More than half of women vets say they were stalked while serving

As if being pursued by an enemy isn’t traumatic enough, women in the military are also being stalked by their own.

A new study by researchers at the University of Southern California found that nearly 60 percent of the female veterans they interviewed said they experienced being stalked while they served. This is significantly higher than the number of men stalked, which the study put at 35 percent. It is also “much higher” than seen in previous studies, according to MilitaryTimes.com. Overall, the researchers spoke to 1,980 veterans. 

As in civilian life, the type of stalking differs by sex: Women were more likely to receive unwanted messages, emails, or phone calls while men were more likely to experience “someone showing up unannounced or uninvited.” The Uniform Code of Military Justice—the bible of military law—defines stalking as “repeated proximity or verbal or written threats that place an individual in reasonable fear of death or bodily harm.” Cyber-stalking was added to the code just this year.

Women make up about 15 percent of enlisted service members and a slightly larger percentage of officers, according to the Department of Defense. These women are more than four times as likely as civilian women to experience stalking at some point in their lifetime. The National Center for Victims of Crime, a Virginia-based nonprofit, says that 15 percent of civilian women (as opposed to the 60 percent in the military) and 6 percent of civilian men “have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.”

Stalking can be considered a form of sexualized violence, according to advocacy group RAINN. A 2019 Department of Defense survey of 100,000 active-duty soldiers found that sexual assault of military women had doubled between 2016-2018. About one out of every 16 military women reported being groped, raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted within the last year, The New York Times reported in May. Still, DoD put the rate of reporting at just 30 percent. A separate study this year found that reports of sexual assault at military service academies have increased by nearly 50 percent since 2016.

The military has long been called “toxic” for women, and the high level of stalking reported only increases the negative psychological impact of serving. The USC researchers said both female and male veterans who experienced stalking “were significantly more likely to have probable PTSD and depression.” “Victims [military or civilian] are also far more likely to take defensive actions, such as taking time off from work or school, changing jobs or schools, and even moving away from family and friends to avoid contact with their stalker,” according to Psychology Today. Women in the military may not have such options, however, thus increasing the psychological fallout as they continue to work near—or even for—their perpetrator.