Sex assault claims shake US Air Force

Top officials at the US Air Force Academy are facing possible disciplinary action for their alleged failure to deal with complaints of rape and sexual assault levelled by dozens of current and former female cadets.

The scandal involves 56 cases of reported sexual attacks during the last 10 years at the academy, based near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the Air Force equivalent of West Point for the Army.

But James Roche, the Air Force Secretary and the civilian Pentagon appointee in direct charge of the service, said that fear and shame had almost certainly prevented other women from coming forward. "There's probably another 100 we haven't seen," he told a Senate committee last week.

The affair has come as a deep embarrassment for the academy, and led to a host of demands from Capitol Hill for the resignation of its superintendent, Lt General John Dallager, and his deputy, Brig General Taco Gilbert, the commandant of cadets.

Thus far the two officials have been stoutly defended by Mr Roche, who insists the problems at the academy long predate their arrival there. But the pair have been forced to admit that existing procedures to help female cadets who say they have been sexually assaulted have failed.

In the last three years, 11 reports have been investigated, of which four were substantiated. The academy is now seeking to introduce safeguards to guarantee women confidentiality and reduce the opportunity for sexual misconduct.

Among changes planned is a stricter physical separation of the dormitory rooms of male and female cadets. The current proximity, General John Jumper, the Air Force Chief of Staff told The Washington Post, "erodes the dignity of the male and female interaction".

But rape counsellors at Colorado Springs, who have heard many of the complaints, say the main problems are the male- female imbalance (82 out of every 100 cadets are men), the academy's distance from the town, and the authority that male students are given over younger female colleagues.

One thing, however, is beyond dispute. It is the worst scandal to involve the US military since the Tailhook convention of navy pilots at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1991, in which some female pilots were subjected to intense sexual harassment by drunk male pilots.