Lawrence Downes in the New York Times seems to have read our blog of May 20th (and/or all of the other ones) about sexual harassment in the US military. As we did, he describes the Tailhook scandal of the ’90’s as well as the recent scandals involving the arrests of sexual harassment prevention officers and concludes that after 20 years of espoused “zero tolerance” its time for the military to take steps to actually do something about it.
He quotes Secretary of Defense Hagel: “It’s not good enough to say we have a zero-tolerance policy. How does that translate into changing anything?”
And he concluded: “If the military could agree to stop using the phrase, and start reforming itself instead, that’d be great.”