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Senators Barbara Boxer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Mazie Hirono are calling for transparency and a major reform of the military judicial system in response to a recent report highlighting a number of child sexual abuse cases in the military.

The Senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Tuesday, urging reform of the system "so that it is transparent and accountable."

An Associated Press report found that the largest category of offenders in military prisons are child sexual abuse perpetrators.

The report concluded that “Of the 1,233 inmates confined in the military's prison network, 61 percent were convicted of sex crimes, according to the AP's analysis of the latest available data, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA. In just over half of those cases, the victims were children.

Since the beginning of this year, children were the victims in 133 out of 301 sex crime convictions against service members — including charges ranging from rape to distributing child pornography.”

The system for prosecuting offenders of child sex crimes is anything but transparent, and Congress is more concerned with prosecuting adult on adult crime in the military. But the numbers suggest near epidemic rates of child sexual abuse and lenient sentences for offenders.

AP’s report additionally found that the Pentagon even reduced the sentences of several offenders through what it called “undisclosed pre-trial agreements.”

In their letter, the three Democratic Senators wrote "This is incredibly alarming,” referring to the AP report. They added that "While there may have been legitimate reasons for some of these decisions, it is prohibitively difficult to independently assess the decisions in a timely manner since the military services do not include legal records or trial outcomes in an online database like the civilian court systems."

They further criticized the opaque system of accountability on the Hill, a system that relies almost solely on outside Freedom of Information Act requests, which take months to file.

Another concern mentioned in the letter was the fact that the Pentagon separates “family-related assault cases” from the annual Sexual Assault and Prevention Response Office that is submitted to Congress. So the statistics regarding child sexual abuse cases in the military are clouded, kept within the Family Advocacy Program of the Pentagon.

The Family Advocacy Program deals singularly with military or post-military members, utilizing prevention and victim advocating, not necessarily legal action.

"Taken in combination with the AP's findings, we are worried that we continue to lack a clear picture of the full rates of sexual assault in the military," the Senators said.

They added a request for equivalent transparency standards as that afforded civilian courts as well as electronic documents.

"Additionally, we request that the Department begin including Family Advocacy Program related incidences in the annual SAPRO reports submitted to Congress," they wrote.

"The lack of transparency in the military justice system calls into question the integrity of the institution and hides the system's shortcomings."