To promote April as Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, students attending the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention Academy's Baseline Certification Course at Fort Leavenworth handed out fliers and educated patrons on the importance of preventing sexual violence April 10 at the Post Exchange and Commissary. These 32 students are in one of three Baseline Certification Courses being presented this quarter at the academy.
Since 2013, the structure of the Army SHARP program has changed with a full-time sexual assault response coordinator and full-time victim advocate added to all brigade-level organizations across the active Army, Reserve and National Guard. To train these professionals, the Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Raymond Odierno challenged the SHARP program to create a schoolhouse. With this challenge, the SHARP Academy was created. A course was piloted at Fort Belvoir, Va., and then transferred to Fort Leavenworth in October 2015. The mission of the SHARP Academy is to professionalize the full-time SARC and VA personnel across the Army. The SHARP Academy is in the old U.S. Disciplinary Barracks hospital building at 809 Harrison Drive, within the old USDB walls.
Since arriving at Fort Leavenworth, there have been four iterations of the seven-week resident Baseline Certification Course, graduating 126 service members and civilians. Three iterations are currently in session.
In addition, the academy also offers a 12-week trainer course that prepares students to serve as SHARP trainers who will instruct the SHARP 80-hour certification course for units. Next year, a 10-week course will be added for SHARP program managers.
Col. Geoff Catlett, director of the SHARP Academy, said that the academy was located at Fort Leavenworth under the Combined Arms Center to give it priority attention and to have it at the "Intellectual Center of the Army" enables communication between organizations that helps build a culture of dignity and respect focused on leadership and ethical behavior.
"The last two years we've really dedicated a lot of time, resources and personnel to this horrible problem of sexual violence in the military," Catlett said. "We've made progress. Reporting is up, showing that people have more confidence in the chain of command and that incidents are down ... How do you sustain the momentum? How do you keep things like this going? The way you do that is you build enduring institutions that continue to create innovation and continue to develop the issue and keep our response systems and prevention programs going forward. The SHARP Academy is part of that."
In the Baseline Course, students are taken through self-awareness training, the social science behind sexual violence, power dynamics, resiliency training, effective communication, how to respond to sexual harassment and assault, participate in practical exercises, hear from guest speakers, participate in leadership panels and other things that give them a deeper and broader education.
Upon completion, the SARCs and VAs return to their organizations and should be able to assess the environment and culture, provide honest feedback to their commanders and help them come up with the strategies to address any negative issues or negative environmental concerns.
"We want to send people out to the force that are able to be catalysts of change," Catlett said.
Catlett said SHARP's mission is to create a culture of dignity and respect.
"What that really means is that when I work with you and I evaluate you, I'm doing that solely by your intrinsic value as a human being and as a soldier," Catlett said. "Not by your sexual value, not by your gender value, or sexual orientation value and all those other things. It's solely based on your value as a person and as a soldier. I think that's where we are going. I really do believe that we are changing the culture here in the Army."
Catlett said this change in culture happened in the 1990s as well with the removal of "Jody calls" or profane, dirty and sexist cadence songs. The "not in this squad" mentality has resurged with Sgt. Maj. of the Army Daniel Dailey's new initiative to rid the ranks of sexual assault and harassment by giving zero tolerance to first-line squad leaders.
When it comes to sexual violence, Catlett said that it isn't just a female issue.
"When I say I don't want to value you by your sexual value but by your intrinsic human value -- that's man or woman," Catlett said. Catlett said male soldiers only report sexual assault about 12 percent of the time.
"If you don't dig and you don't look, you're not going to find it," Catlett said.
Catlett said 14 percent of female officers feel vulnerable to sexual violence in their unit and about 18 percent of female enlisted soldiers feel vulnerable to sexual violence in their unit. If they witness crude or offensive behavior in their units like fowl language, dirty storytelling or sexist talk in formation, those numbers jump to 38 percent of officers and 42 percent enlisted who feel vulnerable to sexual violence in their units.
"That dumb joke and that sexist comment in formation and that squad leader or platoon sergeant or platoon leader or company commander whoever makes that ugly joke or that crude joke, he is undermining the trust of the soldiers in that unit that they are going to be taken care of," Catlett said. "That gets me when I think about that. I want every single soldier to feel secure and trust in their organization. Isn't that what the mothers and fathers of America expect is that their sons and daughters joined this place and that they can work in a secure, drug-free environment?"
Catlett said that sexist culture is part of the continuum of sexual violence. It manifests itself into sexual harassment, which could be crude or offensive behavior, coercion, unwanted sexual tension and then sexual assault.
"A sexist culture allows the predator to thrive because he (or she) goes unnoticed," Catlett said. "In the midst of all that crude and offensive behavior, his (or her) hunting can go unnoticed. Then what the sexist culture does for young people who are struggling to understand Army values, who are struggling to understand what constitutes a mature relationship between a man and a woman or a man and a man or woman and woman, what constitutes mature use of alcohol, boundaries, etc., that sexist culture erodes all that. We have sexual violence that's tied to just simply young people not understanding boundaries and not understanding correct relationships and not understanding what consent means."
Catlett said that he's heard people blame society as the problem for sexual violence and that 14 weeks of Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training was not sufficient time to mold soldiers. Catlett said that's an excuse and not the Army way.
"The Army is a reflection that society has a problem, but we're going to own the problem," Catlett said. "We're not going to just throw up our hands and say, 'What can we do?' We're the Army. We're going to fix this. The Army can do it. We did it with race. We did it with gender and we're doing it with sexual orientation. We can do this with sexual violence. It just means we have to be on our guard. We have to be vigilant all the time. We have to recognize that a lot of these behaviors we grew up with and thought were funny are fundamentally immature."
In the future, the SHARP Academy will be responsible for all of the SHARP training support packages and all of the professional military education across the Army to also include annual SHARP training Armywide, distance learning and online training. Catlett said he hopes to be like a university in the sense that he wants to have a graduate studies program with online courses for SHARP professionals who have to take 32 hours of recertification training.
"SHARP in many ways is a vehicle to look at ourselves and say, who are we?" Catlett said. "What are we about? What are our values? What does it mean to be a soldier? What does it mean to treat a soldier with dignity and respect?"
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