From Draft NOtices, April-June 2023
- Rick Jahnkow
For the first time in decades, the military’s high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps has become the subject of a national debate, the impetus for which has been a series of critical articles on the program published by the New York Times in July and December of 2022.
The Times investigations brought to light a large number of sexual assault complaints lodged against JROTC instructors, as well as the existence of misleading content on historical events in the textbooks. Furthermore, an article on the front page of the December 2022 Times revealed that thousands of students were being involuntarily enrolled in the program at high schools around the country, particularly at schools where students are disproportionately youth of color.
Not only did the various articles stimulate widespread national media coverage of the issue, they also led some members of Congress to call for scrutiny of the program in general and a Congressional demand for the Department of Defense to answer critical questions about JROTC oversight. One such demand, issued on February 1, 2023, was signed by U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mazie K. Hirono, Ron Wyden and Bernard Sanders.
Recently, COMD received a question about warning letters the government sends to young men who are suspected of failing to register with Selective Service. This is a brief explanation of the implications for those who receive such letters. (Note that SS sends mass mailings of postcard registration “reminders” to some lists of males who have not yet reached age 18. Those reminders are not the same as the warning letters discussed here.)
In July of 2022 the New York Times published an explosive exposé on sexual abuse in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corp (JROTC). JROTC is a federal program sponsored by the United States Armed Forces that operates in at least 3,500 high schools with more than 500,000 students enrolled across the country. The U.S. Army JROTC website describes the program as “one of the largest character development and citizenship programs for youth in the world.” The NY Times investigation revealed that since 2017, there had been at least 33 JROTC instructors criminally charged with sexual misconduct against their students, and several other accusations. The report detailed that within the last five years, the Army decertified 24 instructors because of credible sexual abuse allegations. Other military branches also had to decertify several of their JROTC instructors for sexual misconduct: 15 instructors in the Marine Corps JROTC, 10 in the Navy, and seven in the Air Force. Two additional JROTC instructors accused of sexual abuse died by suicide before their cases could be settled. All of the programs’ instructors are retired military officers.
