Perry 1
Shanda Perry
Dr. Rebecca Johns
ISS 4935
April 25, 2012
Women in the Military: Mental Trauma and Female War Veterans
I served in the United States Navy as a power plant engineer and with the military police from 1992 to 2005. I was 19 when I left for boot camp. After completing boot camp, I attended the first of many training schools, far from home. I was a young woman, impressionable and eager to please. Within two years, I had a myriad of experiences, all of which shaped who I am today: As a power plant engineer, in environments dominated by men,I was sexually harassed twice and sexually assaulted once (and I reported all three occurrences). In all of my military roles, I experienced workplace discrimination. I worked with men who deliberately said and did awful things in an effort to get a rise out of me.When I worked with the military police, I tended to female victims of severe sexual assaults. In some memorable cases, the victims did not make the report;friends reported the assaults after they had been sworn to secrecy, and the victims would decline to press charges, frightened of repercussions due to the closed-in culture of the military. These experiences incensed me. They also made me aware that military members are people, too. Just as they are lauded as heroes when they return from wars, they are susceptible to trauma and to reprehensible behavior. As I got older and gained rank and the respect that accompanies it, the scramble to hold on to what felt like a basic sense of dignity mercifully melted away. It was replaced with the luxury to relax and to observe my fellow female sailors, especially the younger, greener recruits who reminded me of who I once was. I became a mentor, an example and a sounding board. I consulted many female sailors, usually subordinates, about proper comportment. I reminded them that they were still women. They came into the military as women, and even though training did its best to strip away all marks of gender, people were still people, and the injustices of the world outside the base gates still occurred inside those gates (meaning the military environment, both domestically and overseas) , where most of us felt safe and protected.As a result, I formulated a way of dealing with the world, a philosophy of sorts, which sticks with me today. I shared this philosophy with those younger women: I will respect you, and I deserve respect.You don’t have to like me, nor I you, but everyone should act in a civilized manner. I may be female, but that does not mean I deserve to be treated as a lesser being.If my personal boundaries are crossed, the way in which I react depends on the situation and the environment.I am lucky that I did not actively serve in the conflicts in the Middle East,but I could understand how, if I faced challenges during a time of peace, women who served during a time of war would face those challenges and more.
I don’t know whether I was more amazed by the admissions that I read, by the fact that these women stepped forward to speak, or by the fact that they were broadcast in a popular magazine. Women who served in the War in Iraq were interviewed for Marie Claire magazine, and they spoke candidly about their experiences in the Middle East. In Life as an American Female Soldier by Tara McKelvey (2007), Jennifer Errington, former Captain of the US Army, recalled “When it was too hot and we'd take off our jackets and wear just our T-shirts, the sexual remarks were endless. You'd hear, "Oh, my God, she's got boobs." Even if you don't sleep with anyone, people will say you've slept with the whole unit. There were lots of reminders that you weren't just a soldier — you were a female soldier.” Former Army Specialist Ashley Pullen stated,“At night, my roommate and I would turn the music up loud. The guys would come over, and we'd dance. It was fun. After they left, though, I slept with my back to the wall so if somebody reentered the trailer, I could protect myself. The chance of rape during wartime is high.” Pullen continued to speak about how her experiences in Iraq impacted her mental health. She now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “I spent nearly a year in Iraq. How do you go back to normal life after something like that? You can't just turn it on and off. Home looks the same, but I'm not. I'm harsher; I'll get in these moods where I go from happy-go-lucky to "get away from me." I have nightmares. I can't stand it when a balloon pops. I'm less trusting. My husband works part-time at Wal-Mart, and I'm not working at all. After everything I've been through, I can't concentrate. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder last fall. I'm not looking to the future anymore. I look at every day and how I'm going to get through it (McKelvey, 2007). Pullen’s experiences directly contributed to her PTSD diagnosis, and PTSD now controls her life.
The data in this paper provides evidence on how women have come to participate in the military, up to but not including armed conflict in active combat situations. It also examines how mental trauma affects their personal and professional lives, both during military service and afterwards. It shows that a number of professionals acknowledge that female service members and veterans have not received adequate care for the mental trauma they have received as a result of deployment during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and outlines measures which are being taken to improve the range of veterans who need care and the quality of care that they receive. The claim of this paper is supported by qualitative research and secondary sources. Magazine articles are used to give personal anecdotes and scholarly journals support the sub-claims herein. This information was derived from libraries, internet research and casual reading.
Female service members are steadily gaining equal footing with their male counterparts (Spangler, Simons, Monroe, & Thase, 1996). Prior to 1948, women only held permanent positions in military detachments as nurses.Female patriots, eager to volunteer to serve their country, were only allowed to do so temporarily and during times of war, when the country needed their numbers to swell the military ranks. These women were barred from active combat duty and served in auxiliary roles. According to Brown (2012), the ladies of the Women’s Army Corps were trained as clerks, cooks, drivers, photographers, medical and dental technicians and financial specialists.The women of the U.S. Naval Reserve received training as communication watch officers, language specialists, radio and radar technicians, lawyers and educational services officers(Brown, 2012). The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act was enacted in 1948, enabling women to serve in permanent roles in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force (Encyclopedia Brittanica Profiles: 300 Women Who Changed the World, 2012). With the passing of this revolutionary piece of legislation, women were allowed to carve a career out of military service, but their roles did not change immediately.As time passed, a greater number of jobs were opened up to female enlistees. With a larger variety of career paths open available to them and three major situations of armed conflict in the future, it was only a matter of time until female service members would share combat experiences with their male counterparts.
For many female service members, integration and equality came with a price. According to Desai, Fontana and Rosenheck, women service members who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF, or the Iraq War) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF, or the War in Afghanistan) have experienced more exposure to a larger array of trauma than have their counterparts who participated in combat in the Persian Gulf and Vietnam (Fontana, 2010).For their study, Desai et al.relied on five categories of traumatic events: receiving fire, both hostile and friendly, participating in atrocious acts, witnessing atrocious acts but refraining from participation, undergoing sexual trauma during active military duty, and noncombat, nonsexual trauma, such as training accidents (Fontana, 2010). The range of these activities illustrates the changing roles of women in today’s military. They also show that women are rapidly gaining equal footing with their male counterparts.
Unfortunately, women service members have not been spared the horrors of war. Through the decades, they have experienced every type of trauma on that list, but the levels of exposure have differed with each war.According to Desai et al., female veterans who served in the Persian Gulf War and OIF/OEF reported less occurrences of participating in atrocities than did women who served in Vietnam.Veterans of OIF/OEF report less occurrences of sexual trauma than did Vietnam and Persian Gulf veterans (Fontana, 2010). The gradual decrease in reported claims of wartime atrocities points in two directions: either such horrors have occurred less frequently or, more likely, women have gained a greater collusion with their male counterparts, and reported wartime atrocities less frequently than they did in the past.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been full of atrocities. One prominent example was the abusive treatment of prisoners at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Beginning in 2004, military police personnel from the Army were found guilty of promulgating sexual, psychological and physical abuse against imprisoned Iraqis, up to and including torture, rape, sleep deprivation and homicide.One prominent and sensationalized aspect of the events at Abu Ghraib was the publishing of pictures taken by the soldiers, presumably for personal use as souvenirs. Those photos were used as evidence against the soldiers who were accused of abusing and humiliating inmates. They showed prisoners in demeaning, humiliating poses, both with and without the soldiers.One intriguing aspect of the events at Abu Ghraib was the participation of female soldiers in the mistreatment of the prisoners. Of the eleven soldiers convicted by military courts-martial (the military equivalent of court) of prisoner abuse, three were female. Private Lynndie England and Specialists Megan Abmuhl and Sabrina Harman participated willingly in the abuse of those prisoners alongside their male counterparts. In Sexualized Torture and Abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison: Feminist Psychological Analyses, author Eileen L. Zurbriggen states that women have assimilated to the hypermasculine military culture, and that that the process of basic military training imparts masculine socialization to both male and female recruits, which lessens gender differences in military environments (Zurbriggen, 2008). The events at Abu Ghraib support this theory. The female soldiers at Abu Ghraib went along with the “program” of prisoner humiliation and torture. The photographs that were circulated by the media showed smiling, happy women in military uniforms. In images that left an indelible mark on the collective American consciousness, these women were photographed grinning as they pointed to the exposed genitals of Iraqi prisoners and leading prisoners on leashes.
While it is noble to volunteer to serve in the military and to put one’s life on the line in times of war, studies have shown that people who volunteer may have psychological characteristics that make them easier to govern and perhaps more pliable to the dictates of authority. This does not mean that they are psychologically weak, just that they may ascribe to more patriarchal and traditional social mores.A “herd mentality,” the group-like tendency to go with the flow, brings up another interesting factor in the self-selection of members in an all-volunteer military: Zurbriggen mentions a study done by Johnson and Kaplan (1991) which indicated a willingness in male volunteers to be willingly punished by authority figures and a possible correlation to female volunteers, who may have the same characteristics (2008). Zurbriggen also noted that female enlistees may agree (more than women who do not choose to enlist) with traditional aspects of masculinity, such as hierarchical roles,staking and holding a place within that hierarchal system by any means necessary. Zurbriggen also notedthat all volunteers may tend to place more value on physical action and less on thought (2008). This is an admirable, and some may say necessary, quality for a soldier to have.
According to Luxton, Skopp and Maguen (2010), women are generally at higher risk for depression than men. This explains the higher rate of women veterans reporting depression. Luxton et al. found that female veterans were more likely to report depression as a result of combat exposure than were male veterans (2010). As proof of their findings, Luxton et al reference the diathesis-stress perspective, which explains behavior as a result of genetic or developmental vulnerability (Drevets, 2012).
Parallels have been drawn between the events at Abu Ghraib and the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. In Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty?, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland question whether the soldiers who perpetuated the atrocities against prisoners at Abu Ghraib shared abuse-related characteristics, such as “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism and social dominance,” that were shared by those who participated as “prison guards” in the Stanford Prison experiment (2007). Carnahan and McFarland found that self-selection was in place long before those soldiers came to be stationed at Abu Ghraib. The War in Iraq began in 2003 and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004. It can be deduced that fresh hostilities toward Iraqi prisoners in light of the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the domination these soldiers were feeling toward the captive prisoners culminated in the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib. The differences between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the crimes of Abu Ghraib are twofold: Abu Ghraib was not an experiment, and Abu Ghraib, unlike the Stanford experiments, included female participants. It is telling that these women acted with the men more than against them. Zurbriggen (2008) noted that all of the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib were male, and that none of the women who were stationed at Abu Ghraib’s military police detachment were bystanders. All of them participated.
Women in the military have also been subject to sexual trauma.Along with the growing number of women serving in the military, a 2011 study by Ghahramanlou-Holloway, Cox, Fritz and George reported an increase in the rate of military sexual trauma. Defined as sexual assault or severe sexual harassment experienced during military service, military sexual trauma has gained prevalence among female military members. Compared to one percent of male military members, 22% of females have reported experiencing military sexual trauma (Ghahramanlou-Holloway, Cox, Fritz, & George, 2011). The threat of military sexual trauma is usually from inside the ranks. In a study of women who served in Iraq, Katz et al. found that 56% of the female veterans surveyed reported experience military sexual trauma. All of them reported sexual trauma, 33% reported unwanted physical advances and 3% reported rape or completed assault. All of these women reported that these events occurred at the hands of their fellow service members ( (Katz, Bloor, Cojucar, & Draper, 2007).
Women are still prohibited from participating in active combat roles. As a result, female veterans experience lesser rates of combat exposure than do male veterans, but they report experiencing more depressive symptoms than males. In an examination of the differences in traumatic event exposure among male and female veteran mental health patients, Freedy et al.revealed 12.3% of male veterans receiving treatment at VA health centers suffered from PTSD, compared to 9.2% of female veterans at the same facilities. 15.9% of males suffered from depression, compared to 29.3% of females(2010). Freedy et al. report that sexual trauma, experienced both prior to military service and during military service, should indicate a higher level of PTSD in female military members. Instead, the rate of females reporting symptoms of PTSD has been lower than expected.Women are taking on more active roles in the military, but are not directly engaged in combat, which may explain for the lower-than-expected number of women reporting symptoms of PTSD.
Research by Mattocks et al. found that all combat veterans may be more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, including unprotected sex (2010). Mattocks et al. also reported that, since depression has been associated with women practicing unprotected sex, women veterans with mental health problems may have a higher risk for pregnancy (Mattocks, et al., 2010).Female veterans with PTSD or depression also face risks when they become pregnant.
Pregnancy can both precipitate and aggravate physical and mental health conditions, and since VA facilities contract out health care services for pregnant women instead of offering them continuing care during pregnancy with caregivers who know their preexisting conditions and with whom they are comfortable, there is often a lack of coordination between health care providers who may be unaware of the mental health care problems faced by pregnant veterans. This is not to say that all pregnancies in female veterans are the result of high-risk behavior precipitated by symptoms of depression, but that is has been noted as an issue which the VA has become aware of as a vulnerable point at which people under its care are experiencing a lapse in care and experiencing consequences which can affect both the parent(s) and children.