 California in East LA because my mom was a junkie and we were always being evicted. She was Mexican but she looked white like me. We were so alike. We were like sisters. Then when I was 16, Grammy got cancer and the day before my 17th birthday she died. I mean I knew that she was sick but you just never really expected you know. My grandpa didn't really know what to do with me after that. He made me feel like he wasn't really my grandpa anymore. So I joined your graffiti crew and I got kicked out of school and then another. I was smoking a lot of weed, really messing up. My boyfriend lived across the street from my school so I used to go and see him instead of going to class. And I got sick and tired of myself and that's when I started thinking about the army. There were recruiters in the school hallways all the time so I went to see one. If you sign up with a national guard you won't have to serve outside the country. National because that means in the country, right? You get three thousand bucks just for enlisting. The army will pay for college, train you in whatever job you want and you get to travel. And all I had to do was sign up for six years. I wanted to do something I was proud of. I imagine telling my grandchildren about something I'd done to protect the country. It was a year after 9-11. I think a lot of people felt that way. So I went to the recruiter and I said that I wanted to sign up. You're gonna have to get your mom to sign that because you're only 17? I hadn't seen my mom in months but I called her and I told her. If you want to join, forge my name, I don't care. So I forged your name right there under the recruiter's nose. We do it all the time. Don't worry about it. Well, it turns out it's spread out over four years and they take the taxes out. The army never paid for me to go to any college that I wanted to go to. And it turns out you can't sign up for six years. It's got to be eight so I'm in until I'm like 24. And I never got to travel anywhere apart from the war in Iraq. The whole time in Iraq is a days. I work nights and we were shot at every night. Mortars were coming in and mortars is death. And you know when they say that only men are allowed on the front line? That is the biggest crack of shit. I was a tank gunner. But when I say that I was in the war, nobody listens. Nobody believes that I was a soldier. Do you know why? Because I'm female. Blessed are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times. When I was a freshman in high school, I vowed I'd never be in the army. I wanted to go to college, you know, but my parents are rural religious. Clara, you don't need to go to college. You can do God's work better in the army. It's strange because she and my dad went to college but they told me I didn't need to go. I was working as a cook in Bible camp in the summers and I saw how I could make kids happy doing that. So I thought maybe mama was right. Maybe serving food in the army would give me a mission to spread the word of God. So she took me to the recruitment office. I was just 16 then. They gave me the test that shows what kind of jobs you can do in the military. My score suggested that I could be a nurse. I wasn't sure about that. All I'd ever wanted to be was a teacher, but then the recruiter started calling my home all the time. One day this recruiter came to my house. He was three years old of me. A model, a picture guy, you know, blonde, blue-eyed, so handsome in his uniform. He told me I could be a chaplain's assistant and that appealed to me because it was religious. And he was one of those perfect guys, you know? So I joined the reserves. Mama signed the waiver because I wasn't 17 yet. It was 2004 by then, but mama and me weren't worried about war. We knew you could die just as easily crossing the street. It's all in God's plan when you die, whether you go to war or not. My name is Terris. Saja DeWalt Johnson to you. I'm 37 years old. The mother of four kids, two boys, two girls. My home is in Georgia now, but I grew up in D.C. My life there was pretty drastic. My stepfather was a drunk, beat up on my mom all the time, beat up on me and my brothers and sisters, too, but he saved the worst of it for her. He hit her with a hammer, lacerated her legs, broke her skull. One time, he stabbed her 13 times with a long kitchen knife. Till it sank in so deep, he couldn't pull the knife out again. She only survived because she was so fat. By the time I was 13 then I learned to fight him back. Laying him out flat with a baseball bat once. It was I got to kill this guy or he is going to kill my mom. As soon as I could, I moved out and started living with my boyfriend. He's my husband now, a gentleman and a sweetheart. I've known him since I was nine. About the time I was 19, we had two kids and I was working two jobs. One at McDonald's and the other selling tour tickets down at Union Station. One day, this recruiter comes up to me. Have you ever thought about signing up? The army will pay for college, train you in whatever job you want and you get to travel. I got interested because I'd always wanted to travel. So I joined the army reserves and that enabled me to get out of DC. DC is such a poison place to me. I mean, all you've got there is a bunch of drugs and killing. Three of my brothers were shot to death there for no reason. My son was shot in a drive by in the feet. He was just five years old playing in the yard. It's because of the military that my kids live the way they do now. We have a nice house. They go to good schools. So I liked being in the army. Then they sent me to Iraq. We're up in a small rural town in Wisconsin. It's only about 2000 people. So pretty much everybody knows everybody. There were two types of people in my town. The people who left and the people who stayed. My way of getting out was to join the Army National Guard when I was 17. A lot of people from my high school were in the military. So it didn't seem like any big deal. But my parents weren't happy about it. I come from a very political household. My dad was an elected official and we're Democrats. So I have to really argue with them to get them to sign and let me join. Anna, we just want to make sure you know what you're getting into. But I was stubborn. I thought I wanted to give something back to society, do something for my country. But really, it was a rebellion. When I joined the military, I got an overwhelmingly good response from my community. If I went downtown or to the supermarket in my uniform, people were proud of me. It made me feel like I belonged. After all, it was pre-911. We all thought differently then. In August 2001, I shipped out to do my training at Fort Jackson and zero date, the day you meet your drill instructor, turned out to be September 11th. We just finished taking the oath when the sergeant said something about a plane hitting towers. But I couldn't really hear. The people were running to the barracks getting hysterical. The sergeant was saying, we're going to war! We're going to war! We're going to war! But I just thought it was part of the training. It took me a couple hours to realize it was real. After that, there were rumors that training would speed up and we'd be sent over. But it didn't happen. Training just went on as normal. We stuck bayonets into man-shaped targets, sang songs about blood and killing, and didn't bat an eye, because we were already desensitized. We solved for it either. It's because my best friend sitting next to us in the cab, and we don't want him to die. Third generation Air Force. My grandfather and father were Air Force officers, and all my life I wanted to be just like him. So I joined the Air Force Reserves at the high school and put myself through school during my listening. I got married too and had a baby girl. My daughter was only two years old when I was deployed. That was March 2003, right as the U.S. was going into Iraq. I had to leave her with my husband. We're divorced now. It was so hard to leave my little girl. I kept worrying about would she be fed right, would she be able to sleep okay? It really hurt to hear her little voice on the phone. Well, I was on active duty for a little over eight years in the Air Force. I was a public affairs specialist. That means combat correspondent and a photographer. I loved my job. I am Santiago Flores, 46 years old, and retired after 22 years in the Army. I was a drill sergeant who taught other people how to be drill sergeants. So I have a drill sergeant personality. Used to tell my soldiers it's not unusual for Native Americans. It's our way of holding on to the idea of being a warrior, a vegan, a provider, and a protector. It's something we find great honor and pride in. Nowadays it is hard to find things that bring honor to your family, for natives. Until I was 10, we never lived in one place long enough for me to finish out of grade of school. My dad kept moving to find one job or another, but also to run away from his drinking. You know, drinking is a problem for native people. Well, it was no different. Finally he bought a house and we stayed put. My dad's a supervisor in a bakery and my mom's a band teller. They raised me in a little town in Southern Wisconsin. I didn't have any direction after high school, so I joined the Army military police, became specialist, Sylvia Gonzalez. I did it for the money and the challenge and the discipline. My parents didn't have any opinion on me enlisting. That's what I wanted to do was find it then. So mom signed the papers because I was only 17 and then my 11 happened. And I was mobilized to Iraq. My 11 made a lot of people proud of being in military, including me. I wasn't scared. I was glad that I was in an organization that was going to do something about this. I never really thought about the actual war at first. I figured it wasn't my place to get involved in something that I didn't know much about. The thing that worried me was that I was going to be away from home for a whole year. They gave me notice three weeks before I had to go. My parents don't deal with things emotionally, so I just figured out my stuff and I left. I was 13 and my dad brings home this white guy to work from Fixing Cars, George. This was 1973 and George was just back from Vietnam. He had one leg shorter than the other and he spent a whole year in hospital with his wounds. And people said he'd raped girls in Vietnam. I didn't like him at all. But he started being nice to me, took me to a drive-in movie, gave me a joint to smoke and something to drink. Then he raped me and I got pregnant from that rape. My dad was furious. Thought it was all my fault. Didn't care that I was only 13. So he makes me get in the car and we go looking for George. We find him pretty quick. Get in the fucking car! My dad said. He was six feet tall. People did what he said. So George gets in, dad drives us back to the house, sits us down at the kitchen table, pulls out a gun, sets on a table in front of us and he tells George, you have five minutes and two choices. Either marry my daughter or die. And all I could think was my dad shoots George, he's gonna go to prison and all of us are gonna be without a dad. My mom's gonna be without a husband and it'll all be my fault. So I told George, marry my other son. I love him but he knows the story and he feels pretty immediate. And he hates having an Indian mom because he sees no other. The next few years I'm living with George. He's beating the crap out of me and I'm turning to drink just like the rest of my family. When I'm 16 I can pregnant again. Birth control. Nobody told me about that. And I've had so much trauma in my life. Finally at one point I can't take it anymore so I decide to kill George and dump him in Lake Tahoe. But he's such a big guy. I can't figure out how I'm gonna get his body there. Gonna have to put him on a boat alive and then kill him and he's such a really strong guy. So I'm thinking, okay, that's not gonna work. By the time 20 George has landed in jail again for attacking me and I'm divorced that last. So there I am living in a one-bedroom cockroach infested apartment with two kids and I'm on welfare. So I'm thinking, what am I gonna do? That's when I decide to join the army. Bitch, if you won't sleep with them so you can't win. In Iraq in the beginning I was considered a hoe because I was nice to people. When I heard what people were saying about me I became a bitch. I wasn't mean. I just had to change so that nobody thought I was being flirty. I changed the way that I walked and the way that I talked. Everything. Nobody over there really knew who I was because I was always putting on an act. A lot of the men didn't want to stare. One guy told me that the only reason they send female soldiers is to provide eye candy for the guys. Keep them saying. In Vietnam they had prostitutes but they don't have those in Iraq so they have women soldiers instead. It was July 2003 by the time I got to Iraq. We were in Bob Spiker which used to be an Iraq year base and there were huge pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. It was spooky. Soldiers would pose next to them and take pictures like tourists. I was attached to an army engineering unit and our job was to build bases and roads, fix bridges. So we cleaned up the rubble and all kinds of disgusting stuff in the building so we could move in. Excrement, rags, bits of military equipment. We prepared the base, built runways, used scrap metal to make our own armor because we had no up armored vehicles. We built a basketball court for ourselves but we were doing nothing to help the Iraqi people. I was petroleum supply specialist. That means I pumped gas. My job was to drive around the base refueling dump trucks, rollers, scrapers, wait for a couple hours then do it again. When it was busy it was really busy and when it was slow there was absolutely nothing to do so I wrote a lot of letters to pictures, threw rocks into a box. My unit was a real good old boys club though and I was one of only 19 women out of 141 people. The leadership didn't trust women to do a good job at anything. They were always hovering over you waiting for you to screw up. Soon you feel like you couldn't do anything right. The guys had cases of porn which they'd look at out in the open. They were always calling out things like, Hey Peterford! I like your tits and that t-shirt. It happened so much you got numb. Finally after a couple months I started to go out on missions to rebuild schools. That was the best part of my time there. Then I began to convoy to other bases. I was driving a 2,300 gallon diesel truck and because it was taking occasional gunfire it could have burst into flames any moment. It was a bomb on wheels. The Iraqi people were pretty hostile to us by that time. When we went into town we were always looking at faces and hands trying to get their mood. If they're staring at you not in fear but because they hate you well you know you're not wanted. We were told the kids could be dangerous too. They could be a decoy or be carrying a bomb so if they run in front of the convoy you're supposed to run them over. I'd been a daycare teacher before I got deployed and one of the guys on my team who knew this about me said Ed and I have been talking. If a kid came in front of the convoy we don't know if you'd be able to run him over. I had to tell him I don't know if I could either. Then our first day out a boy threw a rock at our vehicle. It made a crack like a bullet and I knew then that if I had to hit a kid and kill him I would. Not to save my life but to save all the soldiers who might die. It was really hard to come to terms with. You feel. By the time I was deployed to Iraq in 2005 I was 35 years old and I'd been in the army for 14 years so when I was on the plane to Kuwait and all the young soldiers around there were making all kinds of dumbass jokes about going to Iraq. I gave them a piece of my mind. I don't know what this means to you but to me this isn't a game. I have four kids at home who will have no understanding if I'm killed. Back when I was training at Fort Bragg I knew things were gonna get bad and I saw how my command was acting. Instead of the leadership saying we need to work together to bring these soldiers back safe and sound. Too many people wanted to be chief and not enough wanted to do the work and they were training us like we were gonna fight in a jungle not the desert. They made us practice lying in the grass and taking cover behind jungle plants. There ain't no jungle in Iraq. Then I had this dream. I'm in a truck and it gets hit. The vehicle blows up and all I see is a big ball of fire above me. My sight was black for a minute. When it comes back I'm descending from the clouds to my mom's house. My mom is there and she is going berserk because the news has gotten to her that I got killed and that's what hurt me the most. The next morning they wanted me in the firing range to practice shooting with live rounds but I couldn't shake that dream. I get my weapon and when I look up the first sergeant and the commander are there and I'm thinking these morons are gonna get me killed and all of a sudden this anger just comes over me and I can see myself shooting both those morons dead. Sergeant I can't go to the range today somebody needs to take this weapon off of me please. No sir and I throw my weapon at my Kevlar on the ground and I walk off and then I call my uncle who's a bishop and I tell him about my dream and he says it's a warning about my leaders being so weak. So I decide I've got to speak to them. So I go to the first sergeant. Sir we've been here now for about four or five weeks and for some reason the senior enlisted still have not gotten it together. Now none of these soldiers are going to tell you this to your face but I will. We don't believe that you are able to lead a horse to water. He didn't like that. He slapped me with an article 15 for attempting to destroy government property that was the one my M16 and my helmet on the ground and then he tried to send me for a mental eval. Sir I've been in the army 14 years sir and I have never been sent for a mental eval. Just talk to me sir when there's a problem. I know when I get tense my brows kind of frowned up but it really doesn't mean anything. I'm not as fierce as I look. So I thought that was the end of that. Two weeks later we were deployed. When we flew into Kuwait there was nothing to do for six weeks. I had my 20th birthday there but otherwise we just sat around played guards and then finally in June 03 we convoyed to Baghdad to camp Mustang in the green zone. Our mission was to reinstall the police force, guard it from the looters, fix it up, weed out the good police from the bad. Some were taking bribes, beating, raping the prisoners. We weren't going to allow them to do that anymore. Some were part of the insurgency. Later we made to this other base where we were sleeping in tents with sandbags around them. We didn't have any protection from water there. This tent just down the road from us got hit. It was shredded. My friend Sandra had just left a latrine when she when he got murdered and she turned around. My first five months the routine was the same every day. You load the trucks with equipment, go through inspections, meet with a squad about what we were going to do and then I'd have breakfast and I'd climb into a Humvee with the two guys that made up my team and we'd convoy through Baghdad to a police station and then 12 hours later the next squad comes, relieves you, you load up, go home, put everything away, go to sleep, do it all over again the next day. Being the only, well the youngest soldier in my team I was the gunner. That meant that when we were driving I was sitting sticking out of the rooftop of the Humvee with my 50 cal machine gun and this little gun turret. Now in the gun turret you're exposed for name tag up. We didn't have any shields. Luckily in the beginning we mostly got waves and good feedback. We had like 20 kids that would always follow us and dance for us. Some of the women would burn away but later people got hostile. People stare at you, give you dirty looks, give you a finger. Sometimes you'd go home, throw a rock at you and guys expose themselves because you're a female. Now as a soldier, hostility doesn't bother me but as a woman it bothers me a lot. I hate it when guys do that. I think it's sick and disgusting, irrocky or not. And our own soldiers were a problem too. They make flirty or sexual comments, stare at you. That was something that I couldn't stand. You walk into the chow hall, there's a bunch of guys that just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you've been over somebody's gonna say something. It got to the point with me where well I was afraid of walking past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. It just really wears you down. I left my job and I did but boot camp up until I got out I was harassed all the time. People used to call me Air Force Barbie. Couldn't go anywhere without been watched by a million eyes. I had a senior non-commissioned officer constantly quiz me about my sex life. She'll put my barracks at odd hours of the night and ask me personal questions that no supervisor should ever have the right to ask. I had a criminal sexual anger ask me in ways I'm too embarrassed to explain. These are the people who had complete control over my life when I worked, when I ate, when I slept, when I could talk or not talk, rest or not rest. These are the people who I was supposed to obey no matter what. One time my sergeant came sit between the chow hall and said feel like I'm gonna fish fall the way all these man's eyes are boring into your back. That's what my life was like I said. Well finally I went to my leadership and explained situation. I was told to write an MFA, a memo for record. Every time that officer said or did anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Well I did that for months until I had a binder just full of those memos. I took it straight to senior leadership. Did that officer get punished? No. He went on to make E9 which is the highest enlisted rank in the armed forces. Why am I complaining? It was only words and gestures right but it should never have happened. I was a hard worker who loved her country and service. This is not what I deserved but like so many other females in the military I put up with it for the good of my family, my beliefs in my country. Well after my first deployment I decided the constant harassment was all just a part of being a female in the military and I made the decision not to tell anyone any more about my problems. Excuse my language but I decided to be a bitch. Bitch. When I first got to Iraq in November 2005 I was still hoping to do God's work among my fellow soldiers. I was there for a year and in the beginning I was attached to a company out of Alaska. My platoon had 60 men and one lone female, me. I was also the youngest, still 17. Because I was the only female there men would forget in front of me all the time and say these terrible derogatory things about women. I had to hear these things every day. I'd have to say hey and then they look at me all surprised and say oh we don't mean you. One of the guys I thought was my friend tried to rape me. Two of my sergeants wouldn't stop making passes at me. Everybody's supposed to have a battle buddy in the army. Females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with or the showers that's so you don't get raped by the men on your own side. But because I was the only female there I didn't have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife. When we drove up into Iraq on a convoy in April we saw how the people there were living. It was so sad. We saw kids on the sides of roads using hand signals to beg for food and water. Kids barefoot and dirty. We saw how they live in makeshift mud houses held together with pieces of clothing or plastic. It makes us realize how blessed we are. Seeing those kids though made me miss my own kids real bad. My youngest now he don't beat around the bush son. Mother's day he sent me an email that said mommy happy mother's day love you wish you were here hope you don't get killed in Iraq okay. We were based at camp atter in the south but it wasn't long before they sent me to camp anaconda which is 50 miles north of bad dad. Anaconda got mortared so much the soldiers called it Mortarita Vale but our trucks had no armor nothing and we weren't even authorized to be out on that road but they sent us out anyway and at night too it was a suicide mission. I'm driving the middle gun truck when an IED goes off right under the truck in front of me it was so loud it scared the living shit out of me. My heart was pumping so fast it felt like it was going to jump right out of my chest but I showed none of what I was feeling to my soldiers. Two days later the command has ordered us out into formation. I expected some kind of apology but they were blabbering on about nothing setting up the internet how we're violating dress codes by wearing the wrong t-shirts for pt. Dude I've been fired at. I don't want to hear about a goddamn t-shirt. Then they asked anybody got anything to say? Nobody said anything but these soldiers were young and trained not to question their seniors. So I raised my hand for a sergeant did you all forget about the incident two days ago? Do you realize that none of your soldiers have any confidence in the leadership now? Don't you give a damn about us. First sergeant gives me this look like he wants to kill me but you don't say nothing. See when you have a female of that type of attitude in the military doesn't go over well with a lot of men. I was deployed to Iraq in 2004 when I was 42 years old and the staff sergeant with 19 years of service under my belt. I was so proud of what I'd done in the military that when my two sons grew up I encouraged them to join too. One's in the army the other's the Marine. About the time I got sent to Iraq they came with seven grandchildren. I was based at Camp Cedar II a convoy pit stop about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad. I was put to work with a lieutenant in charge of organizing the movement and repairs of all the vehicles. They were so messed up they knew how you could be missing for a week and nobody would know. So I thought okay they don't know whether they're doing any better than I do and I started organizing the whole thing myself. But we were under command of this female major a white woman who hated anyone who wasn't white and male. She replaced every soldier of color with a white soldier and she made the soldiers of color train the white people who would take over their jobs. She destroyed the careers of many soldiers of color doing that. But if you said anything you'd be punished. One of the first things she did when we got to Iraq was she made me and the other female non-commissioned officers move into the same tents as the privates. We literally had that much space between our books. Now you do not move a higher ranking soldier in with a lower ranking. It makes you lose your power pace because it's their territory. You're new to this. Soon the privates were refusing to obey our orders. This one girl Benson she had a canopy over her bed with pink blankets and I thought what the fuck. But when I tell her to move her bed over her foot to make room for me she goes into this itty bitty little voice like a baby. I don't care what you about what my young soldiers were going throughout their roads in Iraq. One was this young female sergeant who trained as a driver but they made her into a gunner because there was a shortage of military police to do the job. That's how a lot of women end up in combat in this war. Well she and her team were out on the road one day and they were attacked with mortars and grenades. So the sergeant fires back at the machine gun. So when she gets back she's all excited shouting about what happened. The adrenaline is up tomorrow's going to be a different story. Then I realized the combat stress team hasn't shown up. Now they're supposed to come help soldiers have been in battle like this but nobody bothered to come. Go to bed it'll be fine. Sure enough the next morning this sergeant and her team are a mess. One's lying in her bunk in a fetal position and the others are sobbing because well they've killed all these innocent people. And Benson the girl with the pink blankets. Well she was driving a large truck in a convoy. Now over there you drive on the opposite side of the road a lot to avoid IEDs and you drive fast. Well this car was coming towards them but nobody had time to get out of the way. So the car ends up driving right underneath the truck. Killed four children, both parents. There's blood body parts all over the place so when she gets back to camp she's in shock. I guess she thought I was still mad at her because she just stood there and didn't see anything. So I hugged her. She started crying. She was only 20 years old. They should have debriefed these girls. They should have had a combat stress person there but they didn't. Nobody was taking care of these kids so you can imagine the condition they were in when they got back home. And I know it's not getting any. In October 03 I was sent up to Bakrava just northeast of Baghdad. We stayed in camp warhorse. One night her in the wreck building. I was doing my email when the whole building shook. There was this high-pitched squealing sound and a flash and it went black. Everybody stared at each other a second then dropped to the ground. 20 seconds later another bomb dropped. I grabbed somebody's shirt. Take me to the bunker. We got outside. There was no bunker. Another mortar dropped 50 meters away. Shrapnel was flying over our heads. This girl was lying on the ground screaming. My bomb's back inside. It was on the ground. Two Iraqi workers and two American soldiers. I started working on them. It was dark in there and all I had was this tiny blue flashlight to see. Blood was all over the place. This female was lying on the ground covered in it and this guy called Sergeant Hill was helping her. I said is this blood all hers? Is it an artery hit? He said no I think some of it's mine. I got hit too but she's worse. I found someone else to help her and then I lifted his arm and there was all this blood. He was much worse than her but he didn't realize because he was in shock. But we packed all the wounded into the honey. I was holding back this guy's blood with my hand. I didn't have anything else. Another mortar dropped. We had no flat jackets, no kevlar, nothing. So we threw our bodies on top of the patients. The mortar stopped long enough for us to drive the wounded to the hospital. As soon as I got there I saw a nurse and yelled this is Sergeant Hill. He's 32. He's positive. He needs blood now. Because I'm covered in blood and none of it's mine. That helped me survive my time in Iraq was my boyfriend Stephen. I could not have got through it without him. We met the night that I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey for my AIT. We started talking immediately. He said give me your number. And then later he texted me saying what's good? We started going out right away. Stephen's black but he looks kind of Dominican. Real cute. Six foot big muscular guy from New York. Now you're not allowed to threaten us in the army which means have a relationship but everybody did. And because he was a surgeon and I was a specialist nobody could know about us but everybody knew. And then I got pregnant by him. So I couldn't deploy when he did and the rest of my team did. I had to stay behind at Fort Dix with strangers. Then after three months I had a miscarriage. Made me feel really empty and sad. I really really love Stephen and I really wanted to have his baby. But they gave me one month to recover and then they said you go to Iraq which made me really mad because one month is not enough time to get over losing a baby. But in February 05 I was sent to FOB Spiker. They put me in this uh this chew which is this tiny trailer that uh sleeps two people but you gotta share it with three. The night I arrived it was so tight I had to squeeze my way into it. I didn't end up getting along with the girl on my right. But the girl on my left she was my friend from before. She was really excited to see me because the last she'd heard I was pregnant. So the first thing I did was I put on my favorite perfume and I went to look for Stephen. We hadn't seen each other for four months. He knew that I was coming but he didn't know when. So I knocked on his door and his room he said that he didn't know where he was. And then I remembered the time difference that when it was midnight for him it was three o'clock for me and that's when we would talk online. So I thought I know where he is. So I ran over to the recreational building and sure enough there he was sitting at a corner computer with his back to me. Now I didn't go up to him right away. Instead I sat at the computer and I locked online. Sure enough there he was. I wrote I'm in Kuwait it's really cool that I'm in your time zone. And then he wrote it's weird I can smell you. I must really miss you because I can smell your perfume. So then I wrote turn around and he turned around. He just started laughing. In each police station that we would fix up in Baghdad we'd go through the day searching people coming into the station and switching guard positions. I searched mostly women because guys were not allowed to do that in Iraq. And you'd be there for like 12 hours every day standing or sitting. It's hot. You can't move and you have to watch everybody all the time. But he used to that. The thing that I couldn't stand was the people that I was working with. My squad leader was a pervert. He was old like 35 or 40. He used to point out these little Iraqi girls and say these disgusting sexual things about them all the time. These girls are like 12 or 13 years old. But the worst was my team leader. He made passes at me at first. He tried to have revenge by controlling everything that I did. I had to eat with him because he wouldn't let me eat with my friends. I had to clean my weapon with him. He wouldn't let me talk to anybody. So I'd sit up in my Humby turret all day long just to get away from him. Every day alone. I think people knew it because they'd come up to me and say man your life sucks. When I asked to get switched they wouldn't do it. Just really made me hate my time there because it got to a point where I didn't trust anybody that was in my company after a while. I didn't trust anybody at all. In fact I still don't. During my first few months in Iraq my sergeant assaulted and harassed me so often that I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to report him. But when I turned him in... The one common factor in all these problems is you. Don't see this as a punishment but we're going to have you transferred. Then that same sergeant got promoted right away. I didn't get my promotion for six months. They transferred me from Mosul to Rawa. Rawa was nothing but a tank camp on the Syrian border covered in sand. The camp had Marines, Navy, Air Force and Army. There were over 1500 men in the camp and less than 18 women so it wasn't any better than the first platoon I was in. I was fresh meat to the hungry men there. I was less scared of the motorhounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food. I would never drink late in the day even though it was so hot. Because the Port of Johns was so far away it was dangerous so I'd go for 16 hours in 140 degree heat and not drink. I just ate skittles to keep my mouth from being too dry. I collapse from dehydration so often I have IV track lines from all the times they had to rehydrate me. They made me cook because I'm female so I wanted to do other jobs too so I was cooking 1500 meals three times a day. I worked from four in the morning till nine at night the next day. I was exhausted all the time. One day somebody wrote my name on a Port of Johns saying I had sex with a lot of people only they put it in much worse words than that but when I wasn't working I went to chapel and then I went to bed and that was all I did. Work, chapel, bed. Work, chapel, bed. It was so untrue but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't defend myself. Nobody there wanted to believe me. Nobody was on my side. I was trying to stay cheerful. Be nice to everyone. Back in boot camp I was known as sunshine but within a few months I went from cheerful and smiling to bursting into tears all the time. I couldn't even smile anymore. I called mama crying and told her what they were doing to me. If you were treading the path of righteousness none of this would be happening. When I was working the entrance to Spiker we saw convoys being hit all the time. Highway one ran right past our base. We called it the highway of death because so many people got killed there by IEDs and mortars. One night this convoy got hit and it was like this huge flash in the night and then they drove to us with their wounded. This civilian got out of his car and started throwing up because his brother who sat next to him in the car had been shot in the throat. I was on a tank out in the road just looking at him. I would radio for an ambulance but they have to go through all this clearance and shit so by the time it arrived it was too late. The guy was already dead. I really thought about death that much when I was in Iraq. I figure everything happens for a reason and I'm gonna die sometime so I was never really afraid of dying. What I was afraid of though was losing a limb or scarring my face or tripping because walking is really hard. It's hot you got all this heavy equipment which weighs nearly half your weight if you're small like me and I was worried about our equipment too. We had these flat jackets from Vietnam which everybody said were no good against AK-47s which is what the Iraqis are shooting. Our radios were old and broken. Our ambulances were rattled and shook. I cannot imagine having to travel in one of those wounded. It didn't mind working the checkpoint most of the time. I got to work with Stephen that way because he was the team leader and the sunrises and sunsets were beautiful. The guys on my team most of the time. A couple of things they did bother me though. Stephen went home for two weeks on R&R and they hit on me all the time and then when he got back they made up all these stories about me hoping that we would break up they would get a chance with me. Oh and if we were attacked they'd make me stay at the back of the tank and they'd be like oh it's because you're like a little sister we don't want anything to happen to you and I'm like no! Like I'm your little sister! I am a soldier not a gender! I'm a soldier just like you! Then they took it to the next level. We had to guard out in the road and nobody wants to guard out in the road. The soldier that's out in the road is known as the sacrifice soldier because you are the first to be hit if anything happens. For a while they put me out there. They did not want to hear me say I'm a soldier just like you and you! One was to Afghanistan in 2006 with the Amitabh Mountain Division. Now by this time I'm a soldier with years of sexual harassment under my belt so I decided this time it was going to be different. This time I decided to put up a wall now my wall became thicker and thicker you know normally I'm a very bubbly person but all that disappeared behind the wall and to this day I don't know if I've ever regained that part of myself but you have to put up a front and act like one of the boys even if it means losing who you are you become very cold you don't show your emotions. You don't let anyone in because if you do they will walk all over you still the harassment was worse than it had ever been. A few months into my deployment I was directed to full nightguard duty now I smoke like chimney when I was in Afghanistan and this night was no exception so after a few hours I put my weapon in my radio in the guard check and walked 20 feet to the closest smoke deck. You don't ever leave your weapon unattended when you're in a combat zone. I had a momentary lapse thought I would be okay 20 feet from my weapon. I was wrong. I'd just taken a few drags in my cigarette and somebody dragged me in a choke cold and dragged me behind some power generators all I could see was a man much larger than me in a US Armed Forces uniform. I struggled with all my strength to get free while he dragged me to his spot. I tried my hardest to find a moment. I got in a few kicks but it was finished his death. Well I waited until my shift was over and then did what every law and order show says to don't take a shower go straight to the authorities. I thought they would listen to me. I was wrong. They told me if I filed a claim that I'd been raped I'd also be charged with dereliction of duty for leaving my weapon unattended in a combat zone that could get me court martial. Could end my career. So I shut up. Shut up. Didn't say anything to anyone. Soon after I got to Iraq they made me convoy commander. Now some of those convoys are 25 trucks long and I was in charge of making sure that every one of those soldiers and troopers did the mission and got back in one piece. One time I'm in the lead gun truck going through a crowded street with this young guy up in the gunner's shoe. Now he hasn't been out on the road before. He's been in the office doing paperwork for so long he was getting called Professor Stapler. Now we got traffic coming at us and civilians all over the place and this car comes toward us too close for comfort. But being that it's my gunner's first time I didn't know what to do. So I tell him fire a warning shot. He doesn't shoot. So I tap him. Hey man don't be afraid to fucking shoot that weapon okay. You do know how to shoot right. The vehicle is getting closer and closer but the moron still doesn't shoot. So I hit him. Man I tell you to fucking fire you fucking fire you hear me. You don't never let a vehicle get that close to my fucking convoy. He knows I'm not playing now. So he fires directly at the car. The hood peels right up the whole car goes rolls over on its side and then tumbles over this bank. My gunner panics he's only 19. He grabs his head and he yells oh my god I think I killed somebody. It's not your fault. I don't think you shot nobody but we still got shit coming at us you hear me. So I need you to focus right now and pay attention. But his face is red and he's yelling oh my god after that he has got a story to tell the guys. It makes him feel like he's matured from a boy to a man. A lot of young soldiers feel like that. Women too. They think I'm not some wimpy female. It was a good job I did in Iraq. The longer we were in Iraq the worse it got. It got so that you knew something was going to happen every day and you didn't know what. One day we were dried into this police station in Najif when suddenly this IED pulled up right next to my Humvee truck and I must have passed out because when I woke up I was by myself in the truck and I had shrapnel. That's little bits of metal in my arms and in my face. My ear drums were ruptured. They took me to the hospital and they cleaned me up and gave me some painkillers but I couldn't work for a month because I was deaf. So I just hung out on base watched a lot of movies slept. My body hurts so bad. But I wasn't phased to be wounded like that. I was like okay I'm alive. In fact I was kind of pissed. I didn't get hurt worse. I really hated it out there. My friend Michelle Whitmer she was in our platoon. She got shot too in an ambush. Shot in the armpit. Hit her artery. She was 20 years old. She died in Sydney. My tour in Iraq was a real eye opener for me because my biggest enemy out there was my own company. Officers would brief us by saying it's Indian country out there. Go get them. I found that very shocking. If this is Indian country perhaps I'm on the wrong side. But when I was over there a lot of young people would come and ask me for help especially soldiers of color and I would stand up for them against their command after all I was old enough to be their mom. But that got me into a lot of trouble. My friend I was banned from my unit. I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone. And then they sent me to another base. Scania. That's where they send soldiers to punish them because Scania's on a major highway. It gets mortar all the time. The whole time I was at Scania hardly even wrote home. Even to my sons. I didn't even think about home because it became hollow like a robot. You get up. You do your job. You hear people complain. You talk about this. You talk about that but you don't look inside. My sister sent me a medicine box with my prayer stuff in it. So I sit at night smoke a cigarette and offer my prayers and I watch the moon. That brought me some peace. That and the songs I would hear the Iraqi men singing in the morning at camp Scania. The prayer songs. The songs would echo and oh my god it was beautiful like angels. I wake up in school because of those songs. I think they saved me for myself because there were times I thought I was going insane. What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I not just getting on a plane going home? What am I doing on this base? It's a concentration camp. When I started talking to the Iraqis who worked on the base. The young ones would come up to me and say you're Indian from India and I would say no. Now finally when one goes back after seeing the movie Dance of the Wolves and he goes you're Red Indian and I said yes and he goes Native American and I'm like so I was invited to have a meal with them at the market they had just outside the base. They cook the same kind of rice my people cook. The same kind of bread and chicken. I tell them we make this kind of tell me about your people and your religion. I want to know about your women. I want to know what you think about this war. I found out so many of their traditions are the same as mine. The significance of the moon. Our tobacco ceremonies. The way we use sage and their clan system how people marry in and out of clans and the rules about paying things back. And I thought why am I doing this to these people? I started to see how we were changing their clan system, their council system that's been there for thousands of years. I started to see how imposing democracy means is not democracy anymore. And I began to think this war if it wasn't we'd have things in place to help the women, to help the children, to help the civilians but we don't care about them. We'd rather they die. I'd like to let you know there's a talk back after the show we've widened the debate from the military to domestic and sexual violence so I do hope you can stay for the talk back. I'd like to say hi to everybody this show is being live streamed and I'd like to say hi to everybody who's watching it all over the world. Thank you very much and look forward to hearing from you after the show. Excited and you never knew if you were going to get extended and I didn't want to be disappointed. But then the day finally came. Sitting on the plane next to Stephen I was so nervous. I didn't know how my family was going to act or how I was going to cope with being a civilian and I didn't know what was going to happen with Stephen either. You know what every girl hates in the army is you meet a guy and you get close but you never really know what kind of guy he's going to be on the outside because people can present themselves wherever they want over there. I got this friend who was so in love with her boyfriend in Iraq that when they got home she took a plane to go visit him. She waited at the airport for him to pick her up. He never came. You know when I got to the airport and I was walking through there was nobody there saying welcome back or nothing. I was disappointed because you always see on the news when people come home there's all like fireworks and all this but nothing. Just me walking through the airport carrying my bags. I didn't even believe that I was back from Iraq until I saw my grandpa and my aunt. My aunt gave me a hug. Now I never cry ever only when Grammy died but I cry. It's like you're a ghost. Like you died and you're coming back to life and you've got to weasel your way back in because everyone has had to adjust without you. And I didn't come back to St. Croissant. I'm not as easy going. I don't like being around a lot of people. I can't stand loud noise. And I lost how to dance. I think I'm so in tune with marching that I gotta be really drunk to dance. And he started being really depressed and has never happened to me before. I've always been able to deal with things but I think it was you know the army and and Grammy and losing the baby and being in Iraq it just all got too much. Only the way that I was being treated as a female veteran. We don't get the same respect as men. We have to really fight for it. People about being shot at and seeing death because I know they don't. Be with Stephen and go to school and to get away from my family. And then I got pregnant again. Stephen's a sweet guy but he's different than before. He's from the hood. He's gotten whoever he had before he had me. I don't know if he has him now. So I guess I'm raising this baby by myself. You know to this day I've never spoken to my family about my time in Iraq. When they asked me and I just go, oh it was hot. I'm gonna tell them anything because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. And the people close to you they never understand. You can't hate them for not understanding but a lot of the time you do. If you ask the majority of soldiers do you know what our purpose is in Iraq? They couldn't tell you. Some might give you some political bullshit to justify it. Or say that because we wear the uniform we're supposed to not speak bad about it. But most soldiers would say that they don't see the point. See this area right here. Think about it as the place the military built for us soldiers. You got toilets and running water, showers. You got trailers, beds and mattresses, air conditioning, washers and dryers. You know big generators running all night. You got Taco Bells, Subways, PX's, good food, lobster, shrimp, steak and we're not paying the Iraqis any property taxes or anything at all for all our luxuries. But over here on the outskirts you've got Iraqi families living in huts. No electricity, no star. And you tell us when we go outside these gates and there's a kid on the side of the road asking for water. We're not supposed to give it to them. The warehouse is full of water. But I can't give one bottle of this kid out here who don't have it because we've bombed the shit out of their water supply and everything else too. The US government isn't going to stand for anyone coming in and telling us how to run things like that. But we think it's fine to go over there, westernize them. Because people have been living this way for centuries. I may not agree with it, but that's their country. And they used to say that our way is the right way. You know what we are? We're just bullies. Bullies. That's what we are. When I got home from Iraq, I kept everything to myself. Thought I was going to be okay. I jumped straight back into school. I worked hard. But by a year later, I snipped into my friends. I stopped hanging out. I had homework for hours every night. And I got jumpy. I can stand loud noises. People walking behind me. I wasn't sleeping well either. But I didn't get any help because I thought my problem was hormones or something. Girl things. Maybe that's because those post-traumatic stress videos they show you never represent women. Not like a guy who has PTSD. I don't get into a car, drive 80 miles an hour, punch things. I recognized that there was anything wrong until my boyfriend said you should get some help. So I did. Some people asked me what the best part of being in the army was for me. Was it the drive that I have to succeed now or all the friendships that I made? I can't think of the best part. Every day there was a bad day. By the time I got home in April 2004, after 11 months in Iraq, I was really a mess. I couldn't sleep for more than 50 minutes at a time. And I'd be awake for two hours in between. I got angry easily, agitated. I had nightmares about the mortar attacks. Flashbacks. On New Year's Eve they had fireworks in our town square and as soon as I heard the pooms I fell to my knees. Every time I opened my eyes the faces in front of me would fade away and I'd be brought to that night we were attacked. I was crying hysterically. My friends didn't know what to do. And I had nothing to talk about. All my friends' conversations were about movies I hadn't seen or fashion I didn't know about. Anything I talked about turned morbid very quick. Little kids in Iraq, death, mortar attacks. And everyone would get quiet and no one would know what to say. I remember this girl talking about how she wanted some designer purse and I said, yeah I know what you mean. One time in Iraq these kids wanted some food and I felt really bad because we didn't have enough to give them. I hate it when you can't get what you want. Everyone just sat there. They felt like assholes. I felt like an asshole. I was so out of place after I got home I couldn't feel comfortable in my skin and I couldn't talk about it to anyone. I didn't know other vets were going through the same thing so I thought I was crazy. My back and head were injured too. I'm 80% disabled now because my back so messed up from banging around in the humvee. No shock absorbers hitting my head on the ceiling, compressing my spine. I couldn't stop worrying about that guy in the mortar attack, Sergeant Hill. And whether he'd lost his arm and could I have done something more. I tried to get a medical discharge from the army to pay for my benefits but they made it so difficult. I gave up. I couldn't get the tuition they promised me for a long time either. For a long time I couldn't even get to a clinic for my medication or therapy because all the VA clinics were so far away. I work with veterans now so I know a lot of soldiers go through this which helps. It's important for vets to reach out to each other so you don't feel alone and crazy like I did. Still think a lot about why we went to war. Was Saddam a bad person who needed to be removed from power? Yes. Was he the reason for us going in there? And it's not the guys sitting in their air conditioned offices at the Pentagon who are feeling the aftermath of it. It's the mother and father who are getting their child sent home in a box. It's the innocent people of Iraq who've been killed and raped and had their villages turned upside down. I really do love some of those people of Iraq but I don't know how to help them. Some of those kids were so beautiful. They only wanted attention and food. Still I knew if I had to kill a kid to save my buddies I would. How can anybody love anyone who has such horrible thoughts? When I came home from Afghanistan I didn't talk to anyone about the rape. I felt it was on my own phone. It took me six months to even tell my mother why I had to leave the Air Force. Why never go back. Military has a way of making females believe they've brought us upon themselves. Yes I made some bad decisions but the guilt lies with the predator not me. There's an unwritten code of silence when it comes to sexual assault in the military but if this happened to me and nobody knew about it I just know it's happening to a female as well. It makes me so mad when I think about the fact that I'll let them get to me and let the military. I was so proud of being third generation. I had dreams of becoming a high ranking officer one day like my father and my grandfather. Now I came home. I felt like I messed everything up. I let my mom and dad down. I let everyone down. I hated myself. September 30th, 2006. That was the day it was all going to end. No more shame would be brought to my family. It would be over. Take the tip of a blade to the middle of your forearm. Touch the top of the main vein. Press the home steel through your skin. Drag it down so there's no room for mistakes. One shot, one kill. That's what they teach in the army. See the thick blood running bright red? For a moment it seemed that that gash would bring relief. I was ready to cut the other arm when the phone rang. It was mama. She felt God pushing her to call. She wanted to tell me how proud of me she was. To me everything they talked about was pain when I hear connection to my mother, brothers, my sons, my boyfriend, everybody. I came back so angry and I didn't know why. Nobody could stand me. I couldn't stand myself. It's really hard to admit you have PTSD. It feels weak because the military teaches you to suck it up and drive on. After I'd been home for a while my former husband George died. He raped me and beat me up. I went to his funeral anyway. Maybe just to make sure he was dead. But there was another part of me that cried. Not because he was my husband but because he was a Vietnam vet who got lost. He didn't come back from war the same. He always talked about raping girls in Vietnam. So what he did to me wasn't any different from what he was used to. So whose fault is it? I don't know. But I don't think he was born that kind of person. I think the military made him like that and I gave him. After I'd been home from Iraq for about half a year I wouldn't even dress up. I wouldn't wear makeup. I didn't care. Couldn't concentrate. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't work. And I became paranoid thinking people were following me and breaking into my house. And I was afraid to take sleeping pills because I thought that would make me vulnerable if somebody attacked me. And I was broke. I joined the army to get off welfare. And after 22 years in the military here I was on welfare. Again, my soldier went through this. My friend who I'd served with in Iraq came home a year ago. They found her dead in her home. She'd been dead for two days. PTSD and depression so bad she couldn't tell anyone because there was nobody to tell. Isn't over when you come home. One thing I really can't stand is for people to come and say thank you for your service. I hate that. Are you thanking me for participating in a genocide? Is that what you want? Because I'm not protecting anybody's country. I am taking somebody's. Even though I never pulled the trigger, I feel that I participated in a genocide. I feel very responsible. And that's a hard thing to live with. I feel very ashamed. See it sooner. Stand up again. I was a true surgeon. My job. Other people's children. How could I as a spiritual person teach people to care? As a mother, could I send my own sons to war? I asked myself that. I brought into the whole being. I thought it was the honorable thing to do. Myself. Tell the debate what I'd like to say. Do appreciate it. That's right. No problem at all. You're welcome. Thank you. What I'd like to say before we start the debate is this play is about the American military and you're all wondering. We've had different debates for the last couple of weeks. I've decided it'd be interesting to extend the debate to civilian population and see what the situation is in the UK. So I'm going to start off with one of the questions asked to Susan. What's the prevalence of sexual assault and rape in the civilian population? Welcome to the crime survey here in Britain. About 80,000 women raped a year and maybe 30% of the population lifetime of all experienced sexual assault. High for women and men. One of the things that came out of the play is that it's an American play and women represent 17% of the US military and 90% of the women are sexually harassed. That's the statistic that's come out. And one in three will experience a rape or sexual assault of some form or another. So it's one in three. It's quite high. In the British Army, the statistics are there's 10% of, 10% are women. We don't have very good statistics in England and Wales regarding rape and so therefore liberty, who were supported during this play, because of the statistics, the army can't respond to the problem if they don't know the extent of the problem. The question I'm going to ask Dr Vera Gray is, when these women are sexually assaulted or raped, where can they go? Where can they get help in the civilian world? So I'm from an organisation called Rape Crisis, which I don't know if everyone knows about. There's about 40 rape crisis centres across England and Wales. There's four here in London and that would be the main place I would say to go. So Rape Crisis centres, they all offer something different, but generally it's counselling, advocacy for women and girls who are going through the criminal justice process, which if any of you read the media, you know how difficult that process is, we've got a 6% conviction rate in this country which is just abysmal. So advocacy helps someone go through that process. Also doing outreach work, particularly with homeless women who are at great risk of sexual violence and also prevention and training work in schools, with GPs, just kind of everywhere that you possibly can to help increase someone's knowledge and awareness about sexual violence. Dr Vera Gray, one of the things I read, are rape crisis centres closing down? Is there a problem? Yeah, there's a problem. It's a question because, you know, is it funding or? Yeah, it's funding. So ongoing, we're always dependent on funding. Anyone that knows anything about the charity sector, we're very dependent on funding. So with this recent election, we're all looking very much to see what's going to go on in terms of funding for the charity sector. So they do the best work, I'm not just saying that because I'm from one of these, the most specialist work that you can get, you can't get that work from paying for it, you actually can get it provided for free. So I would like to think that we're in a stage now with the government and public, understand the value of specialist centres like that, but always we need support from the public and just watch this space in terms of what happens. So what I'd like to say is, if you'd like to spot rape crisis, do go on their website and donate because it's really important that this work continues. And one of the other things is the women involved, they've got somewhere to go, but we're also looking at the medical practitioners, the people that deal with these women that've got the problems. And Professor Susan Bruehle has written a book called The ABC of Domestic and Sexual Violence. It's really important because one of the issues that's come from the play is that these women feel very alone, they don't know where to go, they don't know what to do. And in civilian society we're looking at this and one of this is the important thing is that the doctors or the practitioners that have to deal with them, how do they handle it sensitively and everything. So if you'd like to expand on that, that would be lovely. Well in addition to the rape crisis centres, they're all around the country, they're a sexual assault referral centres funded by police, so that if a woman or child or a man is raped or sexually assaulted, there's a place to go for immediate care, usually through the police, but it can be through self-referrals. Maybe only 10% of people report immediately and get immediate care. Partly it's some forensic work for the police and criminal justice, but also the immediate care in terms of being kind, appreciative of what someone's gone through and sorting out the emergency contraception, sex and transmitting infections and ongoing counseling. Because as we saw here, very high rates of mental distress afterwards, depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress, etc. So there's an amigot set of needs, both criminal justice and medical, and then obviously in all parts of medicine, we meet people who've had bad experiences in childhood, we're seeing a lot of historical childhood abuse being reported now, and it can appear in all sorts of parts of the body and systems in mental health services in particular, but the reason our editor's book with a colleague who's set up the havens, that's the London Sex and Assortment for Health Centre, is because we want everyone in the NHS to be able to support someone who says something very bad happened to me, but I'm a sexual violence, I'm a physical violence, I'm a controlling behaviourist, might as terrible things happen to children, and actually know how to hold it and where to go next, how to be kind, how to be supportive, how to document, how to witness just being with someone kindly, and then go into the very specialist services of which are all sorts, but FGM, for honour-based violence, domestic violence, sex violence, lots and lots of different kinds of problems which have health impacts, but these are social problems. So what are the long-term needs of these women that have been sexually assaulted? How can society help these women? In the short term, they can get to these assault centres, they can be referred on to specials, but the longer, like some of these women who come back from war, highlight these issues. Short term, they deal with it, they may tell a friend, but long term, what are the mental health needs, what does society need to do in order to support these women? Well I think the first thing is because we know most, many people don't tell anyone at all, and many people will tell a friend, actually I think a lot of the hurt and upset and repeated upset comes from rape myths, media stories, disbelief, and those are things that collectively we have to do something about. In terms of specifics, I mean some women will need help with housing because they'll be need to get away from a violent partner, 50% of 40-50% of people in domestic violence relationships are raped by their intimate partners. So sometimes people will need help with housing, sometimes people will need help with immigration. In terms of health, it's largely in primary care and general practice, we've got some general practitioners here who I know here will know better, and I'm not a psychiatrist for psychology, but there are a number of very effective talking therapies, treatments for post-traumatic stress, it's not all pharmacological support that we're made. I was just going to ask Dr Vera Gray regarding how do you think we can prevent sexual violence and domestic violence? I mean it's one of the important things, before we have the problem, how can we prevent it? I think it's a really good point, it's something that we very deeply believe in, everyone needs to believe it is that it's not inevitable, the fact like you were saying earlier that we're living in a place where there's 80,000 women a year being raped, 400,000 women a year experiencing some form of sexual assault, and it gets into a mindset that it's inevitable and that we can't do anything about it, and we need to not believe that, we need to understand that this is a social problem, it has a social cause, and so therefore we can do something about it, very much around challenging the rate myths, challenging the media, and something that we are very big on is trying to get proper sex education into schools in this country, which again after the election is probably not going to happen, so hopefully you'll see in the media a much bigger, more political campaign about that, because what we're seeing, the other thing that we're seeing on the side of it which we're talking about a bit before, is then growing numbers of sexual assaults happening within institutions such as universities, because we've got young people in schools who are not being told anything about what consent is, they're being bombarded with messages from the media, from pornography, from kind of vast forms of sexualisation of culture, no one's talking to them about what consent is, what consent means, and then they're growing up in that world, they're going on, they're going into university and we're seeing the rates of sexual assault and rate happening in university increase, and similar to some of the issues that were raised in the play around when disclosures of sexual violence are made at universities, the response from the authorities are very bad, very silencing, very much you have the problems the person who's being raped, not the perpetrator, so yeah, sex education, challenging myths, and holding events like this, I think is really important for all of you coming to events like this, like actually taking some time to learn the issues, to think around the issues, it was a very difficult play to watch but it has such an emotional impact and to take that impact then back to the world, talk to people about it, talk to friends about it, and I think if there's enough of us working together against it, we can actually prevent it. Thank you very much. I'd like to open the debate to all of you, has anybody got any questions? Talk. Anybody? Total quietness, I'm going to have a look to see if anybody's... Oh, have you? Okay, lovely, thank you. How much of a part do you think that self-esteem plays in terms of sexual violence with you know, young women in particular? In terms of the impact of sexual violence, do you mean? Yeah, or, you know, the issues around non-consensual sexual activity and things, how much of a part do you think that that plays, and obviously it's going to be different for everybody, do you think that it's quite significant? Yeah, I think that what happens a lot of the time that we never really think about is the way that perpetrators target particular women and girls, and I think they will target women and girls that they know don't feel very good about themselves and they will do that, you were saying earlier, around domestic violence relationships and what we know, because one of the first strategies that they will use is to make the person feel very good about themselves. You're very good, you're very beautiful, you're very special, I think you're more special than your friends do, slowly start to isolate you, then the controlling behaviour increases, and then we see physical and sexual assault. So I think it's very important to see the way that perpetrators use a whole host of things that we all have in order to facilitate a space where they can... And certainly I haven't been doing the sector functions work for very long, but very struck by how vulnerabilities play out, how young girls are targeted, seeing quite a number of women with disabilities of one sort or another, young women with mental health problems, and certainly we know that children who've experienced breaching of boundaries, whether that's sexual or violence as children, or having very disruptive dysfunctional chaotic families, that actually those boundaries aren't so clear, so that again, I think people can pick that somebody who may not stand up for themselves in the same kind of a way, and you see that playing out in the women coming through reporting to the police. You had a question? I was just wondering what do you think men are being, men and boys, are being involved in the right way in terms of, I think, those campaigns, whether or not emphasis has been put on the fact that they can be involved in integration, sexual integration and the treatment of women? Yeah, I think that they're not being involved enough, definitely. There's great work that is going to start to be done, I hope, here around bystander work, I don't know if anyone knows about bystander, but it's about talking about with sexual violence, you've got a potential victim, potential perpetrator, but then you've also got the third person, who are all of us, who are people that see things where they think, I'm not sure if that's entirely right, and it's about involving men and boys in that, because as a man, I'm not a man, but if I was a man, it's not very nice to be totally always talked to as though you're a potential perpetrator. You need to also be talked to as though you're a potential kind of change agent, which is someone who can intervene, and we do work in schools, and what we definitely see is that the young boys really respond, we bring in young male trainers with us, and they really respond to those young men, so it's about skilling up young men to talk to other men, to challenge other men about some of their behaviours and attitudes towards women. Yeah, I had a question, sorry, are you going to go on to that, because mine sort of linked to that, and I was just curious, because you talked about sex education in schools and sort of ramping that up, when I was in secondary school, early in my second education, I was like 11 or 12, and we had PSE, which was personal social education, and that was everything, and it was run by this man who had PTSD himself that was undiagnosed, most definitely, he'd been in the Marines for like 25 years, and he was brutal. He was a terrible bully of some of the most vulnerable people, and he taught sports as well, and here was this man, it was a boy's school, and we were all brutalised by the experience of being taught social education by this guy, to some degree or other, I mean he bullied me frequently in front of people, and humiliated me in front of the group. Do you think that there's this, especially because I've been sort of a boy's school, there's a lot of new information that I think young men need to absorb about not just sexuality, but also about gender, and gender identity, and like I didn't receive any of that, and I'm 32, but I still feel like I'm just like all the time having my mind blown, by having to really change some of my attitudes, because quite often I've worked a bit with the military, and I've seen there's these two responses, this kind of one, you're the galant, protecting the little woman, putting her at the back of the truck, so that she doesn't get hurt, or whatever. And it's parallel to the plane, that's one of those things. Yeah, so on the one hand you're either the galant, or you're sort of, oh I'm showing you that I fancy you, so obviously that that peps up your self-esteem, and as a man you kind of sometimes think, well what is it that I'm supposed to do to help this person, is there a third language that I need to learn to help this person feel empowered in a way that isn't the ways that feel automatic to me, based on my previous educational training. So it's like those new skills that I have to learn, I'm getting into my older adulthood, but these kids, these teenage boys really need to get that when they're pubescent, you know, because that, do you have feelings about that, thoughts about how, a new sort of PSE, almost, like a new personal social sexual education? That's it, so we're involved in a campaign, now it's PSHE, personal social health education, but it's not compulsory, and so we're involved in a campaign to try and make it compulsory in schools, but it's not at the moment, so schools can pick and choose, faith schools generally don't do it, a whole bunch of schools generally don't do it. In some schools you have some really good practice, and I think it really makes a difference, but it's just very patchy, so it's about actually saying to the government, you're letting kids down, you're letting boys down in this, you're setting them up, and you're setting up women as well, and you definitely start talking about gender, definitely start talking about sexuality in schools, because levels of homophobia that I see in schools is out of this world, and it's completely connected to that kind of gender order. Do you have anything to say? I was just going to say, for all, whatever the curriculum is, there's a hidden curriculum as well, because my daughter's been fantastically well educated, but she says, now they're all 17, the boys, they're all absolutely fabulous galants, whatever they are, they're really nice, one by one, in a group, they're just a pack, they're rude, can you make me my sandwich, everything's sexual taught, because that's what the pack wants, and she's just, look, I don't know how you deal with what's official and what's actually going on, because there's always a disjunct being there, but I think, I mean I'm quite struck that young people have got all sorts of resistances that I wasn't aware of, and a lot of them are dealing with sex texts and phone porn and going, sorting themselves out, sexually and getting contraception and so forth, and they're having to negotiate what's fantasy and reality, and I think for the children who are not so, haven't got such self-esteem, that's when they can be picked on, there are problems, but I'm not unholy for our children, and some of the young medical students that I see are so wise about gender and behaviors that they see amongst doctors, and they talk about, you know, this male registrar taking the pee out of this female student was such a shame, and I was like, boy, so I wouldn't, I don't want to be despondent, I mean I still think there's a lot of work to do. Well I'm just going to, what was said by, so Nick Carter, who's the head of the UK Army, he actually quoted that there's got to be a cultural shift in order to negotiate this bullying and sexual harassment in the army, that was quoted on the, we were on the Today programme, which was on, on the 19th of May, please, you know, hit the link and listen to the rest of the programme, but that was one of the things he said, so in order for a cultural shift, you need both, both sexes, you need men and women to realise that there is a problem, and to go forward, and on that note, I'm going to close the debate, and I'd like to thank all of you for coming to the show, for supporting, supporting us, I'd like to thank everybody who's watching on the live stream, Haida, all you guys in the state, my Kickstarter backers that back this play that allowed it to have a voice, because it's a very difficult subject, it deals with women, it deals with sexual violence, it deals with PTSD, it's a multi-layered play and has lots of problems, it deals with the military, it deals with the American military, but there's parallels in civilian life, as we've discussed tonight, and I'd like to thank our actors who've done an amazing job, our technicians, and I hope to see you again, thank you very much for coming.