DENVER -- Several changes are reportedly in the works at the Air Force Academy, where dozens of female cadets have reported being raped and then subsequently reprimanded.

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The Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper and Air Force Secretary James Roche told reporters on Monday that one change that could possibly occur on campus includes separating female cadets in dormitory rooms set apart from male cadets. (Currently, male and female cadets can live in adjacent dorm rooms.)

Jumper and Roche said they also intend to start providing victims of sexual assault with individual counselors who would help track the handling of complaints and give them advice, and they plan to grant greater authority to the school's officers and senior enlisted personnel to help monitor the situation, according to the Washington Post.

Their goal, they said, is to make sure that the academy climate is changed so that the prospect of any sexual misconduct is reduced.

According to the Associated Press, Air Force leaders blamed a trend in recent years toward closer dormitory living for contributing to a general erosion of rules and respect between the sexes.

"Now the climate is such that the male can see the female in these intimate circumstances, in bathrobes walking down the halls," Jumper told the reporters, and such proximity "erodes the dignity of the male and female interaction. That's the part that has to be restored."

Jumper said grouping the rooms of female cadets together would give women an important support network as well as extra security.

But this idea has drawn fire from critics, who say that segregating the dorms by gender could be counterproductive because integrating men and women in the military has been shown to decrease the number of sexual assaults and rape because the women are more accepted and respected for their abilities.

Military investigators, now numbering 17, returned to the academy for a second round of interviews on Monday and met with officials from an off-base rape crisis center where 38 female cadets sought help in the past 15 years. (That's up from the 22 cases the center reported last week.)

"We shared with them in as much detail as possible without crossing confidentiality boundries, the nature of that client contact, the number of cases, whether or not those cases had been seen in person or over the phone, the number of assaults," said Cari Davis, executive director of TESSA. "The (women) felt like they were being blamed in part or in whole for the assault."

The Air Force investigators were ordered to return to the Springs to interview the alleged victims after 7NEWS revealed that the investigators didn't speak to any victim during their initial 10-day investigation at the academy.

Later this week, a separate three-member team of investigators from the Air Force Inspector General's Office will arrive in Colorado Springs to look at individual cases.

The president is also putting subtle pressure on the Air Force to address this problem.

"This is a matter the president is concerned about," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday. "Making certain that throughout our society, including the Air Force Academy and other places, that every step is taken to preserve the liberty and security of the people who attend these institutions and to put protections in place for women at these institutions."

In his first public comment on the charges of misconduct at the academy, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday said that any time there are such allegations it's "enormously disappointing" to anyone connected with the Defense Department.

He also expressed confidence in the response of Jumper and Roche, saying that they are dealing with the allegations aggressively.

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