Military assaults: Nowhere to turn
Army Pvt. Anna Moore spotted the man approaching as she knelt on the hallway floor, scraping off a dingy layer of wax. He was a sergeant from another battery with no apparent reason for entering the empty third floor of her barracks.
“Look at you, all sexy covered in paint,” he said.
Moore was a Patriot missile operator, on light duty and recovering from kidney stones, while the rest of her unit in Hanau, Germany, worked in the field.
The sergeant edged closer. Suddenly, he grabbed her between the legs. “Knock it off,” she
told him, then turned and headed for her nearby room. The sergeant followed.
He rushed at Moore and pulled her close, groping and fondling her. She fought back and screamed for help as he tried to force her onto the bed. From the hallway, a soldier who had just returned from the field heard her screams and called back. The sergeant fled.
She reported the October 2002 assault to her first sergeant, but he instructed her to drop the complaint.
He said it was better for everyone’s career — hers included — to just move on. Then he tore up her sworn statement.
“I said, ‘I don’t think that’s the answer,’ ” Moore recalled. “He told me to get out of his office. He yelled at me.”
Less than a month later, she began to receive bad job reviews and went to a mental health counselor for support.
What followed is familiar to many sexualassault victims in the military, according to active and former troops, families, victim advocates and veterans groups. ‘Personality disorder’
Less than eight months after she reported the assault, Moore was diagnosed with a pre-existing psychiatric illness that she had never heard of: personality disorder. The Army kicked her out.
Similar accounts from members in every branch of the military show that those who disclose a sexual assault face commanders who often disregard their reports and send them to uniformed counselors, who subsequently find them to be mentally unfit for duty, a seven-month San Antonio Express-News investigation shows.
Through dozens of interviews with experts and victims, and a review of thousands of pages of military and medical documents, the newspaper found the problem to be pervasive, with cases spanning three decades.
The pattern of expulsions continues, defying policies to limit the psychiatric discharges and to ensure qualified doctors evaluate sexual-assault victims.
Victims often had no history of mental health problems. Yet, military mental health officials diagnosed victims with disorders they claimed existed before their service, making them ineligible for medical benefits or re-enlistment.
No one tracks how often it happens. But women are disproportionately diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and discharged at higher rates than men, according to records obtained by veterans aid groups and reports from the Defense Department. 90 percent tossed out
A survey of 1,200 service members who sought help since 2003 at the nonprofit Military Rape Crisis Center found 90 percent of victims who reported sex assaults were involuntarily discharged from the military.
Most commonly, victims are told they have personality disorder, while others are labeled with adjustment disorder and bipolar disorder, said Panayiota Bertzikis, executive director of the Boston-based center.
“It’s a constant problem. They’re saying the victims are not credible because they’re crazy. They just want them to go away,” said Bertzikis, who was diagnosed with adjustment disorder and pushed out of the Coast Guard in 2007 after reporting a shipmate threw her to the ground, punched her in the face and raped her. “My medical records say I had problems adjusting to being raped.”
The Express-News found victims encounter an insular justice system in which superiors often interfere with sex-assault reports. Many victims face harassment and retaliation, or become targets of investigations into their own conduct. Others who seek transfers away from their bases are held in place for months, despite a policy to let them relocate quickly after an assault.
A series of lawsuits against the Pentagon and an ongoing sex-abuse scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, where 33 instructors have been investigated for illicit conduct with 63 trainees, have turned a spotlight on the epidemic of rape in the military.
Last year, an estimated 26,000 troops were victims of sexual assault, an increase of 35 percent over 2011.
Military women are far more likely than civilians to be victimized. One in four female soldiers has been sexually assaulted, compared with one in six women in the civilian world.
The prevalence of the problem is aggravated by a lack of faith in the justice system. By the Pentagon’s estimate, 89 percent of victims do not report sex crimes. By comparison, in the civilian justice system, about 65 percent of sexual as- saults go unreported, the Justice Department says.
In a world where good soldiers must sacrifice for the sake of the survival and cohesion of the unit, victims who break the silence say they are ignored, discredited or even punished.
“After reporting it, I became the problem,” said Lola Miles, an Air Force helicopter mechanic who was discharged in 2005 with borderline personality disorder after she told her superiors that a fellow airman had pinned her to a car seat, grabbing and kissing her.
Commanders told her she had invited the abuse by acting like “one of the guys,” said Miles. “They told me I needed to repair my reputation.”
To distance her from the perpetrator, she was moved to the overnight work shift. She was told that if she pushed her complaint higher up the chain of command, she would receive a written reprimand.
The Pentagon has implemented a flurry of reforms aimed at improving care for victims, developing better criminal prosecution and changing military culture. Last year, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta required a higher level of commanders to decide how sex-assault cases are handled.
New provisions in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act require the creation of specially Did not want anyone to know Did not think anything would be done Afraid of retaliation/ reprisals from the person(s) who did it or from their friends Thought it was not important enough to report trained victims’ units for each service branch.
Col. Alan Metzler, the Deputy Director of the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said the services are broadening new protections for victims.
One key provision would give victims who file an open sexualassault report the right to appeal an administrative discharge, regardless of whether they feel they were targeted for speaking out, he said. Accounts of retaliation against victims, including complaints of being pushed out for mental disorders, resonate with top military officials, he said.
“They’ve told us this is something they want us to focus on, and we are,” he said. “We’re listening to victims and we’re here to fight their fight.”
It’s unclear how many sexual-assault victims have been cast out of the military for specious mental health problems. But 31,000 service members were discharged for personality disorder from 2001 to 2010, according to a study released last year by the Vietnam Veterans Association of America.
Numbers compiled by the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School show women in every branch of the armed services are discharged with personality disorder at disproportionate rates. The widest disparity appeared in the Air Force, where women make up about 20 percent of the population, but account for 35 percent of personality discharges, according to data released by the Yale law clinic.
A Defense Department report released in June shows servicewomen are far more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders. The study, published in the Medical Surveillance Monthly Report, tracked active-duty service members from 2000 to 2011 and found women were diagnosed with personality and adjustment disorders at more than twice the rate for men.
Personality disorder refers to a family of 10 disorders that includes paranoid, borderline and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders. It is a severe mental illness marked by long-term problematic behavior like impulsiveness and anxiety that make it difficult to keep stable personal relationships and hold jobs. By definition, symptoms appear during adolescence.
The consequences for victims extend beyond the loss of their careers, as the Pentagon considers personality disorder to be a condition that existed prior to service and thus does not qualify as the basis for a medical discharge.
The diagnosis can prevent veterans from obtaining lifetime disability benefits and health care. In some cases, sexualassault victims have been forced to repay their enlistment bonuses. ‘False diagnosis’
Moore, 33, is raising three young children in Colorado, and she and her husband are struggling to pay a $6,000 bill that includes her enlistment bonus plus fees. For nearly 10 years, she has fought the Army to remove the finding of personality disorder from her record.
“It was a completely false diagnosis,” she said. In response to congressional pressure in 2008, the Pentagon tightened rules to require a psychiatrist or a psychologist with a Ph.D. to diagnose a personality disorder. A discharge is warranted only when a service member’s ability to function is “significantly impaired.”
As an apparent result of the changes, personality disorder discharges dropped sharply, from 4,054 in 2007 to 564 in 2010.
But as those numbers tapered, dismissals in some service branches spiked for another mental illness: adjustment disorder.
From 2008 to 2010, annual discharges for adjustment disorder more than doubled in the Air Force, from 303 to 668.
Even after the reforms, Defense Department reviews found hundreds of illegal personality disorder discharges, according to documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the veterans group. A Navy document showed only 8.9 percent of personality disorder discharges in 2008 and 2009 were legal.
A GAO report in 2010 found problems persist, with as many as 60 percent of troops receiving the diagnosis from a mental health provider who was not sufficiently qualified.
Rebecca Johnson-Stone was among the combat troops whose case was supposed to benefit from the reforms.
She was working as an Army intelligence specialist in Iraq in 2009 when a fellow soldier attempted to rape her, slammed her head into a concrete barrier and threw her into a dumpster. No illness, ‘I’m hurt’
“I remember exactly what he told me before I got dumped: ‘You don’t deserve to be in combat because you’re a woman,’ ” said Johnson-Stone, 31.
As a result of the attack, she suffered a traumatic brain injury that caused severe chronic headaches and destroyed her sense of smell. Despite the injuries, she returned to her team and finished the deployment. But after her return to the U.S., ongoing health problems, including nosebleeds and blackout spells, prompted doctors to recommend her for medical retirement. She agreed to the separation and is waiting to be discharged.
In October, the medical evaluation board rejected the findings of her physician and a neurologist, and switched the underlying reason for her discharge to personality disorder and later changed it again to depressive disorder.
“I don’t have a psychiatric illness. I’m hurt,” she said.
Victims taught to believe in loyalty and trust suffer a profound sense of betrayal — first, at the hands of a fellow soldier turned sexual assailant and then by a chain of command that fails to support them.
For victims already struggling to cope, the mistreatment from their command worsens the trauma.
Like other survivors, Moore did not receive proper mental health counseling for sexual assault and became suicidal. What VA experts say
When she first sought out a therapist after the attack, her superiors disapproved. She was reprimanded for faking an illness to avoid work. She did not return for help until months later, after her command’s dismissal of the assault and harassment reports left her feeling defeated.
“If I had the appropriate treatment, I would have been able to recuperate completely, but because of everything I was put through afterwards, it turned into severe PTSD,” she said.
Data from the Veterans Affairs Department show post-traumatic stress is closely tied to military sexual trauma. Of those veterans who said they experienced sexual trauma, 55 percent also had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Post-traumatic stress and personality disorders share symptoms, and distinguishing between the two can be difficult, VA experts said.
“Sometimes, clinicians mistake the behavior of a person with PTSD for that of personality disorder, and it’s hard to diagnose that with any validity until the PTSD has been sufficiently treated,” said psychologist Dianne Dunn, the Military Sexual Trauma Coordinator for South Texas.
“If a clinician doesn’t ask the right questions and determine that there is a trauma history, that then would explain why they might very well get the diagnoses of a personality disorder,” Dunn said.
kking@express-news.net