The Merchant Marine Academy has the highest rate of sexual assault and harassment of any U.S. military school. While the school received just one report of sexual assault in the 2014-2015 academic year, student surveys taken by the government reveal that 63 percent of women and 11 percent of men experienced unwanted advances or other sexual harassment. And 17 percent of women and 2 percent of men endured some kind of sexual assault, defined as unwanted contact, from groping to rape. Those numbers exceed the combined rates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Naval, Air Force and Coast Guard academies, where 48 percent of women and 10 percent of men described sexual harassment in similar surveys. Under pressure from Congress, Kings Point hired its first sexual assault coordinator four years ago and beefed up online and face-to-face prevention training. But officials were shocked to find so few victims reporting when surveys told them otherwise. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education - which does 10-year accreditation reviews for the U.S. Education Department - placed the Merchant Marine Academy on warning in June. The commission described a "campus climate and incidence of sexual harassment and sexual assault that have been a serious and recognized problem for over 10 years. The report [criticized] the academy's efforts to prevent misconduct as "insufficient and ineffective."
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.