The Virginia Military Institute is one of America's premier military training facilities. It's also is a hotbed of violent aggression against female cadets, according to a disturbing new investigation by The Washington Post. Within hours of publication of the report, elected officials and others in Virginia and beyond began calling for action, including official probes. That, at the very least, should happen immediately. Misogynistic violence against women in the military will never end if it continues to be tolerated among cadets from their earliest training.

The Virginia institute has admitted women since 1997, compelled by a Supreme Court decision. Today, women make up about 13% of the student body at the 182-year-old academy. For much of the relatively brief time women have been allowed there, multiple state and federal investigations have turned up distressing evidence that the male majority has subjected female cadets to various forms of misogynistic harassment and sexual aggression, including sexual assault. Just last month, a Virginia state investigation concluded that VMI fosters a "racist and sexist culture."

The Washington Post's report last week put voices to the victims of that culture. More than a dozen women told the newspaper of an atmosphere of hostility toward female cadets. Five of those who spoke said they had been sexually assaulted. Other female cadets face constant ridicule on a social-media app popular at the institute, where some posters have derided women as "shedets."

The problem isn't just with the male cadets. Several of the female cadets who told the newspaper they'd been sexually assaulted also reported the administration downplaying their allegations, pressuring the female cadets not to pursue them. "'Just a reminder, you know he is a couple months away from graduation,'" one VMI official told a female cadet, regarding a male cadet who had assaulted her.

The institute's reporting policies also work against reform, including one that, unlike other universities in Virginia, allows punishment for alcohol or drug infractions against cadets that come to light as those cadets are reporting sexual assaults — a policy that effectively disincentivizes the reporting of rape if the victim had been drinking or using drugs.

One Virginia lawmaker told the newspaper that a former VMI superintendent, defending that policy, explained that drug infractions are considered more damaging to the institute than sexual assault is. If that outrageous view is still representative of the institute's leadership, then that leadership should change.

Whether traditionalists like it or not, gender integration is a fact of life in today's military. Cadets who come up through a training system that still bristles against that reality with exclusion, harassment and violence against female cadets will make that integration more difficult than it should be going forward. Virginia and federal officials must get to the bottom of these issues at VMI and other training facilities before they are carried over to active-duty service.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Defence-Imagery at Pixabay