The White House convened a meeting on Thursday with 16 members of Congress to discuss ways of combatting sexual assault in the military. The issue has been a recurring one this year since a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing in January.
It gained even more attention in just the last week with the arrest of Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski who is accused of fondling a woman in a parking lot. The irony of course is Krusinski was the chief for the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch.
A number of bills have either been proposed or are in the works and Thursday’s meeting was intended to figure out a strategy going forward, according to a POLITICO article on the subject.
Host Carmen Russell-Sluchansky spoke with Juana Summers, a defense reporter for POLITICO, to discuss the story.
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Earlier this year, he spoke with Paula Coughlin, who was a victim of what has become known as the Tailhook Convention Air Force sexual scandal in which more than 100 aviation officers allegedly sexually assaulted 90 enlistees at a Las Vegas Hilton in 1991.
She also started the petition to get Congress to hold the Lackland in which they were investigating a series of sexual assaults at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas. We talked to her just after those hearings.
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