Military Rape Crisis Center

By Melissa Dribben, Inquirer Staff Writer The U.S. military is struggling to defend troops who are under siege day and night on ill-defined battlefields. Troops who are fighting wars in which it can be impossible to identify the enemy or to know whom to trust. And when they are betrayed, they dare not tell anyone.…

By Nan Levinson When Panayiota Bertzikis tried to tell her commanding officers that she had been raped in May 2006 by a shipmate four months into her tour at the Burlington, Vt., Coast Guard Station, they discouraged her from talking to an Equal Opportunity officer, barred her from seeing a civilian therapist, ignored a written…

KISSIMMEE, Fla. (AP) — The “show and tell” table at this gathering of doctors featured contraceptive sponges and female condoms. Life-size rubber pelvises and female breasts covered several other tables at the back of a windowless convention center ballroom. The lectures focused on topics like how to help a rape victim feel comfortable in an…

An estimated 3,500 New Mexican female veterans have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychological syndrome commonly tied to combat. The vast majority of them were traumatized not by war, however, but by sexual assaults by fellow servicemen, according to New Mexico Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System officials. “Eighty to 90 percent” of the state’s…

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — The secretary of the Navy has censured the former commander of a fighter squadron at Oceana Naval Air Station. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said Cmdr. Liam Bruen permitted a hostile work environment, allowed subordinates to sexually harass a junior officer and gave the officer a bad performance evaluation as reprisal…

ST. PETERSBURG — Fallout from a series of sexually charged Coast Guard hazing incidents is continuing, with more disciplinary action possibly to come. Seven current and former crew members of the Coast Guard cutter Venturous, based in St. Petersburg, were disciplined for participating in the hazing over a two-year period, according to the Coast Guard.…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The military too quickly destroys records from the hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults reported confidentially each year, say victims’ advocates and some members of Congress. They say the practice can hamper successful disability claims by victims or the prosecution of offenders. They want the military to preserve and centralize all reports…