Teens face sex abuse in JROTC programs

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-of-state 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. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice.”

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.

Little oversight

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, but they have struggled to adequately oversee a program that largely operates on the fringes of their campuses.

Victims have reported sexual assaults in classrooms and supply

closets, during field trips or on late-night 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. A recent cadet in Tennessee said her JROTC instructor warned that he had the skills to kill her without a trace if she told anyone about their sexual encounters. In Missouri, a student said she was forced to kneel at her instructor’s bedside, blindfolded, with a gun to her head.

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.

‘So much faith’

The nature of the program offers instructors an unusual level of access to the children they mentor, according to interviews with former students and instructors. It often operates with its own classrooms and facilities, and students frequently are asked to participate in after-school, weekend and out-of-state activities, where instructors sometimes violate district rules by communicating with students on personal cellphones or driving them in their own vehicles.

The weak oversight has allowed some instructors to engage in repeated misconduct. At least seven of those who have been criminally charged had already been flagged for previous allegations of misconduct but were allowed to stay on the job.

“There’s so much faith and confidence and trust that goes into these instructor positions,” said Joe Williams, a former Marine gunnery sergeant who worked as a JROTC instructor in Mississippi and Kansas for six years, and who was the first to raise concerns about Hardin with school administrators. “We’ve got these individuals who use that trust as a cloak.”

Bauer said that Hardin continued to pursue sexual encounters with her for several months after he transferred to the new job at another school district. He would ask her to meet, she said, and gradually she began to realize that she no longer needed to respond.

She eventually told her mother, and then police. Hardin was charged in 2017 with six counts of sexual battery.

He eventually pleaded no contest to a lesser crime, contributing to the abuse or neglect of a child, in which he did not admit any sexual misconduct but said he had failed to notify authorities about unrelated possible abuse or neglect that Bauer suffered at home. One judge rejected the plea arrangement. A second judge also balked. Defense lawyers eventually won a hearing before a third judge, who accepted the deal.

Hal Kittrell, the district attorney in the case, said prosecutors always believed Bauer but had to consider the likelihood of winning the case.

Prosecutors agreed to the plea because it gave Hardin a felony record and barred him from working as a teacher, Kittrell said.

Hardin declined an interview but emphasized in a brief conversation that the original charges against him had been dropped.

Bauer said the experience forever changed her view of men, the justice system, schools and the military.

“The people who are supposed to be out protecting our country, do they really protect their own people?” Bauer said.

She never joined the Marines.

New York Times file photo Former students say military veterans who led JROTC classes in U.S. high schools fashioned themselves as mentors, then used their power to manipulate and abuse.