One in three service members filed a complaint about an incident that they or someone else experienced, up from 1 in 4 last year.
Reports of sexual assault in the military fell slightly in 2025, totaling just below 8,000 complaints, the Defense Department said in its annual update on the topic Friday.
While DoD estimates fewer troops were assaulted last year, those incidents were reported more often. One in three service members filed a complaint about an incident that they or someone else experienced, up from 1 in 4 last year, the department said.
The findings reflect years of effort to reform the reporting process and encourage victims to come forward, one military personnel expert told Federal News Network.
A higher rate indicates that the “‘no wrong door’ approach to reporting, investment in professionalizing sexual assault [and] prevention workforce competencies, and an emphasis in prevention over the last decade are having a positive effect,” said Kate Kuzminski, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security.
Overall, 4.3% of active-duty women and 1% of active-duty men experienced unwanted sexual contact, according to the results of a survey DoD conducts every two years. That translates to about 20,500 troops — about 8,500 fewer than the previous estimate in fiscal 2023.
“Unwanted sexual contact” is the department’s catch-all term for the range of penetrative, non-penetrative and attempted sexual assault crimes barred by military law. Those incidents were less frequent among both men and women compared to the previous survey, the department said.
The Marine Corps had the highest prevalence of unwanted contact against women at 6.4%, while the Navy saw the highest for men at 1.5%. The Air Force logged the lowest rate at 2.8% for women and less than 1% for men.
DoD said it had enough evidence to take disciplinary action in about 1,300 cases.
“While the decrease in both sexual harassment and unwanted sexual contact have decreased, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 25 men are still experiencing sexual harassment, and 1 in every 25 women/1 in every 100 men experienced unwanted sexual contact,” Kuzminski said. “Such behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the professionalism required of the U.S. military.”
While the number of sexual harassment complaints DoD received continued to hover around 3,000, the department estimated those incidents occurred less often.
“The Department continues to encourage greater reporting to connect warfighters with vital restorative care and enable leadership to hold offenders appropriately accountable,” it said in a release Friday.
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