SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Army Pvt. Anna Moore spotted the man approaching as she knelt on the hallway floor, scraping off a dingy layer of wax. He was a sergeant from another battery with no apparent reason for entering the empty third floor of her barracks. Why was he there, she wondered.
"Look at you, all sexy covered in paint," he said.
Moore worried about her isolated spot that morning. She was a Patriot missile operator, on light duty and recovering from kidney stones, while the rest of her unit in Hanau, Germany, worked in the field.
The sergeant edged closer. He tried to make small talk as he watched her work. Suddenly, he grabbed her between the legs. She jumped and pulled away from him.
"Knock it off," she told him, then turned and headed for her nearby room. The sergeant followed.
He rushed at Moore and pulled her close, groping and fondling her. She fought back and screamed for help as he repeatedly tried to force her onto the bed. Her battle buddy, who had just returned from the field, heard her screams and called back. The sergeant fled.
She reported the October 2002 assault to her first sergeant, but he instructed her to drop the complaint.
He said the sergeant who attacked her was preparing to transfer back home to his family, that it was better for everyone's career — hers included — to just move on. Then he tore up her sworn statement.
"I said, 'I don't think that's the answer,'" Moore recalled in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News (http://bit.ly/13M8IUG). "He told me to get out of his office. He yelled at me."
Less than a month later, she began to receive bad job reviews and went to a mental health counselor for support.
What followed is familiar to many sexual-assault victims in the military, according to active and former troops, families, victim advocates and veterans groups.
Less than eight months after she reported the assault, Moore was diagnosed with a pre-existing psychiatric illness that she had never heard of: personality disorder. The Army kicked her out.
Similar accounts from members in every branch of the military show that those who disclose a sexual assault face commanders who often disregard their reports and send them to uniformed counselors, who subsequently find them to be mentally unfit for duty, a seven-month San Antonio Express-News investigation shows.
Through dozens of interviews with experts and victims, and a review of thousands of pages of military and medical documents, the newspaper found the problem to be pervasive and long-standing, with cases spanning three decades.
The pattern of expulsions continues, defying policies to limit the psychiatric discharges and to ensure qualified doctors evaluate sexual-assault victims.
The mental health diagnoses can come with little or no psychological evaluation, and many are disputed by doctors outside the military.
Victims often had no history of mental health problems. Among them were soldiers who had established promising careers, passed the rigors of boot camp and attained top security clearances.
Yet, military mental health officials diagnosed victims with disorders they claimed existed before their service, making them ineligible for medical benefits or re-enlistment.
No one tracks how often it happens. But women are disproportionately diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and discharged at higher rates than men, according to records obtained by veterans aid groups and reports from the Defense Department.
A survey of 1,200 service members who sought help since 2003 at the nonprofit Military Rape Crisis Center found 90 percent of victims who reported sex assaults were involuntarily discharged from the military.
Most commonly, victims are told they have personality disorder, while others are labeled with adjustment disorder and bipolar disorder, said Panayiota Bertzikis, executive director of the Boston-based center.
"It's a constant problem. They're saying the victims are not credible because they're crazy. They just want them to go away," said Bertzikis, who was diagnosed with adjustment disorder and pushed out of the Coast Guard in 2007 after reporting a shipmate threw her to the ground, punched her in the face and raped her. "My medical records say I had problems adjusting to being raped."
The pattern ties to larger failings with how the military handles sex crimes within its ranks.
The Express-News found victims encounter an insular justice system in which superiors often interfere with sex-assault reports. Many face harassment and retaliation, or become targets of investigations into their own conduct. Others who seek transfers away from their bases are held in place for months, despite a policy to let them relocate quickly after an assault.
Commanders who supervise the accused and may hold them in high professional esteem have broad discretion over how to handle the cases and often choose not to prosecute. Instead, they routinely handle accusations as administrative matters that never reach a courtroom.
A series of lawsuits against the Pentagon and an ongoing sex-abuse scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, where 33 instructors have been investigated for illicit conduct with 63 trainees, have turned a spotlight on the epidemic of rape in the military.
The Defense Department estimates 26,000 troops were victims of sexual assault last year, a 35 percent increase over 2011.
Military women are far more likely than civilians to be victimized. One in four female soldiers has been sexually assaulted, compared with one in six women in the civilian world.
The prevalence of the problem is aggravated by a lack of faith in the justice system. By the Pentagon's estimate, the vast majority of victims — 89 percent — don't report sex crimes. By comparison, in the civilian justice system, about 65 percent of sexual assaults go unreported, the Justice Department says.
The numbers are rooted in complex cultural dynamics. In a world where good soldiers must sacrifice for the sake of the survival and cohesion of the unit, victims who break the silence say they are ignored, discredited or even punished.
"After reporting it, I became the problem," said Lola Miles, an Air Force helicopter mechanic who was discharged in 2005 with borderline personality disorder after she told her superiors that a fellow airman had pinned her to a car seat, grabbing and kissing her.
Commanders told her she had invited the abuse by acting like "one of the guys," said Miles, now a family therapist with a master's degree in mental health counseling. "They told me I needed to repair my reputation."
To distance her from the perpetrator, she was moved to the overnight work shift. She was told that if she pushed her complaint higher up the chain of command, she would receive a written reprimand.
After Anna Moore reported the sexual assault in her room, she faced mounting harassment from fellow soldiers in her unit of about 100 men and five women. She was groped and subjected to degrading remarks.
"Usually, a comment that went with it was that I have a black chick's butt," she said.
The worst of it came from a higher-ranking specialist in her unit while deployed in Israel.
"He would say I was worthless because I'm a woman and women shouldn't be in the military," she said.
She reported the harassment — to the same superior who destroyed her sexual-assault report — and was told nothing could be done. When she objected, saying she would be forced to protect herself, her superiors interpreted the remark as a threat.
"So they took my weapon after that," she said.
The Pentagon has implemented a flurry of reforms aimed at improving care for victims, developing better criminal prosecution and changing military culture. Last year, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta required a higher level of commanders to decide how sex-assault cases are handled.
Growing awareness of the problem has prompted legislative proposals to remove or limit the power of commanders in the military justice system. New provisions in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act require the creation of specially trained victims' units for each service branch.
Col. Alan Metzler, the deputy director of the Defense Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said the services are broadening new protections for victims.
One key provision would give victims who file an open sexual-assault report the right to appeal an administrative discharge, regardless of whether they feel they were targeted for speaking out, he said. Accounts of retaliation against victims, including complaints of being pushed out for mental disorders, resonate with top military officials, he said.
It's unclear how many sexual-assault victims have been cast out of the military for specious mental health problems. But about 31,000 service members were discharged for personality disorder from 2001 to 2010, according to a study released last year by the Vietnam Veterans Association of America.
The report was spurred by longtime complaints that the military's medical bureaucracy washes out combat soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress and brain injuries on the basis of alleged personality disorders. Thomas Berger, executive health council director for the veterans' group, contends sexual-assault victims are subjected to the same practice.
"It's a lot easier to get rid of folks under those types of diagnoses than to evaluate them properly and treat them properly, because that takes time and money," Berger said
Numbers compiled by the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School show women in every branch of the armed services are discharged with personality disorder at disproportionate rates. The widest disparity appeared in the Air Force, where women make up about 20 percent of the population, but account for 35 percent of personality discharges, according to data released by the Yale law clinic.
A Defense Department report released in June shows servicewomen are far more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders. The study, published in the Medical Surveillance Monthly Report, tracked active-duty service members from 2000 to 2011 and found women were diagnosed with personality and adjustment disorders at more than twice the rate for men.
None of the studies identified the number of troops who reported assaults.
The consequences for victims extend beyond the loss of their careers.
The Pentagon considers personality disorder to be a condition that existed prior to service and thus does not qualify as the basis for a medical discharge.
The diagnosis can prevent veterans from obtaining lifetime disability benefits and health care. It also may be a red flag for future employers, who can see the diagnosis listed in military paperwork. In some cases, sexual-assault victims have been forced to repay their enlistment bonuses.
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