Veterans Say Rape Cases Mishandled

Rape is a crime. Simple. So why is it there are some believing they are above the law? Why would anyone in the military not be able to honor the law? This is the part we all need to face. They believe they can ignore it.

This attitude not only insults females in the military, it insults every female veteran slapping their service with a less than worthy middle finger. It insults every woman in this country especially women seeking protection and justice from a rapists.

Veterans Say Rape Cases Mishandled
February 15, 2011 posted by Veterans Today
WASHINGTON – A group of U.S. veterans who say they were raped and abused by their comrades want to force the Pentagon to change how it handles such cases.

More than a dozen female and two male current or former service members say servicemen get away with rape and other sexual abuse and victims are too often ordered to continue to serve alongside those they say attacked them.

Kori Cioca, 25, of Wilmington, Ohio, speaks about how she was raped while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard

In a federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday that names Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, they want an objective third party to handle such complaints because individual commanders have too much say in how allegations are handled.

The alleged attackers in the lawsuit include an Army criminal investigator and an Army National Guard commander. The abuse alleged ranges from obscene verbal abuse to gang rape.

In one incident, an Army Reservist says two male colleagues raped her in Iraq and videotaped the attack. She complained to authorities after the men circulated the video to colleagues. Despite being bruised from her shoulders to elbows from being held down, she says charges weren’t filed because the commander determined she “did not act like a rape victim” and “did not struggle enough” and authorities said they didn’t want to delay the scheduled return of the alleged attackers to the United States.

“The problem of rape in the military is not only service members getting raped, but it’s the entire way that the military as a whole is dealing with it,” said Panayiota Bertzikis, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit and claims she was raped in 2006. “From survivors having to be involuntarily discharged from service, the constant verbal abuse, once a survivor does come forward your entire unit is known to turn their back on you. The entire culture needs to be changed.”

Although The Associated Press normally does not identify the victims of sexual assault, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit have publicly discussed the cases.

Bertzikis, 29, of Somerville, Mass., now is executive director of the Military Rape Crisis Center. She says she was raped by a Coast Guard shipmate while out on a social hike with him in Burlington, Vt. Bertzikis complained to her commanding officer, but she said authorities did not take substantial steps to investigate the matter. Instead, she said, they forced her to live on the same floor as the man she had accused and tolerated others calling her a “liar” and “whore.”
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Veterans Say Rape Cases Mishandled

And then we have this study.

Trauma increases risks for alcohol problems in women
February 14, 2011
By Jim Dryden

Young women who have experienced traumatic events are more likely to become alcohol dependent than those who have not, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Midwest Alcoholism Research Center (MARC), which is housed in the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine.

The MARC involves collaborations among Washington University alcoholism researchers and scientists at the University of Iowa, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System, Arizona State University and Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia.

The center is preparing to host the 11th Annual Guze Symposium on Alcoholism, which this year will focus on Trauma and Alcoholism, Findings from studies published in the journals Psychological Medicine and the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggest that trauma is an important risk factor for alcohol problems in women.
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Trauma increases risks for alcohol problems in women

They prepare for the fact there will be traumatic events when they deploy but what they are not prepared for is being attacked by their own and then betrayed.

Women go into the military as they have since the beginning of this country, legally or disguising themselves and they will keep going into the military with the same patriotic tug of the heart as males. They will deploy into combat zones and while they are technically not supposed to be in combat roles, they are. With the kind of warfare going on as terrorist tactics remove safe zones, combat comes to them.

Why do they serve? Because they love this country and the rights that are supposed to be protected for all citizens but as they are risking their lives they discover they are sub-citizen to their commanders in the military. Rape is a crime. If these same commanders had a wife, sister or daughter raped by someone in the military or in civilian life, they would not be able to put the rapist criminal above them. So how do these same people justify it when it is a servicewoman under their command?