When you aren’t following the sexual assault scandals within the U.S. navy, tune in: It’s one more enviornment the place bogus psychiatric diagnoses are taking part in a sordid function.
Girls troopers who report sexual assault are recognized with psychiatric circumstances akin to borderline persona dysfunction or bipolar dysfunction that get them drummed out. Not solely are their careers ruined, however they’re denied advantages and generally should even repay any bonuses they obtained for enlisting.
As a result of the signs of those “preexisting” issues overlap with the emotional sequelae of trauma — anger, concern, despair, nervousness, avoidance — it may be exhausting to inform the distinction.
Girls in each department of the U.S. navy are being disproportionately discharged with persona issues, in accordance with an investigative sequence, Twice Betrayed, within the San Antonio (Texas) Categorical-Information. The Air Power has the widest disparity: Girls make up 20 p.c of the drive, however 35 p.c of persona discharges.
Typically, as in a single case featured within the Categorical-Information sequence, navy psychologists and psychiatrists are being influenced by officers within the accused’s or accuser’s chain of command to view accusers as mentally unstable and/or sexually promiscuous.
In a report on “unlawful” psychiatric diagnoses, the Vietnam Veterans of America say that along with rape victims, many fight troopers with natural mind trauma or posttraumatic stress dysfunction proceed to be drummed out of the navy with bogus persona issues and adjustment issues that block their incapacity advantages, regardless of Congressional efforts to crack down on this abuse (for instance, by requiring that the diagnoses be issued by psychiatrists or PhD-level psychologists).
It was a bit incongruous to search out myself sitting in an Air Power courtroom, consulting on a sexual assault case, when the information broke that the chief of the Air Power’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program had been arrested for sexually assaulting a feminine stranger in a parking zone.Speak concerning the fox guarding the hen coop.
That weird twist got here on the heels of a headline-grabbing survey documenting skyrocketing charges of sexual assault within the navy: An estimated 26,000 troopers have been sexually assaulted in 2012, up from 19,000 the yr earlier than. Girls within the navy face about twice the danger of sexual assault as civilian ladies (one in three versus about one in six). And solely a tiny fraction of assaults — 3,374 final year– are reported.
That is possible resulting from the truth that ladies who do report rape are shunned, disbelieved, and retaliated in opposition to, and their assailants are not often punished. The seven-month investigation by Karisa King of the San Antonio Categorical-Information discovered that solely about 10 p.c (302 of two,900) of the accused have been courtroom martialed, with solely 177 sentenced to confinement. (The airman in my case was a kind of uncommon few, however then once more he was a low-level airman, not an officer. And it most likely did not assist his case that every one of those scandals have been busting out that very week.)
It’s no coincidence that the San Antonio paper ran the sequence: Outdoors that metropolis sits the sprawling Lackland base, the Air Power’s primary coaching middle for enlisted personnel. In an unfolding investigation there, no less than 33 coaching instructors are suspected of sexually assaulting 63 or extra trainees.
If this newest scandal is not sufficient to persuade individuals of the hyperlink between sexual violence and a local weather of hostile masculinity (as researchers akin to Neil Malamuth have been arguing for many years), I do not know what’s. However, if psychologists within the intercourse offender remedy business obtained their arms on these coaching officers, they’d most likely label them with some fictional dysfunction like “paraphilia not in any other case specified (nonconsent)” that decontextualized their behaviors past recognition.
Consulting in a navy courtroom martial one week and a sexually violent predator civil dedication listening to the following, I can not assist however discover how psychological sickness strikes in clusters, afflicting sexual assault victims in a single setting and offenders within the different. The clue that situational exigency is in play is that in neither case is the prognosis about serving to the supposed sufferer. It is all about punishment, with prognosis because the weapon.
Psychiatry Important Reads
I extremely suggest the sequence, Twice Betrayed. An in-depth report by the The Vietnam Veterans of America on the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses within the navy, Casting Troops Apart, is HERE.
