Women Veterans Describe Pervasive Sexual Harassment at Veterans Affairs Clinics
PoliticsOne out of every ten veterans are women, and as women continue to make up a growing number of the military’s enlisted forces—about one in seven today—that number will only grow larger. Yet when women veterans try to access health care at Veterans Affairs clinics and hospitals, they run up against an entrenched sexist culture that continues to make them feel unwelcome and can prevent them from receiving the care they need.
Here’s how one woman veteran, Corey Foster, described the experience of going to a VA medical center in Temple, Texas, to the New York Times:
“You felt like you were a piece of meat,” said Ms. Foster, 34, who retired as a sergeant. “Standing in line at the registration desk, I was getting comments from the male patients behind me, looking me up and down. It was a major source of discomfort.”
The treatment was the same at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., where Ms. Foster moved after living in Texas. At that point she gave up, and opted for her husband’s insurance outside the department. “They need to make the facilities not feel like an old soldier’s home,” Ms. Foster said.
According to the Times, harassment is so widespread that some VA health care centers were forced to remove benches from their hallways so that “men no longer have a place to linger and badger women.”