MST
Military Sexual Trauma By Amber Robinson
The rumors often label the victim as a “whore” or “easy”, with insinuations that their motive was to save their reputation and not to report a crime. BriGette Paige McCoy who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, is an Army veteran, MST survivor and well-known advocate. Much of her work is with P rotect Our Defenders, the human rights organization, and Women Veteran Social Justice Network, among many other projects she has undertaken to help her fellow veterans.
According to the VA, MST includes unwanted touching, recurrent sexual harassment, coercion into sexual acts and rape. Although the problem of sexual trauma has always been present in the services, only in the last couple of decades have we come to learn just how acute the problem is. According to www.DAV.org, one in four women in the military report military sexual trauma and 1 in every 100 men.
She began her advocacy because she realized the need of survivors’ to have a voice as well as her belief that MST needed to be at the forefront of cultural change for the Armed Forces. She can speak to the issue of retaliation along with a variety of other micro-issues within the larger issue.
According to a report from the Pentagon that came out in 2019, MST reports numbers have seen a large spike from two years ago, in fact, a 39 percent raise from reports in 2017. MST advocates and researchers are not sure if this spike is due to the numbers of incidents increasing, or the number of reports are increasing.
“Military sexual trauma is problematic because it is often at the hands of a perpetrator that they know personally, report to directly, or that their commanding officer has direct authority and responsibility over,” said McCoy. “I think it creates a complex web of overlapping challenges overlooked with survivors.”
According to the Veterans Affairs Military Sexual Assault webpage, MST is a pervasive problem in the United States Armed Forces. But, according to advocates and survivors, the problem is not just pervasive, but a complex epidemic that has been ignored and unaddressed for decades.
According to many survivors and advocates, reporting is a huge part of the underlying problem surrounding MST. Victims must report to their own chain of command. For many MST survivors, their sexual trauma was committed by a person within their command who is superior to them. Often, reporting comes with different forms of “retaliation”, a word that has become prevalent in the last few years. Retaliation can start within the chain of command, or come directly from the perpetrator. It involves discrediting the victim by intimidating them, putting them on unfavorable details or rumor spreading. The rumors often label the victim as a “whore” or “easy”, with insinuations that their motive was to save their reputation and not to report a crime. Retaliation can start within the chain of command, or come directly from the perpetrator. It involves discrediting the victim by intimidating them, putting them on unfavorable details or rumor spreading.
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WWW.HomelandMagazine.com / NOVEMBER 2020
McCoy also states that on most occasions after an MST report, the victim must continue to serve daily with their assailant while the case is compiled, or UCMJ action is pending. McCoy goes on to say the lack of protection and validation of the victim can lead to deeper trauma and feelings of betrayal.