(SHARP). Army senior leaders continue to emphasize the importance of the SHARP program. Army leaders demand their soldiers to internalize the intent of SHARP and those soldiers’ actions are conducive to the overall goal of the Army’s SHARP program. For this assignment, I chose to interview an Army Brigade Combat Team’s (BCT) Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC).
The SARC is responsible for ensuring that BCT soldiers/leaders receive mandatory bi-annual training. Secondly, the SARC serves as one (of many) point of contact for a person(s) to report a sexual assault (victim and/or a person with knowledge of such an incident). Finally, the SARC reviews …show more content…
The SARC procures the number of reported cases through multiple means. Since the SARC is one of several personnel who can receive/process a sexual assault report, the SARC must also pull this data from other reporting points of contact, which include the military installation’s hospital victim advocate, the Provost Marshall, and the unit’s chain of command. The SARC compiles all reported incidents into a database and routinally analyzes the reports in order to identify trends, anomolies, etc. Each month, the BCT commander chairs a SHARP meeting where the SARC and all subordinate command teams (battalion commanders and sergeant majors) attend. Within the SHARP meeting, the SARC presents reporting statistics (for the last month) and offers his analysis to the …show more content…
The downside of restricted reporting is that a unit commander may never be aware of a particular sexual assault from within the unit’s ranks. The BCT commander uses the survey’s results to identify incidents of sexual assaults that the SARC’s monthly statistics do not captured. The survey contains several questions referencing SHARP. Some of the questions attempt to identify if unit members are victims of, have witnessed, or are aware of sexual assaults within the unit. The BCT commander could assess his SHARP program as ineffective if the survey’s results indicate a higher number of sexual assault incidents than indentified from the SARC’s monthly statistics. The BCT commander considers the survey as a way to guage the unit’s performance towards SHARP