Rape, Then Red Tape

Ruth Moore joined the navy to fight for her country. While serving, she was raped twice by her supervisor, and she continues to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Moore says her PTSD has resulted in ​“anxiety, depression, insomnia, migraines, a sexually transmitted disease, miscarriages, suicide attempts, homelessness, [and] an end [to her] marriage.” Nevertheless, it took a 23-year fight with the Veterans Benefit Administration (VBA) for Moore to receive any disability benefits. Currently, she has a 70-percent disability rating, which provides her with a bare-bones annual income of less than $18,000.

The VA faces a backlog of nearly 900,000 disability claims, but the struggle to obtain benefits is even more difficult for veterans like Moore who’ve experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). When filing a PTSD claim, MST victims are required to submit evidence of the crime. In most cases, this evidence doesn’t exist. In 2011, a joint study by the ACLU and Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), an advocacy group for women veterans, found that the VBA had approved only one third of MST-based PTSD claims over the previous three years.

In July, SWAN submitted testimony at a Senate hearing to review the VA’s handling of MST-based PTSD claims. Now, Moore is keeping the pressure up with a petition to the VA; you can sign at www​.change​.org/​p​e​t​i​t​i​o​n​s​/​s​u​p​p​o​r​t​-​a​l​l​-​v​e​t​s​-​a​p​p​l​y​i​n​g​-​f​o​r​-​p​t​s​d​-​b​e​n​efits.