Female veterans need to be voice for other women after military sexual abuse

Many Women Veterans have difficulty receiving service-connected disability for PTSD due to MST (Military Sexual Trauma).

“We need more specific information about the incidents. We need to know, within a 2 month period, the date(s) the incidents occurred. We need to know the name(s) of your attackers, and we also need to know if any police reports, or other reports, were filed regarding the incidents described in your statement. If police reports were filed, we need to know the name of the agency they were filed with, and the approximate date they were filed.”

"Your service treatment records do not show treatment for PTSD or any other mental health disorders while in service. Service personnel records do not provide any evidence that a personal assault occurred in service. There is no evidence of changes in performance or performance evaluations or unexplained behavioral changes which could be expected from a person who had undergone such an assault.

In the National Center for PTSD Fact Sheet on Military Sexual Trauma,
Page 2,under What Happens?: "There is no set reaction to MST......You may have a response right away, or it may delayed for month or years."
Page 3 first paragraph states: "After a sexual assault, many women veterans keep quit. They worry what others will think of them, and that talking about the assault will hurt their military careers."

As you can see from the National Center for PTSD already shows, that many times, that MST are not reported, and that reactions vary, including the onset of symptoms.
And again other documents and reports basically say the same thing.
What does it take for the VA to believe the Veterans, who are seeking service-connected disability for PTSD due to MST? Especially for the older Veterans.
Changes need to be made now.


In the Military Sexual Trauma: Violence and Sexual Abuse Document:
Page 3, 2nd Paragraph: "......However, three fourth of the women who were raped did not report the incident to a ranking officer."
Page 4, 2nd Paragraph: "Reasons why both men and women avoid reporting sexual abuse include fears no one will believe them, that their careers will disruupted, that they will be harassed or face retribution from their attacker, or that they will be told to suck it up."
Sexual Assault Permates theU.S. Armed Forces, CBS Evening News: Shocking Report On Frequent Attacks, Low Rate Of Investigation, Prosecution, March, 17, 2009
Page 3, 1st Paragraph: "The Pentagon acknowledges that some 80 percent of rapes are never reported - making it the most under-documented crime in the military."
Page 3, 3rd Paragraph: "They didn't report because they didn't report because they didn't think they'd believed."
The Women's War Document
Page 8, 3rd Paragraph: "Given that PTSD sometimes takes years to surface in a veteran..."
Page 16, 3rd Paragraph: "There is the story of Tina Priest, a 21-year-old soldier who, according to Army investigation records, shot herself with an M-6 rifle in Iraq last March, two weeks after filing a rape charge against a fellow soldier and days after being given a diagnosis of ^acute stress disorder consistent with rape trauma^"
Page 22.last Paragraph: "Some of the women served in previous decades and were only now dealing with their PTSD" Sadly to say, this is many of us "Older" Veterans fall in this category. Assaults occurred decades ago, and we supposed to remember the exact dates, names and such? We forget to survive only to find ourselves wondering why the symptoms of PTSD come to surface.

NAMI VETERANS COUNCIL
Cornelia Huebscher
Veteran/ U.S. Army
NAMI Alaska Liaison to NVC
Chair/Women Veterans Subcommittee to NVC
Chair/NAMI Vets Alaska
huebscher@acsalaska.net
www.nami.org