Domestic Violence Is Part of What War Creates
As Stacy Bannerman has been telling us for decades, the U.S. military has a domestic violence problem. So do some other — and I strongly suspect all — militaries.
The Pentagon has long known about the significantly increased risk of domestic violence by combat-exposed troops, yet has failed to properly inform military members or their families, and has violated laws mandating reporting on the problem.
This lack of transparency and breach of legal responsibilities has left thousands of spouses, children, caregivers, parents, partners, and veterans dead, injured, suffering emotional distress and damages, and often struggling in silence without the resources or support they should have.
This problem is not really a secret. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “As a group, Veterans are more likely to have had traumatic and stressful experiences that may increase their risk of experiencing and/or using aggression in their close relationships. The stress of deployments and separation from their families places stress on the individual and the family unit. Combat trauma as well as military sexual trauma (MST), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and substance misuse can all contribute to an increased risk for experiencing relationship conflict and IPV.”
IPV is intimate partner violence.
There are enough websites on helping veterans and their families with this problem that each victim could probably claim one. But when you sit down and speak with a group of military family members who are working to lobby the U.S. Congress and to sue the U.S. government for help and compensation, words of praise for the VA (Veterans Affairs Department) or any other branch of government are not prevalent. That’s true of many discussions of U.S. healthcare and public services in general, of course, and one of the major reasons for that is how much of our money is dumped into the Pentagon. But if you are a victim of the Pentagon, foreign or domestic, you are likely to have insult added to injury.
I spoke with a number of women whose husbands and/or sons had been involved in U.S. wars. They were decidedly not peace activists. They were in various ways, I think it’s safe to say, supporters of the U.S. military. In some cases, they were full of praise for the U.S. military. Like most members of the U.S. public, they were willing to question the wisdom of many U.S. wars but, in at least some cases, insistent on finding one or more wars to call justified. One spoke of her veteran spouse, saying, “He was in the military, and I was loyal to supporting that. But he did try to kill me.”
One woman’s son, she said, had been fine prior to two tours of “duty,” after which, suffering PTSD, and following various difficulties, he attempted suicide and later murdered his wife, for which he is now in prison in the nation where he and his wife had been living.
Another woman said she suffered PTSD from trying to care for her PTSD-suffering, and TBI (traumatic brain injury)-suffering , husband, who is deeply traumatized and self-mutilates. Any one of numerous incidents she recounted was almost unbearable to contemplate. A number of them included the initial problems plus the VA treating her family more as criminals than as patients: her badly suffering husband repeatedly awakened through the night for his “safety,” his possessions removed without telling him, etc. When her husband phoned 911 because she had said she would kill herself, the men who responded handcuffed her and forced her from her house. A number of these stories ended with “And it was more f—ing faith-based counseling!” or “And their treatment was to give us another copy of the Five F—ing Love Languages!” The Five Love Languages is a book that as far as I know has not cured PTSD, TBI, or moral injury in anyone.
These accounts are full of anger at obnoxious and insulting comments and treatment by the VA, including blaming the victims, accusing the victims of lying, and openly placing bets that a victim will be back again for more “treatment.”
This ought to be utterly unacceptable, whether you believe destroying Iraq was a noble “service,” or you believe destroying Iraq was a horrific crime that you should nonetheless thank people for the “service” of having committed, or you believe all wars and militaries should be immediately abolished. There’s nobody who should find this acceptable. And yet it persists. And addressing it seems not to make up part of the agenda of “bringing a warrior ethos back to the Pentagon” as espoused by the current Secretary of War.
In fact, despite the culture of endless troop celebration and thanking, there’s a general silence on helping troops and their families deal with violence persistence — violence after the period during which violence is required and praised. Sure, there are tons of websites, but not media reports, not marathons or walks or telethons, not advertising, not Hallmark or Netflix movies. There’s not a general awareness and concern that veterans are more likely to harm or kill themselves or those around them.
When the problem is more dramatically public, when it takes the form of mass shootings, there is a strict vow of silence in corporate media outlets. Reporting that mass-shooters are disproportionately veterans — that is, that mass-shooters are people who have been trained and conditioned to shoot — is simply not done. The most common excuse for this censorship is that it is an effort to avoid prejudice toward veterans. And yet, facts are the opposite of prejudice. The fact that almost all veterans are not mass-shooters is an obvious fact, compatible in the human brain with the fact that without military experience some mass-shooters would probably not have committed their crimes. Men are very disproportionately mass-shooters, a fact that many people allow their minds to grasp without becoming prejudiced against men.
The real reason for the censorship, on mass-shootings, on suicides, and on domestic violence is, I think, the incompatibility between finding fault with veterans or “service members” and the belief that anything members of a military do is a praise-worthy service — so much so that you should support even wars you oppose because you “support the troops.”
The reality is that one of the ways in which war does damage is the horrible harm it does to many, if not all, of the people who do war. It also kills, injures, traumatizes, makes homeless, impoverishes, destroys the environment and towns, costs a fortune, prevents international cooperation, tears down the rule of law, concentrates wealth and power, threatens nuclear apocalypse, encourages bigotry and hatred, excuses spying and secrecy, etc., etc. But one of war’s horrors is that it trains people for years to do great violence, and then gives them a 4-hour debriefing and abandons them to cope with a world in which they are going to have major difficulties but be forbidden to address them with violence.
Like many a holiday originally created for mourning the dead of both sides of a particular war, Memorial Day has been gradually turned into a holiday for celebrating the dead on one side (the U.S. side) of many wars — often a very small fraction of the total dead, it should be noted. The survivors of the proper side are celebrated as well, especially if they keep their mouths closed about what they’re going through.
