) on Sexual Assault in the Military (PDF, 3.2MB)opens in new window within days of taking office.

After 90 days of interviews, observations, and data collection, the IRC released a report pinpointing problems in the military’s approach to sexual assault, including “a near total lack of prevention specialists.” The urgency of responding to reported assaults had left little bandwidth for prevention efforts, which generally took the form of lecture-style meetings or well-meaning but unhelpful awareness campaigns such as pancake breakfastsopens in new window and golf tournamentsopens in new window (Hard Truths and the Duty to Change: Recommendations from the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military, 2021 [PDF, 7.4MB]opens in new window).

“We also found that a key driver of sexual assault, as well as other harmful behaviors, was the culture within a unit,” known as the command climate, said Andra Tharp, PhD, the senior prevention adviser for the DoD Office of Force Resiliency. “When command climate is unhealthy, these behaviors are more likely to take place.”

The new Integrated Primary Prevention Workforce (IPPW)opens in new window is the military’s intended antidote—but culture shifts take time, especially for an organization with more than 2 million personnel. Through 2028, the IPPW will recruit, hire, and train more than 2,000 psychologists and other prevention experts to serve at hundreds of military locations and ships around the world. Prevention specialists will take a holistic approach to reducing risk factors and promoting protective factors against sexual assault, harassment, suicide, retaliation, and domestic and child abuse.

[Related: Want to join the IPPW? Here’s how]

“This is a real opportunity for the Department of Defense to continue to evolve prevention science as a leading force within military health,” especially as it pertains to suicide, said Rebecca K. Blais, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a subject matter expert who has advised the Pentagon on sexual assault and suicide risk. “I’m optimistic that some of these new efforts can promote culture change.”

The military measures the prevalence of sexual assault using two metrics: estimates that extrapolate from anonymous surveys and formal reports. Reports made to DoD officials make up between 20% and 30% of the total survey estimate of active duty personnel that experienced a past-year sexual assault. Formal reports reached an all-time high of 7,378 service member reports in 2022, the last year for which data were available (Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, Fiscal Year 2022, 2023 [PDF, 1.25MB]opens in new window).

“We’d actually like to see formal reports increase in the immediate future,” Galbreath said, which is part of why a culture shift that promotes help-seeking is so critical. “The more people coming forward, the more we’re able to assist them, but it also gives us the opportunity to hold offenders appropriately accountable.”

While women in the military face a higher risk of sexual assault than men, the risk for men is not insignificant. In 2021, 8.4% of active duty women (about 19,300 women) and 1.5% of active duty men (about 16,600 men)—nearly 36,000 service members in total—reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact at least once in the year prior (2021 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Military Members, Office of People Analytics, 2023opens in new window).

“There is a myth that men cannot be raped and when sexual assault occurs, it must be part of hazing,” Blais said. “It is both hazing and sexual assault. But most do not recognize it as such.”

Service members who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual also face a heightened risk—this group makes up 12% of active duty service members but accounted for 43% of all personnel who experienced sexual assaults in 2018 (Sexual Assault of Sexual Minorities in the U.S. Military, RAND Corporation, 2021opens in new window). These individuals are at a higher risk for distress and suicide following a sexual assault, Blais said.

Data also indicate that sexual assault in the military is closely tied to experiences of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and workplace hostility. Among female service members who experienced sexual harassment, for example, the risk of experiencing sexual assault tripled between 2018 and 2021 (2021 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Military Members, Office of People Analytics, 2023opens in new window). For men who were sexually harassed, risk of sexual assault increased by a factor of 10.

Those numbers suggested that existing prevention approaches were not working.

“Over time, our sexual assault prevention has focused on raising awareness about the behavior,” Tharp said. “But being aware of an issue doesn’t really move the needle in terms of changing behavior so that those incidents are less likely to occur.”

In Blais’s work on military sexual assault and suicide prevention, service members described mandatory lecture-style presentations delivered to large groups that felt impersonal and even hypocritical at times.

“For a lot of people, particularly women, it felt like false advertising,” she said. “You’re telling me that sexual assault and harassment are not tolerated within the military, but within my everyday experiences, it seems like the norm.”

Instead, research on best practices for prevention science indicates that workshops should be small, interactive, and tailored to the needs of specific groups (Gidycz, C. A., et al., Military Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2018opens in new window).

The IPPW was conceived with that science foremost. It will take a more customized, locally driven view of prevention rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, Tharp said. Two units that report the same rates of sexual assault might be experiencing problems for very different reasons. For example, one unit with a younger demographic and high-stress climate might have a high number of alcohol-related sexual assaults; another unit with an older demographic might experience sexual assault tied to workplace harassment.

“On the face of it, those two installations would have the same kind of ‘problem’ with sexual assault,” Tharp said. “But the approach that you implement to get at the drivers of behavior at a given location might be somewhat different from another location.”

For example, a unit with many members between ages 18 and 25, an age range with high rates of impulsivity, might benefit from a training focused on emotion regulation and self-control. On the other hand, members of an installation in Minot, North Dakota, might need help managing the challenges of social isolation, Blais suggested.

But until now, the military lacked trained prevention personnel who could interpret data at the local level and dig deeper to help commanders tailor a prevention approach to fit their communities. That will change as prevention specialists begin to work one-on-one with commanders to devise action plans that address their individual needs.

The IPPW also plans to take a more holistic view of prevention, focusing not just on sexual assault but also on the risk and protective factors that relate to other forms of harassment and interpersonal violence, as well as suicide. Rather than focusing on a single harmful behavior (such as a workshop focused solely on suicide or an awareness event about sexual assault), prevention efforts will instead address risk or protective factors that underlie two or more behaviors at once.

That includes promoting healthy behaviors like problem-solving skills and reducing things like daily stressors and social isolation. DoD experts hope this will make content more accessible and create a healthier military culture overall.

The IPPW has a strict directive to focus on prevention and will not do clinical work, one-on-one counseling, or incident response. The goal is to clearly separate prevention from response.

“In the past, even for individuals with a prevention skill set, their priority was always going to be on the individual who needed help in that moment,” Tharp said.

IPPW specialists will help service members develop healthy habits aimed at curtailing bad behavior before it starts, including social resistance skills to help promote responsible alcohol use, conflict management to improve communication within relationships, and mindfulness to bolster resilience. They will also advise on ways to reduce risk, such as limiting access to firearms and medications when a person is at a heightened risk for suicide and ensuring service members know how to access confidential chaplain counseling services.

Other prevention activities include support for military dependents, such as promoting home safety checks, helping service members develop healthy and nonviolent parenting skills, and providing financial literacy training. Preventing substance misuse will also be a big focus. For example, IPPW members may collaborate with partners in the community on responsible alcohol sales policies as a way to prevent overconsumption.

Central to nearly every goal of the IPPW is a military culture that encourages help-seeking without judgment or fear of retaliation. That will require a change in mindset among many of those higher in the ranks, Blais said.

“There’s been a huge shift in attitudes toward mental health care,” she said. “Today’s service members are largely open to seeking help, but they might have a commander who is 45 years old (average age for active duty is 28.2) and ‘grew up’ in a different generation of the military, where seeking mental health care was heavily stigmatized.”

For that reason, it’s critical to hire prevention specialists with expertise in attitude and behavior change, Tharp said—and to train them on how to communicate effectively with military leaders. The DoD has developed a credentialing program for the IPPWopens in new window that will start a structured onboarding program focused on the principles of prevention, social determinants of health, and how to deliver information effectively to a military community. Workforce members will complete additional trainings as needed depending on their placements (for instance, specialized instruction with the National Guard or Air Force), including 20 to 30 hours of continuing education each year based on their credential level.

“We need our people to stay on the cutting edge of the science, and we know that prevention science evolves pretty quickly,” Tharp said.

Opportunities in the IPPW will range from on-the-ground work with commanders and service members to roles focused on prevention strategy and policy development. Translating existing research on preventing sexual assault and other harmful behaviors for the military will be another key focus of the workforce.

“There are not a ton of evidence-based approaches that were specifically developed for the military community, so translating that science is a big piece of what our prevention workforce will be doing,” Tharp said.

Hiring is already underway and will extend through 2028. To ensure the IPPW stays on track and reaches its goals of reducing sexual assault, suicide, harassment, retaliation, and domestic and child abuse, the military has commissioned an external review of the new program by the RAND Corporation.

“Given that this is a huge investment and absolutely foundational to the goals of the DoD, we know we have to get it right and learn along the way,” Tharp said. “In addition to our internal monitoring, we thought it was critical to also have an external look to help us continue to improve.”

RAND will assess whether the IPPW is recruiting and hiring personnel who are a good fit for the program, whether new hires complete training and achieve competency, if workforce members are viewed as valuable by leadership at their various locations, and whether prevention specialists are using data to advise leaders in an effective way. Ultimately the department’s evaluation efforts will determine whether changes in command climate, risk and protective factors, and harmful behaviors occur.

“This is really our way forward for the future,” Galbreath said. “We’re getting people out there into our military communities—not just to provide care and assistance but to really understand and address the roots of the problem of sexual assault.”