For military veterans, the trauma of rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment can be as devastating as combat wounds. But these injuries, while real, are often invisible, and the circumstances behind them shrouded in secrecy and denial. The men and women who endure such crimes often have to fight a second battle, to convince the Department of Veterans Affairs that they are disabled and entitled to compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and other afflictions resulting from service-connected sexual violence.
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A report by advocates for sexual-trauma survivors paints a disheartening picture of unfair treatment. The advocates — the Service Women's Action Network, the A.C.L.U. and the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School — analyzed records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit covering disability claims from 2008 to 2012. They found that when a PTSD claim was related to military sexual trauma, as opposed to combat or another reason, the V.A. was less likely to approve it. The grant rate for such claims lagged behind the rate for other claims by 17 to 30 percentage points in those years.
This discrepancy unjustly burdens women, who file PTSD claims based on sexual trauma more often than men do. Nearly 16,000 veterans filed such claims in the years studied, two-thirds of them women. The report also found that men who filed such claims were approved at very low rates, and that the treatment of claims varied greatly among the V.A.'s regional offices, suggesting wide disparities in standards and training.
The report recommends common-sense reforms, like improving training and oversight for V.A. offices and relaxing the evidentiary standards for PTSD claims when sexual trauma is involved. This has already been done for combat-related claims, where pinpointing a precise cause of the disorder is difficult. The military and the V.A. have long failed to confront the problem of sexual attacks against those in uniform. The survivors of such crimes too often find the path to justice and treatment blocked.
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