More than 20,000 active-duty service members, including women, were estimated to have experienced unwanted sexual contact during the latest period measured by the US military.
The numbers become harder to absorb when the reporting gap is considered. The Pentagon estimates that only 33% of service members who experienced unwanted sexual contact reported the incident to a military authority in 2025. The same report found that 17.5% of active-duty women experienced sexual harassment during the period measured. The latest RAND data also places many alleged offenders within the military itself. Eighty-nine percent of women who reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact indicated that at least one alleged offender was a military member.
Those figures offer a measure of the problem, but Trinity Sunshine, founder of SISTERS in SILENCE (SiS), believes they can also obscure the people living inside them. Her concern comes from personal experience. After serving for 22 years in the US Coast Guard and spending years processing her own experience of military sexual trauma, Sunshine began looking at sexual assault through the perspective of both survivors and the environments in which such behavior can develop.
“I would not have had the wherewithal to start being concerned about predators until I have been able to talk all of my trauma out, to make it a testimony,” Sunshine explains. “I would have never thought in a million years that I would have empathy toward the people who did this to me.”
Sunshine believes that perspective matters because military service creates complicated relationships between people who may be required to rely on one another professionally after an assault has occurred. She recalls the contradiction of being expected to continue serving alongside someone who had violated her.
“If this person victimized me on Tuesday, and we had a military mission on Wednesday where I needed to have that person’s back, I would have that person’s back,” she explains. “That person would expect me to have their back, even though they violated me.”
For Sunshine, addressing sexual assault requires attention to the environment in which young service members learn authority and responsibility. She argues that leadership development can place significant emphasis on command and mission accomplishment while giving insufficient attention to boundary-violating behavior and emotional development.
Her concern is focused on younger recruits entering an institution that can attract people dealing with difficult circumstances in their personal lives. Sunshine believes stronger education around respect for boundaries, accountability, and interpersonal conduct should form part of that development. SISTERS in SILENCE approaches the issue through support and advocacy. The organization provides resources for women veterans and first responders seeking healthcare, mental-health and legal assistance, alongside information intended to help survivors navigate the aftermath of military trauma.
Sunshine also places importance on helping women understand how to protect themselves. Her own experience has shaped that emphasis, as military personnel are trained to defend against external threats. Yet an assault by someone serving beside them can create a very different psychological response.
“I can defend my country all day long and sacrifice. I didn’t think I had to defend myself against who’s standing next to me,” she says. The organization’s broader objective is to make experiences that can remain hidden easier to acknowledge and discuss. Sunshine believes public understanding has a role in creating pressure for institutional responses, while support must remain focused on the people living with the consequences.
Her own story has become part of that work. After years of carrying the experience privately, Sunshine is using it to draw attention to women whose military service has been complicated by sexual trauma, and to a system she believes needs continued scrutiny.
“The pain never disappears. From skin and bones, from blood and tissue, I can tell you how it’s affected my life, how it stole my motherhood, how it steals marriages,” she says. “I can’t tackle all of that, but if I can take what happened to me, give other women a voice, help them protect themselves, and make sure their experiences are heard, then there is a purpose in bringing those stories into the light. I don’t want another woman to feel that she has to carry this alone.”
