The Riverside Press-Enterprise
`I felt trapped': Sexual abuse of teens in JROTC program
PICAYUNE, MISS. » With the rifle skills she honed in the Mississippi backwoods, Victoria Bauer had a path to escape the trap of drugs and dead-end jobs she saw most everywhere around her. Her future was in the Marines, she decided, and she had an idea about how to get there.
Across the way from her freshman algebra class, Bauer approached Steve Hardin, the retired Navy intelligence officer who guided the high school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a leadership program sponsored by the U.S. military at high schools across the country. He welcomed her into the fold, she said.
Soon, her 45-year-old JROTC instructor was messaging her on Snapchat late into the night, telling her that it would “drive the guys crazy” if she wore a “small bikini” during the trip to their next out-ofstate shooting competition. Then one night in 2015 as he drove her home from rifle practice, she told investigators, Hardin pushed his hand into her pants and penetrated her with his fingers — the start of what she said was months of sexual assaults. Bauer, who was 15 at the time, feared that resisting him would jeopardize her shot at advancement through the JROTC ranks or a military career.
“I gave all the body-language signals that I didn’t want it,” Bauer said.
For more than a century, the JROTC program has sought to instill U.S. military values in American teenagers, with classes in thousands of public high schools that provide training in marksmanship, life skills, hierarchical discipline and military history.
But a New York Times investigation — which included an examination of thousands of court documents, investigative files and other records obtained through more than 150 public disclosure requests — has found that the program has repeatedly become a place where retired military officers prey on their teenage students.
In the past five years, the Times found, at least 33 JROTC instructors have been criminally charged with sexual misconduct involving students, far higher than the rate of civilian high school teachers in jurisdictions examined by the Times. Many others have been accused of misconduct but never charged.
The senior military veterans who make up the JROTC ranks are certified by the military but deploy to high school classrooms with little oversight and scant training for the actual work of being a teacher. Many states do not require JROTC instructors to have a college degree or a teaching certificate. Schools are expected to monitor the instructors and investigate complaints.
Victims have reported sexual assaults in classrooms and supply closets, during field trips or on latenight rides home, sometimes committed after instructors plied students with alcohol or drugs. One former student said her instructor told her that sexual submission was expected of women in the military.
The Times interviewed 13 victims, many of whom had strikingly similar stories: They were teenagers who came from disadvantaged backgrounds or who otherwise saw the military as a pathway to a promising future, then found that the instructors who fashioned themselves as mentors exploited their positions to manipulate and abuse.
JROTC leaders declined requests for interviews but pointed to research indicating that the program had a positive effect on school attendance and graduation rates. The U.S. Army Cadet Command, which sponsors the largest JROTC program, said in a statement that its instructors went through a “strenuous” vetting process and that any allegations of misconduct were investigated, typically by the school districts that hired the JROTC instructors as civilian employees.
Founded during World War I, the JROTC program has grown to serve a halfmillion teenagers each year. Its instructors are retired officers or noncommissioned officers.
For the military, which has struggled to meet its recruiting goals in an allvolunteer Army, JROTC has also been seen as a potentially important recruiting tool; students from high schools with JROTC programs are more than twice as likely to enlist after graduation, according to the Army Cadet Command.
The program targets schools with high populations of low-income students.