A judge just dismissed the lawsuit of a civilian who reported that she was raped in her own bed aboard a Navy vessel. While Elsie Dominguez spent years fighting for justice, taking an unpaid year off to recover, the man she says assaulted her kept collecting a paycheck during his investigation. In the end, the court ruled that being raped on a Navy ship meant, by law, that it occurred within the scope of her employment. The judge said it should be treated as a workers’ comp claim. Like a slipped disc. Apparently, in the military, rape is an occupational hazard.
For decades, sexual assault has festered, with leaders repeatedly promising reform and then failing to live up to those promises. Now, only around ten percent of young people would even consider joining the military, and 28 percent of young people polled by the DoD “pointed to the possibility of sexual harassment or assault” for why not.
Instead of working to solve this problem, Hegseth fired the first-ever female Chief of Naval Operations without explanation along with the female U.S. military representative to NATO. Hegseth has since interfered with promotions for numerous female senior officers across all branches, blocking two outstanding female Army officers from becoming one-star generals, and of 22 Navy captains who received appointments to the rank of rear admiral, lower half, there were no women on the list. The New York Times has reported that the percentage of high-ranking officer nominations going to women is at its lowest level in at least 25 years. During my time as a Navy pilot, my squadron held focus groups that revealed most women didn’t feel comfortable reporting sexual assault because all our squadron’s Victim Advocates were male.
Hegseth’s warpath against women puts them at risk while not making our military any stronger. Honoring claims from his Fox News days like “I’m straight up saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth has steered the Pentagon to initiate a review of women in ground combat jobs–a thinly veiled attempt to make the military inhospitable to women to keep them from leadership. When combat time becomes a top metric to measure leadership ability and competence, gatekeeping women from those roles will keep them subordinate. The deliberate removal of women in leadership makes women who rely on that representation less safe.
The Secretary of Defense has made it harder to complain about assault, bias, and harassment. Since 1951, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) offered servicewomen a way to report directly about assignments, equipment, health issues, family pressures, and the policies that impacted their service; Hegseth terminated the program, accusing it of “advancing a divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness.”
There are strategic reasons we should take care of our service women. Women represent a higher percentage of the recruitable population than men; back in 2018, the Navy’s then chief of personnel said of women: “That’s where the talent is.” Plus, an overrepresentation of men has a negative effect on security policy initiatives. Already, the likelihood of separation for women from the military used to be 28% higher than for men, largely attributed to sexual assault, family planning, and childcare. Now, Hegseth has eliminated all DEI offices and initiatives within the Department of Defense.
What appears to be a deliberate effort to abuse women in the military mirrors the agonizingly slow release of the Epstein files. Many documents remain undisclosed, the release date has long since passed, and even the names of victims weren’t properly redacted, which presents as either spectacular incompetence or a deliberate attempt to intimidate other survivors. Nearly two-thirds of women who report sexual misconduct in the military already experience retaliation; Hegseth has since instituted new reporting rules so backwards that they are likely to silence victims. Perhaps it is not surprising that survivors have yet to see justice–their leadership may want it that way. The Secretary of Defense himself has been accused of sexual assault (he settled for $50,000), and there are allegations that he sexually pursued female employees at the nonprofit he briefly ran. When people who speak out see no justice, it discourages others from speaking out. Silence allows the abuse to continue.
That’s why when survivors do come forward, we have to have their backs. This is a matter of human decency, fairness, and justice. But also, an institution that doesn’t take care of its people doesn’t retain them, and it doesn’t recruit the next generation either. Every young person who watches Elsie Dominguez’s case get filed as a workplace injury could have been a future recruit who may instead decide this isn’t the life for them.
For our leadership to appear unphased by an incident like this reveals a deep moral rot. Elsie Dominguez is currently assigned to the USS Puller as 1st Assistant Engineer. She is also a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve. This means she is serving her country through civilian work and as a Reservist, working daily to defend our nation, but without any legal avenue for justice for the sexual assault she experienced while doing that work. How are we achieving lethality if we tell the troops we claim to support that rape is just part of the job?
I want to live in a country where sexual assault isn’t an expected side effect of wearing the uniform. As long as women are more likely to be killed or raped by a fellow soldier than killed by the enemy, it’s hard to argue we’re not the bad guys. What are your representatives saying about this? If they’re not speaking up, then they almost certainly aren’t taking any action to actually solve these problems. So speak out against them. Call them, shame them, and vote them out.This election cycle, we can prove that at least the people of this country still have a conscience. Then we can get to work.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
