Child Abuse in Deployed Families (Part 2)

You're welcome. I had been mulling this for a while. I was really getting ticked with the titles of the news reports that were coming out. Very deceptive headings. Made it sound like it was categorically true of all military families when the truth was that only 1,771 families were looked at world-wide and those families already had prior incidences with abuse. And these families studied did not include officer's families or single parent families.

What those news reports don't show is that prior to deployments starting in 2003, instances of child maltreatment in the military community were considerably less than those among their civilian counterparts per 1,000 children. This last report indicates that while incidents of maltreatment among active duty army families have increased, they're only marginally higher than those reported in the civilian sector.

Very few studies exist making a comparison of child abuse between military families and civilian families. Those that do exist are really not representative of the complete military community. For example, guard and reserve families are often not included because there's not a base anywhere near where they live. Underreporting could be happening in cases involving military families due to reports going to Child Proctive Services (CPS) instead of to the Family Advcacy Programs (FAP).

Additionally, there is no uniform definition of what maltreatment or abuse is. Each branch of service has it's own definition and it's own reporting system as do all 50 states. Some report by incident instead of by the case. Others report by the family instead of by the child. Until an across the board system and definition are put into practice, results from these kinds of studies are going to have some sort of bias to them.

What is consistent, though, is the lower the rank, the younger the parents, and the younger the child, the greater the potential for maltreatment. Also of importance is whether or not the family has experience with prior deployments in how to cope with the stressors involved.

It's also important to point out that this most recent study was a secondary analysis of data collected from September 2001 to December 2004. Since that time, MANY improvements have been made to FAPs for all branches. So, this study is really looking at specific time period of post 9/11 predeployment and comparing that to a first time deployment time frame of about 20 months.

I really don't think JAMA or RTI are the bad guys here. They published an objective report covering a specific time period. For the media to frenzy on it like they have is irresponsible. The report from FOX News just set me off. I knew it wascoming because FOX likes to report some pretty left-side stuff, but getting Stacy Bannerman to comment for the article was inappropriate. First, she belongs to an anti-war group composed of military families. Second, she has no children. Third, her marriage dissolved after her husband returned from Iraq. Who better to ask about the effects of deployments on child abuse?

Now, I'm not painting a bulls eye on Miss Bannerman. Don't go sending her nasty hate mail. I don't agree with everything she has to say, but she makes some valid points. She was a deployed spouse as so many of us have been. That kind of service is not measurable and I embrace her for enduring and suffering the months of lonliness. Miss Bannerman is right that more needs to be done in terms of VA treatment for veterans. She's especially right that more needs to be done in terms of outreach programs for national guardsmen/women and reservists who don't have ready access to base facilities and programs. I applaud her for her trips to DC to try to correct these issues that have seemingly slipped through the cracks.

I don't agree with her views about if we should even be in Iraq, but she's entitled to her opinion on that matter and I respect that. I don't agree that not funding the war is the best way to "Support Our Troops". I think she swings from both sides of the plate with that conviction while at the same time demanding better training and equipment for the guard and reserve. IBA doesn't grow on trees. Neither does night vision goggles, MREs, fuel, amunition, transportation, MRAPs, or anything else.

Miss Bannerman also contends that deployments cause more divorces. A study by Rand Corp. contests her claim by stating that wartime and peacetime divorces are pretty much equal. You'll notice a .5% gain in percentages of divorces, but that is explainable by looking at the numbers or couples getting married in the military vs. the numbers getting divorced in a given year. For example, if there are 1,000 married couples in 2001, 100 couples get married, totaling 1,100 and 75 get divorced, the divorce ratio is approx. 6.8%. This leaves 1,025 carried over to the next year. If only 50 couples marry in 2002, totaling 1,075 married couples, but the number of divorces stays constant at 75, now the divorce rate is very close to 7%.

I have searched and searched and I can not find any article, prior to the release of RTI's data review, where Miss Bannerman adressess child abuse in military families. From what I have seen of her book reviews, it also does not address child abuse. There's no doubt that Miss Bannerman is an educated woman with some alphabet soup behind her name. Her opinion is as educated as the next person; but, what is it that makes her qualified to speak on the topic of child abuse? I have no idea.

My point here is this. FOX News used Miss Bannerman, in or out of context (it doesn't matter), to support it's political stance on this war and to be able to have another bullet for it's political weapon. "Deployments cause child abuse! Bring the troops home!" Bologna. Parents/caregivers cause child abuse. Military or civilian.

Along those same lines, "Deployments cause undue stresses, lower academic performance, and higher rates of depression in children! Bring the troops home!" This one is true, but the same can be said for divorce, the death of a loved one, a hurricane, or any other traumatic life change.

I really want to encourage people to look closely at issues that popular media presents in articles and stories. Ask yourself the critical questions. Research it if you like. Just never ever take the word of the media at face value.

Child Abuse in Deployed Families Gaining Lots of Attention

I didn't include the text of the report in this post, but you can get to it by clicking above. When I first saw this, I discarded it as inaccurate. But since it's gaining such attention, I feel it's important to address it here. There are several other sources for this story by several different writers. I've only seen a few reports that include the actual numbers. RTI, Journal Watch, Fox News, and USA Today all comment on the original report, but I didn't see where any of them made it a point to emphasize that this is not inclusive of all military families.

Looking at the original report from The Journal of the American Medical Association with a skeptical and scientific eye, it clearly states that the families included in the research are those with previously established occassions of abuse.

I think the reports are incomplete. A general assumption that all deployed spouses are child abusers can't be made from this report. What the researchers looked at were families where at least one confirmed case of child abuse had already been substantiated.

That being said, the sample taken for this study was not representative of the population that the researchers are reporting on. To me, the people who published these reports, without that disclaimer, are irresponsible.

The fact that DoD defines child abuse differently or more strictly that their civilian counterparts also plays this out in a different light. When we were all kids, corporal punishment was a norm, just like riding around in the back window of the car.

My advice, just look at it as a wedge being driven between the morals of US society and the war. They're playing on the sympathies of the US public. I believe they think if they show deployments as destructive to the home life of military families, US support for the war will drop even further and politicians will feel even more compelled to push for withdrawals and quick resolution.

Until these researchers come out with a more comprehensive examination that is inclusive of all military families or is more representative of the military family population, this report will only be viewed as a black mark.

At best, this report is good to see how the stress of deployment effects families that already have at least one occurrence of child abuse in the home. The fact that occurrences in child abuse for deployed wives where child abuse has already happened increases when their husbands are deployed is not surprising.

Representative samples of the US population where child abuse occurs indicates that women are more than twice as likely than men to be abusive to their children. But again, we’re working with different definitions, like comparing apples to oranges.

Potential Added Financial Protection for OCONUS PCSs/Deployments

Companies that don't do this voluntarily already ought to be ashamed. You do it because it's the right thing to do.

Bill would bar phone, car insurance penalties

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Aug 6, 2007 10:49:56 EDT

Service members receiving orders to deploy or for reassignments to and from overseas bases would be allowed penalty-free cancellation of contracts for their phone, cable television service, automobile insurance and utilities, under a bill introduced by an Iraq war veteran.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., calls his plan the 21st Century Servicemembers Protection Act. The bill, HR 3298, would greatly expand financial and legal rights under the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act to allow the termination or suspension of contracts signed before military orders were received.

The bill was referred to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, which already is considering updates to the current SCRA.

Murphy is a former Army judge advocate who deployed to Iraq in 2003 as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. Since being elected to Congress in 2006, he has pushed to update military personnel policies. He is not a member of the veterans’ committee but does sit on the House Armed Services Committee, which makes recommendations about changes in legal protections for deployed troops but does not have legislative jurisdiction over the law governing service members’ rights.

With 22 co-sponsors, Murphy is proposing a major extension of current cancellation rights that allow apartment and automobile leases to be canceled when a service member receives permanent-change-of-station orders or is deployed for more than 90 days for housing and 180 days for vehicles.

His bill specifically would apply to cellular phone service, cable or satellite television service, Internet service, automobile insurance, water, electricity, oil, gas, telephone and other utilities.

Under Murphy’s proposal, a service member or a service member’s dependent would have the option of terminating or suspending a service contract if he receives reassignment orders to or from a location outside the continental U.S., or receives orders for a deployment of 90 days or longer, or has received orders to deploy a minimum of 180 days.

A company could be notified by hand, fax, mail or private messenger of the termination or cancellation. A company could not impose an early termination charge and would have to refund any fees paid in advance, However, canceling a contract does not mean a service member or his dependent does not have to pay any balance for service provided before the cancellation takes effect. In cases where fees were paid in advance, a company would have 30 days from the effective date of the termination to provide a refund and a service member could also receive up to $10,000 in damages and have his attorney’s fees covered for each violation.

Murphy’s bill also would increase the potential penalty for companies that do not comply with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act by lowering debt interest rates to 6 percent for pre-military loans when service members are mobilized for active duty. Up to $10,000 in fines plus attorney fees would be allowed as damages when a creditor willfully or negligent violated the law.

Got Screwed on Tuition or Credits due to Deployment? Hopefully, Not Anymore

If this passes, it will be so awesome. Certainly, military personnel should not be punished for serving their country when called. Kuddos to Sgt. Campbell for his efforts.

Vet Rewrites The Law To Help Others

Paul Rieckhoff | June 28, 2007

When Sgt. Patrick Campbell returned to law school after serving a tour in Iraq, his student lender told him that he was defaulting on his payments. Due to his deployment to Iraq, he had used up all of his permissible grace period. Unlike his non-veteran classmates, the lender was going to require Patrick to start repaying his loans the day after graduation. Finally, after writing dozens of letters and spending hours on the phone, he was told that the only way to restore his pre-deployment status would be to rewrite the laws. So he did just that. Patrick spent his final year in law school writing the Veterans Education Tuition Support Act (VETS) to help returning student-soldiers.

Today that bill was introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (OH) and Representative Susan Davis (CA). This new legislation will fix the loopholes that were punishing young Iraq vets like Patrick. The Veterans Education Tuition Support Act, or VETS Act, will:

Require colleges to refund tuition for service members who deploy (or provide future credits)

Restore veterans to their academic status when they return

Cap student loan interest payments at 6% while the student is deployed

Extend the period of time a student-soldier has to re-enroll after returning from abroad

Patrick's story is reality for the thousands of other National Guardsmen and Reservists who are also college students. For these troops, deployment poses extra financial burdens - including thousands of dollars in lost tuition and overdue student loans.

Sgt. Todd Bowers, IAVA's Director of Government Affairs, experienced this first hand. When he was activated on his second deployment to Iraq, Todd was forced to withdraw from his university only two weeks before finals. After he returned from Iraq, the school would not allow him to take his finals or finish his classes, and they refused to refund his tuition. Only after local media picked up on his story did the university permit Todd to finish his finals and complete his classes.

We at IAVA are incredibly proud of Patrick for pushing to make this bill a reality. He has shown how one motivated young veteran can make a difference. The VETS bill will help reassure men and women in uniform that serving their country opens doors to higher education, instead of closing them. Join us now in making sure it gets passed. You can learn more now at www.iava.org. Tell your members of congress that college students shouldn't be punished for deciding to serve their country.

Do the Math: Soldiers' Return Plus 9 Months Equals Base Baby Boom

Now this is the kind of article I enjoy reading, except for the whole re-deploying bit. It is interesting to me to see the trend or the pattern between soldiers' returns and the ensuing fruits of romantic entanglement that follow. I would have to look for more data on this issue, but I do not believe that this is only a recent occurrence. I have a neighbor that lives just up the street from me. They have two little boys and he's been deployed right before each was conceived. (ponders)

Do the Math: Soldiers' Return Plus 9 Months Equals Base Baby Boom

By KRISTIN M. HALL
Associated Press Writer
FORT CAMPBELL, Ky.

Army Spc. John Luckey and his wife, Kerry, already had five children and no plans for more when he came home from a year's duty in Iraq. But there was romance in the California air when the entire family went on a vacation to see the giant redwoods.

Nine months later, Kerry Luckey gave birth to a daughter, EmLee Rae.

Apparently many military couples at Fort Campbell celebrated like the Luckeys when about 20,000 soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division came home last fall, because the military hospital here is now seeing a baby boom.

The hospital...


...expects to deliver 210 babies a month soon, nearly twice the usual number of deliveries, and more are expected at other nearby hospitals in Tennessee and Kentucky.

"You go around town and there are these big bellies everywhere. It's kind of fun to have all the babies around," said Kerry Luckey, who lives in Clarksville, near this Army post.

A temporary increase in births is not uncommon after soldiers return, but the boom this year is the biggest the post has seen in decades, said Lt. Col. Diane Adams, chief of women's health at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital.

The base is seeing "a lot more folks with family on the mind when they returnedthis time around," Adams said.

About 19,000 soldiers returned to Fort Stewart, Ga., in the first months of 2006, and the hospital there saw a baby boom nine months later, delivering more than 100 babies a month, compared with 76 per month the previous year. Fort Hood in Texas saw deliveries peak at 289 in March 2006, well above the 213 average.

Lt. Trena Buggs, a labor and delivery nurse at Blanchfield, got pregnant herself not long after her husband, a Special Forces soldier, returned from Iraq in early 2006, and she gave birth in May. She knew what to expect when the 101st Airborne came back between August and December of last year.

"We knewthat any time the soldiers are deployed, we knew the one thing they liked to do best when they come home is get a little bit of loving," she said.

In many cases, the father was back in Iraq by the time the baby arrived; many soldiers have heard their children's first cries via cell phone.

In the Fort Campbell hospital's busy maternity waiting room, many new mothers do not even seem to notice when Brahms' lullaby starts playing over the public address system _ the signal that another baby has just been born.

Adams hears the lullaby about seven times a day.

"We should be close to 2,300 for the year," she said. "Last year we delivered1,352, to give you a comparison."

The baby boom at Fort Campbell is expected to continue through December, which also happens to be when three units from the 101st Airborne are set to return to Iraq. Another three units are scheduled to leave for Afghanistan early next year.

About 20 percent of the new mothers at Fort Campbell are active-duty soldiers themselves, Adams said.

New mothers are exempt from deployment for four months. But after that, husband-and-wife soldiers have to arrange for child care if they are both sent overseas. Often, relatives or close friends take care of the children.

Many soldiers at Fort Campbell have beensent to Iraq three times already. Back-to-back tours can play havoc with family planning.

"When you're in your first deployment, if you haven't started your family already, you think, `Well, we'll go ahead and do that after the first one,'" Adams said. "They've put it off long enough, and now they want to get going on getting the family situation straightened out."

Copyright 2007 by the Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Being a Deployed Military Wife

OK. So I'm not a wife. I'm a husband. But I assure you, the worries are the same, the responsibilities are the same, the stress is the same. I'm a full time student as well as a full time single parent of 3 great kids. But biggest and foremost, I'm a full time deployed spouse.

All of our dynamics (deployed spouses and families) are different, but our needs are basically the same. We want to be able to communicate with our spouse that is deployed, however it is possible. If we have kids, we want our spouse to be able to communicate with them also. We knew what we asked for when we signed up, but we're not afraid to take help when it's offered.

Your first stop, if you haven't already, is to go to the Family Readiness Center at your local base. They'll have a list of programs and benefits that you can utilize.

After that, go here. http://www.iraqwarveterans.org/free_for_troops.htm and see what all you can do for your family and for your deployed Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine.

Additionally, many states have extra benefits for families of deployed service members. Check your local state governments web page for details.

If you'd like to help out my family or my deployed spouse, e-mail me at drexxell@hotmail.com and I will send you the information you need. Put "I want to help" in the subject line. These same services can be applied to any deployed service member or their family as long as you know their address.

Also, don't forget to look into Service Members Civil Relief Act (SCRA)(Formerly Soldiers and Sailors Act). This is especially use full for guard and reserve members who have been activated as it relates to their debts incurred prior to being called to active duty (Credit cards, car loans, mortgage loans). Many times, credit card companies will follow the directions of the SCRA for active duty members who have been deployed. Call your credit card company and ask.

As for cell phones, check this out http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/06/military_cellphone_cancelcontracts_070628w/.
This was just passed in June of 2007. Deployed members can have their cell phone accounts put on "Military Suspense" for the duration of their deployment. That means no monthly service charges on their phones (which they can't use because they have no coverage). It doesn't effect phones you're still using at home. Basically, call your cell phone provider and see what they require to make this happen.

My many thanks go out to the organizations that donate their time, money, and effort to supporting our deployed troops and their families.

Special thanks and praise goes out to the deployed Service Members themselves and the families they've left behind. God's safety to you all and God's speed home.

If there's anything I can do for your family or for your deployed member, please let me know.

For spouses and their deployed members, just remember this "It's not worth getting into a pissing contest on who's got it worse." The situation sucks from both sides, but for different reasons. Remember that you love each other. Remember that you love your family. Remember that war has bad effects on people and don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it.

http://www.militaryonesource.com/skins/MOS/home.aspx will give you a lot of tips on how to cope. Additionally, they'll give you 8 sessions of personal or family counseling, no questions asked, all billed to TriCare.

Find the support groups. Get involved in your spouses group at your base. If one isn't active, make noise and help create one. Best of luck to you all.