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Master Sgt. William Wright strangled his 32-year-old wife, Jennifer Gail, and buried her in a shallow grave in a North Carolina field. She was among four wives killed in a six-week period in 2002 by their husbands, all soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. Three had recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan.
The murders drew considerable media attention and prompted the Pentagon to modify its handling of domestic violence, says Anita Sanchez, spokeswoman for the Miles Foundation, a Connecticut-based advocacy group that deals with domestic violence in the military.
Among other things, the military started requiring troops returning from long deployments to complete a mental health checklist — promptly dubbed the “don't kill your wife survey” by troops. They quickly learned “what to check” to avoid raising red flags, Sanchez says, adding that few services are provided for families on what to expect from their returning soldiers. And with so many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, many military families are strained and anxious.
Even before the four slayings, concern about domestic violence in the military had prompted lawmakers on Capitol Hill to require the Pentagon to establish a Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence. Established in 1999, it issued several reports and some 200 recommendations before disbanding in 2003.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, says the Defense Department has made “substantial progress” implementing the task force's recommendations and improving the military's response to domestic violence. For example, the department has funded 22 domestic-violence training conferences over the past two years for commanding officers, judge advocates, law-enforcement personnel, victims' advocates, chaplains, health-care providers and fatality-review team members. The Pentagon also is working with the Family Violence Prevention Fund and the National Domestic Violence Hotline to develop public-awareness campaigns encouraging the military community “to take a stand against domestic violence,” Shavers says.
In the last five years, the Miles Foundation reports a dramatic spike in its caseload. In October 2001, the foundation was handling 50 cases a month. Now it has 147 a week, Sanchez says, attributing the increase to greater public awareness of the issue as well as to the confidentiality and privacy the foundation can offer that the military cannot.
Military life, by its very nature, is stressful, making some family members especially vulnerable to domestic violence. Frequent relocations and high unemployment for military spouses, for example, make them more dependent on their service-member partner for income, health care and housing. Moreover, long deployments can cause some soldiers to worry that their spouses are having extramarital affairs. And easy access to weapons also has been shown to be a risk factor in domestic-violence homicides.
Abuse victims in military families are often reluctant to report incidents of abuse because they know it could jeopardize the spouse's career, along with the family's paycheck, housing and health care.
“Imagine, in the civilian world, that calling a local shelter or confiding in your doctor automatically caused your batterer's employer to find out about his acts of violence and abuse,” Judith E. Beals, a member of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence, wrote in the group's 2003 report.
Victims' advocates say, however, that in recent years the military has lagged behind the nation in dealing with domestic violence. When the military created its Family Advocacy Programs (FAP) more than 20 years ago, the programs were considered progressive. But over time, experts say, FAP stayed the same while the civilian world changed the way it dealt with domestic violence.
In terms of domestic-violence programs, “the military today is where the country was in the 1980s,” Sanchez says. For example, in the 1980s, many civilian hospitals were beginning to make sure they had registered nurses on staff — called SANEs (sexual assault nurse examiners) — trained to examine sexual-assault victims. But Camp Lejeune, a big Marine Corps base in North Carolina, didn't get its first SANE until 2002, Sanchez says. Until recently, sexual-assault victims on some military bases had to be transferred to civilian hospitals to obtain treatment.
Advocates had hoped to persuade Congress in 2005 to add military-specific provisions to the Violence Against Women Act but were told the bill would have to go through the Armed Services and other committees with jurisdiction over military issues, possibly delaying or derailing the entire bill.
Meanwhile, the DOD and the Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women in 2005 kicked off two domestic-violence demonstration projects that use the “coordinated community response” approach. The projects involve the U.S. Army at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the communities of Hopkinsville, Ky., and Clarksville, Tenn., and the U.S. Navy and the city of Jacksonville, Fla. The projects are expected to provide “lessons learned” and serve as a guide for other military installations.
“There really isn't a set model for coordinating the military and civilian response to domestic-violence incidents, so hopefully we can create one,” said Connie Sponsler-Garcia, the Military Projects Coordinator and coordinator of the Jacksonville project.
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