If you or someone you know needs resources or support related to sexual violence, contact the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s 24/7 hotline at 800-871-7741.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Three years ago, it wasn’t easy for Maine leaders to discuss an uncomfortable truth about the Maine Army National Guard: that its culture had allowed sexual assault and harassment to go unchecked and instead punished women who spoke up.
When female soldiers first came forward in a 2021 Bangor Daily News series about the abuse and retaliation they endured, lawmakers and military officials didn’t act immediately. Under pressure from survivors, they ultimately called for hearings, investigations and passed reforms, but that response wasn’t bipartisan. Female soldiers, some of whom sacrificed their anonymity to push for action, looked to the future with only cautious optimism.
But attitudes have changed as time has passed.
Now, military officials discuss the reality of sexual violence among their ranks with more open matter-of-factness. Lawmakers, too, have worked to boost support for survivors, gradually achieving more bipartisan backing.
A shift in public discourse is not necessarily evidence of change within the guard itself. But in interviews, legislators and military leaders acknowledged that stronger oversight and greater transparency, including attention from the media, have helped soldiers begin to rebuild trust in an organization where some previously believed leaders did not take sexual assault and harassment seriously.
“I just think of the long road it’s taken us to even get to the point where we’re even able to have this kind of dialogue,” Rep. Laura Supica, D-Bangor, said during a legislative meeting last month, shortly after Brig. Gen. Diane Dunn briefed members of the Maine Legislature’s veterans and legal affairs committee on the guard’s ongoing sexual assault prevention efforts.
“In my first session, there was hesitancy to even acknowledge that this behavior was happening,” Supica, one of the committee’s co-chairs, went on.
In early 2024, Dunn became the first woman to serve as Maine’s top military official when she was appointed the adjutant general of the Maine National Guard and commissioner of the state Department of Defense, Veterans and Emergency Management.
In a recent interview at her office in Camp Chamberlain in Augusta, she acknowledged the difficulty of overseeing a culture that spreads across a sprawling organization of part-time members who toggle between their military and civilian lives. But it starts with ensuring that soldiers feel like their leaders are listening, she said.
“You’ve got to be open to hearing what people are thinking and experiencing to make it better,” she said.
For example, the guard has long had sexual assault prevention and reporting policies in place, but service members haven’t always followed or understood them, Dunn said. She described how the organization has worked to strengthen awareness and help survivors navigate the process of coming forward.
The BDN’s three-part series in 2021, “Unguarded,” revealed how lax enforcement of policies, little oversight, and retaliation against those who reported sexual assault and harassment continued for more than a decade. The six-month investigation was based on state, federal, military, police and civilian court records, and more than a dozen interviews with male and female service members. (It focused on the Maine Army National Guard; the wider organization also includes the Maine Air National Guard.)
But it wasn’t until lawmakers heard directly from female soldiers about the abuse they endured, some of which forced them out of the military or the state entirely, that action took place in the spring of 2022. A new law required the guard to submit annual reports about sexual assault to lawmakers. It also required an outside review of how the guard handled complaints of sexual assault and harassment. The adjutant general at the time, Maj. Gen. Douglas Farnham, called for a separate outside review of the guard’s policies.
The governor also issued an executive order to establish an advisory council on military sexual trauma, tasked with recommending ways to improve the organization’s handling of reported assaults.
“I think it’s an icky feeling that these things take place,” Supica said, describing how even Democrats, who ultimately led the charge to call for external investigations, felt defensive and reluctant to press the issue.
“The stories of the veterans, of the service members, brought it to reality,” said Rebecca Cornell du Houx, a lieutenant who has served in the Maine Army National Guard for 22 years.
There wasn’t universal agreement on how aggressively to implement that hard-fought call to action, however.
In the spring of 2023, members of the veterans and legal affairs committee split down mostly partisan lines on a bill to enact recommendations from the governor’s advisory council’s first report, with only one of the committee’s five Republican members supporting the proposal. They worried about passing more laws before the guard had time to make changes on its own.
Rep. Benjamin Hymes, R-Waldo, said he had been frustrated during his own military career when policies constantly changed, and Rep. Shelley Rudnicki, R-Fairfield, said the bill might “pile stuff on.”
The Democratic-led Legislature ultimately passed the bill. It approved paid leave for soldiers who report being assaulted by another guardsman and required the adjutant general to submit detailed annual data to lawmakers about reported sexual assaults and women serving in uniform, among other things.
“That was big,” said Rep. Morgan Rielly, D-Westbrook, the bill’s lead sponsor, who has spearheaded much of the legislation related to preventing and responding to sexual assault in the guard since he joined the Legislature in January 2021. “To get good policy making, we need data.”
Dunn presented the latest annual report to the veterans and legal affairs committee on March 5, and it showed that soldiers have continued to report sexual assaults at higher rates in recent years. The guard used to see between two and six reports of assault annually, but the number has hovered between 14 and 18 since October 2019.
Bobby Jo Rogers, the guard’s sexual assault response coordinator, attributed the higher rates to several factors, including that soldiers likely feel more willing to report what happened to them. The larger tallies in recent years, she explained, include survivors who finally decided to come forward about past assaults.
“People were coming out of that isolation [during the COVID pandemic], and they had access to reporting agencies, so that’s part of it,” Rogers said. “I think the other part is when folks read the [BDN] articles, they were more inclined to say, ‘Hey, yeah, I really do need some help.’”
After Dunn’s presentation of the report last month, Sen. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop, and co-chair of the veterans and legal affairs committee, described progress on the issue as “a journey.”
“It looks like it’s getting better, and there’s more work to be done,” he said.
Meanwhile, the guard has completed more than 70 percent of the 24 recommendations from the governor’s council that fell upon the organization to enact, said Maj. Nicholas Erickson, a spokesperson for the guard. For example, the guard has taken steps to improve the military’s communication with civilian law enforcement, which prosecutes assaults between soldiers. It has also signed a formal agreement with the Maine Coaltion Against Sexual Assault to enhance prevention and support services.
“From my perspective, the guard has really just done so much work in the last couple years to focus on these issues,” said Elizabeth Ward Saxl, the coalition’s executive director. She said she hoped the federal government’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives wouldn’t jeopardize resources that have supported Maine’s progress.
The adjutant general said she hopes that, together, the guard’s recent efforts will help to “break down barriers and confusion” within the guard that have prevented service members from accessing help when they need it.
Having a woman lead the organization is “a huge change” in its own right, said Cornell du Houx, the lieutenant, because it automatically increases the respect soldiers have for women in uniform.
“We believe continued reporting reflects growing trust in our chain of command and response staff as well as recognition of our efforts to eliminate misconduct, increase accountability, and safeguard our most valuable resource — our people,” Dunn told lawmakers when she presented the guard’s annual report last month.
Shortly after the presentation, Cornell du Houx, who is also a licensed clinical social worker, testified in support of a bill sponsored by Rielly that would fund additional positions for an organization she runs called the Sisters in Arms Center. Based in Augusta, it is the state’s only emergency shelter for female veterans and has played an important role supporting survivors of military sexual violence. Next month, she departs for a six-month deployment in the Middle East, so the organization needs to hire a manager and counseling staff to replace her.
This was Rielly’s second attempt to try to secure funding for the mostly volunteer-run shelter. A previous version last spring failed to earn unanimous support from the veterans and legal affairs committee, but the Legislature ultimately didn’t fund it.
This time around, the committee ensured the positions would receive funding, voting unanimously on March 19 to use $285,000 from a cannabis-related fund at their discretion to go to the Sisters in Arms Center. Sen. Jeff Timberlake, R-Turner, said in an interview that the group found the shelter’s work important enough that it didn’t want to risk the bill not getting funded again by the appropriations committee.
“I’m so glad this time around the whole committee voted in support,” said Rielly, who no longer serves on it but has continued to submit bills on the issue. He has been amazed, he said, by the courage of survivors who took personal risks to come forward and demand change.
“I’ve been so focused on this for my entire time in the Legislature because to walk away or not give it my all would be wrong and would have rightfully weighed on my conscience.”
Bangor Daily News reporter Callie Ferguson may be reached at [email protected].
