Sexual assault and sexual harassment (SASH) threaten the safety, trust, and cohesion essential to mission readiness in the U.S. Coast Guard. The authors evaluate the Coast Guard’s SASH prevention and response strategies, victim support services to support recovery efforts, and accountability mechanisms.

Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center

Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the Coast Guard

Holistic Study and Analysis

Eric Cooper, Miriam Matthews, Andrew R. Morral, Coreen Farris, Robert Ulrich Nagel, Lucy Shearer, Kimberly Curry Hall, Sarah Weilant

ResearchPublished Oct 2, 2026

This research was conducted within HSOAC, a federally funded research and development center operated by RAND under contract with DHS.

Sexual assault and sexual harassment (SASH) threaten the safety, trust, and cohesion essential to mission readiness in the U.S. Coast Guard. Investigations, internal reviews, and high-profile reports have highlighted systemic challenges in how the service prevents, responds to, and accounts for these behaviors.

In response, Congress directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to commission an independent review of the Coast Guard’s approach to SASH. The authors conducted this study to provide an impartial, evidence-informed assessment of the service’s policies, programs, and institutional practices related to SASH. Separately, the Coast Guard conducted its own Accountability and Transparency Review, commissioned by the Commandant in July 2023, which produced 33 recommended actions to address harmful behaviors and strengthen accountability across the service. The authors examine Coast Guard efforts in light of those findings and recommendations while also identifying areas of progress, persistent gaps, and opportunities for structural improvement.

The purpose of the overall project is to evaluate the Coast Guard’s prevention and response strategies, victim support services to support recovery efforts, and accountability mechanisms for SASH. The authors assess the Coast Guard’s policies, how responsibilities are distributed across programs, and how requirements are executed in practice across a geographically dispersed workforce. Particular attention is given to transparency, command involvement, and the extent to which current systems prevent sexual assault and harassment and support both survivor needs and institutional accountability.

Key Takeaways

  • The Coast Guard’s SASH efforts are constrained less by an absence of programs than by how those programs are structured, integrated, and resourced.
  • The most foundational concerns involve fragmented policy architecture and data. SASH-related policy is distributed across three distinct directives, with no single integrating framework.
  • Data on SASH incidents are similarly fragmented across multiple tracking systems with differing definitions and reporting standards, which limits the Coast Guard’s ability to assess trends, evaluate what is working, and identify where risk is concentrated.
  • Prevention and leadership present related challenges. The Coast Guard’s prevention activity is largely training-centric, with success measured by course completion rates rather than demonstrated changes in behavior or risk.
  • The response and support system faces ongoing challenges. Survivors and stakeholders expressed continued concern about long investigative timelines, limited visibility into case status, and inconsistent communication.
  • Quantitatively, official sexual assault reporting rates have been relatively stable in recent years, but survey-based estimates of prevalence consistently exceed official report counts, indicating that underreporting remains a significant concern.

Recommendations

  • Fragmented policy architecture limits coherence, clarity of authority, and accountability. One option would be to establish a single authoritative instruction consolidating SASH prevention, response, recovery, and accountability; another would retain the existing program-specific instructions while introducing a formal governance body to coordinate them and track implementation.
  • Prevention is treated primarily as training compliance rather than as a sustained capability. One option would reframe prevention as an enterprise capability with measurable outcome targets; another would require individual programs to articulate how their activities reduce risk.
  • Variable training quality, consistency, and focus limit prevention effectiveness. One option would establish a tiered model based on unit risk; another would build risk-based triggers into existing policy.
  • Commanders are expected to foster safe and accountable unit climates, but policy provides limited behavioral specificity and no structured accountability mechanisms. One option is to articulate specific behavioral expectations for leaders in policy and to reinforce those expectations through professional development and evaluation.
  • Response systems have improved, but trust remains fragile due to communication, transparency, and timeline challenges. One option is to standardize communication practices across the response system; another would focus on reducing investigative timelines through process improvements.
  • Resource constraints create a reactive system with limited capacity for prevention and sustained engagement. One option would assign new billets or assignments based on risk and geographic access; another would expand capacity through augmentation strategies.
  • Data fragmentation and governance challenges limit evaluation, oversight, and organizational learning. One option would move toward an integrated data environment; another would clarify data stewardship and improve interoperability across existing systems.

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Cooper, Eric, Miriam Matthews, Andrew R. Morral, Coreen Farris, Robert Ulrich Nagel, Lucy Shearer, Kimberly Curry Hall, and Sarah Weilant, Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the Coast Guard: Holistic Study and Analysis. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center operated by the RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3545-1.html.
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This work was sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Sexual Assault Prevention, Response, and Recovery Program and conducted within the RAND Homeland Security Research Division, which operates the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center.

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