1 female officer in 20 suffers sexual harassment

By Jun Ji-hye

One female military officer out of 20 suffered sexual harassment in the barracks in 2014, according to research released Wednesday.

A research team from Yonsei University Medical School in Seoul interviewed a total of 228 female officers for a paper on soldiers’ health in 2014 and found that 5.7 percent among them, or 13, experienced sexual harassment that year.

The team said the stress index of those who suffered harassment was 18.15, higher than the 14.91 for those who did not.

“If the stress index of a person is higher than 26, that person is categorized as a potentially having psychiatric problems,” the team said in a release. “The stress index becomes higher when female officers suffer sexually harassment. Proper management is necessary to prevent this.”

The team also said that the stress of short-term-service female officers was more severe than that of long-term servicewomen with regard to sexual harassment.

When short-term-service officers were sexually harassed, their stress index was 12.01 higher than the average. On the other hand, for long-term servicewomen, their stress index was higher than the average by 0.668.

“We presume that it was harder for the women serving a short term to resist sexual harassment or openly report it, as they were apparently concerned that it could negatively affect their chances of becoming long-term servicewomen,” the team said.