Thank you for holding this hearing and honoring me with an invitation to testify.

First, I would like to commend the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act, signed by President Obama just this month, as an essential step toward helping female veterans and the families of wounded warriors.

This Act takes an important step toward addressing the horrendous problem of military sexual assault by requiring the VA to train mental health professionals to care for women with sexual trauma.

This is progress. Yet I am concerned that the training be done properly. For my book, The Lonely Soldier, I interviewed more than 40 female veterans of our current wars. Too often they told me that when they tried to report an assault, the military and VA treated them as liars and malingerers.

They also told me that their Sexual Assault Response Coordinators, assigned to them by the military, often treated them with such suspicion that they felt re-traumatized and intimidated out of pursing justice. Indeed, the usual approach to a report of sexual assault within the military is to investigate the victim, not the perpetrator, and to dismiss the case altogether if alcohol is involved. Counselors have told me of seeing case after case where a battered and abused victim has been told, "It’s your word against his."

It is therefore essential that the counselors used by the military and the VA be trained in civilian rape crisis centers, away from a military culture that habitually blames the victim, and that is too often concerned with protecting the image of a platoon or commander by covering up wrongdoing. These counselors, and indeed anyone within the military charged with investigating sexual assault, should be trained to understand the causes, effects and costs of sexual abuse to both the victim and to society.

Within the VA, reform is also needed. The process for evaluating disability caused by military sexual assault needs to be automatically upgraded. And victims who were too intimidated to report an assault while on active duty should never be denied treatment once they come home, as they so often are now. The VA needs to recognize the fact that some 90 percent of victims never report assaults within the military because its culture is so hostile to them. The VA must also recognize and address the fact that it can take years to recover from sexual assault, and that untreated trauma caused by sexual assault can result in depression, homelessness, self-destructive behavior, and suicide. No victim of military sexual assault should ever be denied benefits and help.

In the light of the new Caregiver’s Act, I also want to alert this committee to the finding that many of our troops were sexually or physically abused long before they enlisted.

In two studies of army and marine recruits, conducted in 1996 and 2005 respectively, it was found that half the women and about one-sixth of the men reported having been sexually abused as children, while half of both said they were physically abused.[i]

The picture may have shifted lately with the recession driving more people into the military. Nonetheless, it looks as if close to half our troops are enlisting to escape violent homes.

Thus we need to provide counselors trained not only in military sexual assault but in childhood abuse and trauma. These counselors should be available to active duty troops and veterans. They should embedded with the combat stress counseling teams already deployed.

This is necessary not only to help troops cope with trauma, but to help prevent further sexual violence. Psychologists have long known that an abused boy can grow into an abusive man.[ii]

I emphasize this because too often the focus when addressing military sexual trauma is on women alone, ignoring the fact that men cause the problem, and that they, too, are sexually assaulted in the military.[iii]

Violence is endemic to the military, and little can be done about that. But our troops are not supposed to be enacting this violence on one another. The last chapter of my book offers a list of suggestions for how to at least decrease military sexual violence. These are too numerous to list here, but I include some essential examples:

• Promote more women. With more recognition and authority, women will help to increase respect for female troops, and respect is the single most important weapon against harassment and rape.
• Distribute women more evenly. No women should serve alone with all-male platoons, as they sometimes do now, for it leaves them isolated and vulnerable to assault.
• Strike the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which encourages persecution of men and women, gay or not.
• Reject recruits with records of domestic or sexual violence.
• Hold commanders accountable for assaults that occur in their units.
• And reward commanders and officers who pursue justice in cases of sexual assault.

Finally, let us recognize that more effective than any rules or laws is the attitude of the commander on the ground. Studies have shown that commanders who treat their female soldiers with respect and insist that other soldiers do likewise significantly reduce sexual persecution.[iv] Thus we must reform the culture within officer academies, which at the moment is rife with brutal hazing, abuse, and rape, as the Tailhook, Aberdeen and Air Force Academy scandals have too often demonstrated.[v] This violence drums women out of the service and trains men to enact and condone rape and torture.

All officer training schools for all military branches should teach their candidates to understand that rape is an act of anger, hatred, and power, not desire, and that sexual persecution destroys camaraderie and cohesion. Officers should learn to take pride in ensuring their troops are safe from disrespect and violence from their comrades, just as they take pride in bringing them home safely from war.

Thank you.

[i] L.N. Rosen and L. Martin, “The measurement of childhood trauma among male and female soldiers in the U.S. Army,” Military Medicine 161 (1996): 6, 342-345. 

Jessica Wolfe, Kiban Turner, et al. “Gender and Trauma as Predictors of Military Attrition: A Study of Marine Corps Recruits,” Military Medicine 170(2005): 12, 1037.

[ii] A. Nicholas Groth and H. Jean Birnbaum, Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender (New York: Plenum Press, 1979).

[iii] According to a 2008 DoD report, some 27 percent of men in the reserves and national guard reported sexual trauma in the military. Department of Veterans Affairs, "Military Sexual Trauma Among The Reserve Components Of The Armed Forces."

[iv] Sadler, et al. “Factors Associated With Women's Risk of Rape in the Military Environment.” (2003).

[v] “Conduct Unbecoming” by Cathy Booth Thomas, Time magazine, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,428045,00.html

“Military Sex Scandals From Tailhook to the Present: The Cure Can be Worse Than the Disease.” By Kingsley R. Browne, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, Volume 14:749 2007