Vulnerabilities in Military Rape Culture

The Department of Defense (DOD) and Veterans Administration have inherited a crisis of gigantic proportion in the growing rates of MST. In particular, treatment for sexual assault can be complex and requires time. That is, though sexual assault fits under the general umbrella of trauma, each sexual assault presents a wide array of unique traumas that must be addressed specifically to help overcome the impact a sexual assault can have on a victim’s psyche. Too often, military service providers, often staffed by mental health clinicians early in their career, treat only the rape and not the circumstances around the rape or victim that might complicate treatment. That is, a victim who has had a supportive loving family and experiences a one-time sexual assault will have very different psychological needs than a victim of child abuse before the military and then gang raped during deployment. Often, clinicians work from a medical model of diagnosis and ignore the etiology of the severity of symptoms. That is, medical model clinicians only pay attention to the symptomology of the trauma, but not the antecedent to the trauma symptoms themselves. Unfortunately, this means that many survivors are receiving inadequate, or potentially even harmful, treatment from those clinicians who are supposed to be the ones helping them.