DENVER -- Both teams of investigators -- an internal 17 member team from the Pentagon and a three-member team from the Air Force Inspector General's Office -- are now on the campus of the Air Force Academy looking into cases of sexual assault.

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The investigators from the Inspectors General's Office, who arrived on Monday and Tuesday, are looking into individual cases and specific allegations.

The larger Pentagon group is looking at policy -- interviewing academy staff, cadets and off-base rape counselors whom victims have consulted.

A spokesman for both teams, Lt. Col. Dewey Ford, told 7NEWS that the teams will be on campus indefinitely and there is no time table and no time restriction for their investigation.

It is believed, however, that the teams will have most of their investigation complete by the end of March, in which case they will present their findings to the Air Force by early April.

As of Wednesday morning, 33 present and former female cadets have contacted Sen. Wayne Allard's office, saying that they were victims of sexual assault. And those do not include at least four more women who have contacted 7NEWS Investigates, giving us details of assaults going back as far as 1991.

Some of the women told Allard and 7NEWS Investigator John Ferrugia that they did not have enough confidence in the system to report their alleged assaults to the Air Force directly.

Meanwhile the Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. James Roche, has rejected calls for outside investigators, telling the Los Angeles Times that the problem is best handled internally.

Roche also admitted that when he first heard of the scandal, when 7NEWS Investigates first broke the story three weeks ago, he considered closing the academy.

In Washington, a survey of members of the Arms Services Committee shows nearly everyone is now in favor of a congressional hearing to determine how the Air Force Academy has handled allegations of sexual assault.

But committee members want to wait until the current Air Force inquiry at the academy is complete.

Congressional sources told 7NEWS that committee members are also not happy that Roche and Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper are already floating what one source termed "trial balloons" -- proposing changes before the investigation is even complete.

Some of those proposals include clustering female cadets closer in the dorms, assigning counselors to help track victims' complaints and granting greater authority to the school's officers and senior enlisted personnel to help monitor the situation.

The idea to separate the women's rooms with the men's rooms has received a lot of criticism. Counselors who have worked with rape victims 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.

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

Roche and Jumper have said such closeness between the living quarters of male and female cadets contributed to an erosion of rules and respect between the sexes.

Currently, women share rooms with other women but their rooms are spread on the same floors as male cadets and the rooms can be adjacent to one another.

Roche has said that he is aware of 56 sexual assaults at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the past 10 years.

The academy first accepted women in 1976 and currently 725 of the academy's 4,200 cadets are women.

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