Twice Betrayed: Women Veterans and Military Sexual Trauma

It's my deep-seated belief that women veterans who suffer military sexual trauma risk being twice betrayed: once by their perpetrator in uniform, once by the system itself, which should be doing a much better job of protecting them from a problem that's too apparent, widespread, and part of the actual culture to pretend that it doesn't exist.

 

See Jeff Benedict on this:

"But an occupation that thrives on a unique capacity for aggression among participants runs the risk of being a home for troubled men who cannot contain their rage against the opposite sex." -- Jeff Benedict, author of "Public Heroes, Private Felons"

Preventing Psychological Injury, Betrayal and Trauma: The Real “Costs” and “Treatment” of Military Sexual Trauma

 

Sometimes I think I miss the point on some of these blog posts: I’m too busy trying to set the stage and establish the “milieu” so that a thoughtful person can absorb it all and come away with a new outlook or two on a “same old” problem.  But maybe I’m failing to come right out and say what I’m really thinking, and God knows enough people are floundering around on this topic who shouldn’t be, so maybe I just will.  Here goes the suddenly editorial portion of our program:

 

We heard Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., pretty much the foremost expert nationally on veterans and PTSD, talk the other day about the “psychological injury” that troops are exposed to from lack of sleep, before and after combat, and how that sets them up for significant problems.  True; agreed; understood.  What we’re talking about here with women in the military and military sexual trauma is a similar thing: preventing and treating what is a grievous psychological injury. It's a situation like the one Shay talks about, something where the proverbial “ounce of prevention” is worth the “pound of cure.”  Shay is remarkable: he’s one of a kind.  There’s probably no better advocate for veterans in the country, although anyone who works with veterans from the heart is worthy of great honor.  It’s a pretty much unsung, undervalued calling.

 

However, we can’t really expect Dr. Shay, as amazing as he is, to come out and have much to say about military sexual trauma.  He’s got his hands full already with what his topics are; and, his main “demographic” has always been Vietnam veterans, most of whom…the vast majority of whom…are men.  That’s who served for the most part in Vietnam. That is not the composition of the military today; or even the contracting world that “supports” (using that term somewhat loosely) the military and the Department of Defense.

 

So we need to find some new experts, and some new paradigms; put in place some new safeguards, establish and deliver some new training; and, in general, get a radically new “outlook” on this problem.

 

That’s why I bothered to link in the passage from Jeff Benedict’s book about pro athletes who commit crimes against women, and how they are protected, in part, by the very environment in which their crimes take place.  So too with the military: it’s as good an analogy as you’re going to get right now, and frankly, we’re in need of one.

 

It’s a crying shame that women victims of military sexual assault are being murdered (they are) by their perpetrators to prevent their coming forward; and killing themselves (they are) because they’ve anticipating a double betrayal: the military that failed to protect them in the first place – and allowed the assault to happen – and the betrayal they expect to take place, when they muster up enough strength, courage or hope to try to “fight the system” and report the crime.  In the clutch – feeling desperate, forsaken and very much alone -- some of these women just give up, and take their own lives, because they’ve so lost hope that the system will get them the justice they deserve.

 

If you read the literature on suicide – something that plagues veterans with PTSD, and military sexual assault causes and is associated with PTSD in women – it’s not that hard to see the link.  People kill themselves when they give up hope; and when they anticipate from looking around that their situation isn’t going to be handled any better (any more sensitively, well or effectively) than the last person they heard about who had the same issues.

 

Listen to a world-renowned expert on suicide, Edwin Schneidman, for a moment on this.  A person goes from being troubled (perturbation) to doing something final about it (lethality) when they give up hope.  "Lethality, when coupled with elevated perturbation," writes Schneidman in his book, The Suicidal Mind, "is a principal ingredient in self-inflicted death.  Perturbation supplies the motivation for suicide; lethality is the fatal trigger."  He continues:

 

"Lethality -- the idea that "I can stop this pain; I can kill myself" is the unique essence of suicide.  Anybody who has ever switched off an electric light deliberately to plunge a hideous room into darkness or, with equal deliberation, stopped the action of an annoying engine by turning the key to OFF, has, for that moment, been granted the swift satisfaction the suicidal person hungers for.  After all, the suicidal person intends to stop the ongoing activities [including their highly personal traumas] of life."

 

What's the relationship to this topic?  Do I need to make it explicit?  Well, then, I will: if you set people up in a situation where they will fail (be assaulted) and then furthermore not address their condition compassionately, seriously, effectively or well -- the torment they feel (perturbation) is enough to create a sense that there is truly "no way out" (lethality) and no one who cares.  I think we have all the ingredients here.

 

Said another way, let's turn to Kathie Costos.  Chaplain Kathie Costos, who’s been caring about PTSD issues and the military for years now, signs her personal emails with a great quote, allegedly from George Washington.  It says:

 

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation."  -- George Washington

Well, let’s just snap our fingers and bring that comment current, collapsing it with the material we’re talking about right here.  It still applies:

 

“The willingness with which women who have suffered sexual assaults in the military are to come forward is directly proportional to how they perceive other women veterans who have been victims of military sexual assault have been treated.”

And it seems they would have good reason to be concerned. You see women who came to horrible ends because their predation wasn’t understood for what it was (Maria Lauterbach and Cesar Laurean, but there are plenty more cases like that in the news, not just them); those whose situation was wrongly classified as “suicide” when it was way more clearly murder (see the case of Army Private LaVena Johnson, profiled in Salon and elsewhere, linked here); outrageous sexual assault situations against women contractors (see Jamie Leigh Jones' allegations against KBR, linked here); and well, the list goes on and on. Justice delayed = justice denied. 

 

It's just human nature/common sense: Fewer women come forward to report problems when they can see that the last situations they knew about weren’t handled well by the overarching authority, the military, and represented just more hell for the women involved.  That seriously needs not to happen.

 

(The Sacramento Bee, following up on my lifetime theme about good journalists pushing the culture forward, recently completed an exhaustive, and interesting, investigation about troops with criminal backgrounds, and what the effect on their subsequent service is.  Unfortunately for our purposes it didn't go far enough, because it didn't highlight or single out crimes against women.  If that were studied, and the results were significant -- that's two "if's," we realize -- those findings could go towards screening those potential recruits out of the military.  In a highly-charged aggressive environment with lots of boredom and little oversight, the last thing someone needs is more sexual predators in the midst, in uniform.)

 

In general, though, the focus shouldn’t just be on “reporting” or “treating” women who have suffered military sexual trauma.  It should be on prevention primarily, with a secondary emphasis on the others – or a sense that together, all three of those cords braid into a very strong rope, the kind that women will need to pull themselves up out of a very bad situation.

 

Women who suffer military sexual trauma are twice betrayed: once by the rapist, once by the system.  It’s time to put an end to that problem.

 

Some recommendations?

Create an atmosphere in which military sexual assault is not tolerated.  Where prosecution is expected and justice is swift.  Take women’s concerns seriously.  Raise the standard of investigation and prosecution to be on a par with the civilian world.  Expect, demand, and reward parity with the civilian police departments (good ones) and criminal justice system on this topic.  No more lost rape kits or botched, semi-competent investigations.  If you don’t know how to do this, go learn from the people who do, in the civilian world.  Call them in to be your speakers at your conferences, not the dipsticks who can simply restate the problem to you and offer nothing more than singing “Kumbaya” together as a solution. If you don't have the experts in-house, and my guess is that you heavily don't, go find them, because they are out there: many are specialists in a parallel situation in the civilian world. 

 

Call in some cutting edge thinkers, who can help you re-evaluate the situation as it already stands, and think some new thoughts on it.  People who have some competence in the civilian world, and are sensitive to the issues and concerns that surround women who have been traumatized by aggressive men in a culture that rewards it, but can’t seem to manage mitigating those qualities when they’re not called for – off the field.  The closest analog is actually pro sports: and both Jeff Benedict and Victoria Vreeland (incidentally, both attorneys) who we wrote about the other day on this, if they’re willing, might have copious insights to provide, based on their work with women who have been traumatized by sexual predators.  (Heck, I even know of one combat veteran and ex-cop, ex-police chief, ex-criminal justice teacher, who's getting his Ph.D. in psychology, and intimately understands PTSD, because he has it from combat. He might be willing to help you think through the problem, and create some solutions: or help train the trainers.  That's Rob Honzell.)

 

Want to know the scope of the problem?  Listen to Paul Reickhoff on it, who is once again pushing for change in a key area of importance to veterans.

 

Want to learn how to screen for potential offenders, or protect and keep women secure from it? Get in touch with Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear, and Protecting the Gift, and have him talk to you about what better security looks like for people who need the assist (women) in a dangerous environment.  A senior consultant to the Rand Corporation, and an international expert on security and threat assessment, he’s very familiar with concepts like unwanted pursuit, and predicting violent behavior – two topics that ought to be of concern to the military infrastructure on this problem.  Thankfully, he’s also very sensitized to the whole topic of women and assault, which is a rarity. 

 

Want to learn how the law and the medical system can work in conjunction to intervene effectively, and bring hope back to survivors?  Study things like the innovative “Passageways” program, a medical-legal partnership between Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center and Boston’s equally eminent Brigham & Women’s Hospital that offers domestic violence intervention for women. Sarah Boonin is the person who knows most about this program: her bio is linked here. (The Passageways program even has a cool little book that might be helpful for survivors as they work through some of their issues.)  And spend some time thinking about how to keep women warriors safe in an environment where their sexual safety is a) not a priority, and only poorly understood as a need; and b) where prosecution and treatment of offenses can be poorly handled, botched, or doubly victimizing.  Enlarge your minds, call in the real experts, not the supposed experts, ask the good questions, shake up the paradigm; rethink the problem, and come up with better solutions.

 

As good ol’ Albert Einstein is alleged to have said, in some vague quote I’m botching as I paraphrase, “no real problem can be solved at the same level of thinking that was in place when it was created; you always have to go one level up from it.”

 

That is…if you really want it to be solved.

 

It’s always possible – we like to look at every side of a topic, to better understand the 360 of it – that really nobody wants to solve this problem, or they’d be doing a better job of it.  Is it a way to shuffle women out of the military, which some feel they never should have been a part of in the first place?  Would it take too much wise screening of potentially felonious recruits, to start cutting down on the types of potential predators who are donning uniforms?  Is the longtime military focus on just one aspect of “flipping the switch” – the switch that trains men to be killers, but doesn’t help them re-integrate after combat, and resume their ordinary lives – part of the problem?  Men in combat are a finely-tuned killing machine, with women warriors in their midst – and the whole psychology is attuned to the enemy as the opponent.  Sometimes, women inadvertently become the opponent as well.

 

Seriously – who knows?  Certainly not I.  But one thing I do know for sure: this situation cries out for better handling.  And every week that goes by that it isn’t, women are being assaulted, dying and being killed – at their own hand, and at the hands of others.  And worst of all, by the system’s neglect.

 

It’s great that they’re out there – VA programs like the National Women's Trauma Recovery Program for Women Veterans, which we've blogged about here, and the Women's Mental Health Center for Women Veterans, which we've blogged about here -- programs devoted to helping women heal from military sexual assault.  But those programs are in their infancy, there aren’t enough of them, and the women who suffer these invasive tragedies and horrors by those with whom they serve – have a hellaciously tough time putting their lives back together again.  It’s in their honor that I’m even talking about this, which is a little off the topic of the main theme here on this blog, combat trauma and PTSD.  Really, though, military sexual assault of women warriors is just “another form of combat trauma.”

 

In wartime, “betrayal,” which means to have trust broken by one of the parties, in a horrific way that affects the one who relied upon it, and causes them by implication great harm – is a called “treason” – a crime punishable by death.  That is, when it’s the servicemember betraying the military.  When it’s the military betraying the servicemember?  What do we call that?

 

Let’s hope what we don’t call it is...business as usual.