Missing in Action: Homeless Female Veterans
MARY F. CALVERT
2014 professional winner
Mary F. Calvert has been awarded the 2014 Women’s Initiative Grant. These are her proposal images. These photographs will be updated when Mary F. Calvert submits her final project.
Paulina joined the US Air Force because she loved her country and soon held a coveted top-secret position in flight management. Just a few years later she left the military and before long, found herself jobless and living in her car.
Female veterans are the fasted growing segment of the homeless population in the United States and are four times more likely to become homeless than civilian women.
Although the Pentagon recently paved the way for women to serve in combat positions, the US Military has a long way to go. Women are under-represented in the upper ranks and many who signed up for a military career are getting out due to dashed hopes of career advancement and high levels of harassment and sexual assault. Women who courageously served their country in Iraq and Afghanistan have arrived home with healthcare issues including post-traumatic stress disorder, to scattered families, jobs that no longer exist, an impotent Department of Veterans Affairs and to a nation who favors their male counterparts.
The challenges for female veterans are unique and difficult to address, especially when programs for vets seldom meet the needs of mothers and many homeless women vets happen to be single parents.
Women have to leave their children in the care of family members or friends when they deploy and many face custody battles when the stress of deployment tears their families apart. Many of these women escaped a difficult situation by joining the military and when they get out find them unable to cope with the stresses of unemployment and a weak economy. In addition, a good deal of homeless shelters cannot accommodate children and those that can often wont allow a male child over the age of 12.
In 2009, President Obama and then VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, announced the goal to end veteran homelessness by 2015 and just two weeks ago, during an event for the Homeless Veterans Initiative in the East Room at the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama said, Even one homeless veteran is a shame, The fact that we have 58,000 is a moral outrage. We should all do more about it.
I am committed to using photography to affect meaningful social change and I am known for producing work on gender based, human rights issues. A photographer friend of mine recently critiqued my website and told me I ought to remove some of the depressing content. That people do not want to see stories about rape, obstetric fistula, and polio epidemics. I agree. Most people do not want to see such things, but they need to see them. In the old media world, these stories from Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are usually allocated 15 inches on page A-16 or shoehorned into 30-second slots midway through news broadcasts, if they are reported at all.
The new media world is already a buffet piled high with eye-candy that offers little food for thought or sustenance for the soul. As journalists, we must dedicate ourselves to keeping a place for the disadvantaged at the new media table. I believe that using visual media to document what ails our world is more important now than ever before.
The largest concentration of homeless veterans in America is in Los Angeles, California. My project, Missing in Action: Homeless Female Veterans would focus on this region, the painfully slow response by the beleaguered US Department of Veterans Affairs and the organizations attempting to help these women. Naomi House, run by the Salvation Army, not only provides emergency housing to homeless women veterans but also counseling, legal help and job training.
My job is to put a human face on this neglected crisis and make you care. I will accomplish by making compelling photographs of these women and letting them tell their own stories in their own voices. The mind cannot fathom the horror of a humanitarian crisis in 30 seconds. Only when one bears witness to a scene frozen in a photograph or hears the cries of a traumatized woman or child, can they begin to internalize such injustice and suffering; only when people internalize such suffering are they moved to act.
I endeavor to secure The Alexia Foundation Womens Initiative Grant because I share its core belief that journalists have a duty to shine a light into the deepest recesses of the human experience and provide a mirror for society to examine itself.
US Army Pfc. Natasha Schuette, 21, was sexually assaulted by her drill sergeant during basic training and subsequently suffered harassment by other drill sergeants after reporting the assault at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. While Staff Sgt. Louis Corral is serving just four years in prison for assaulting her and four other female trainees, Natasha suffers daily from PTSD because of the attack. She is now stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Mary F. Calvert
Connie Sue Foss was raped while in the US Army and hasn’t been able to hold down a job to care for herself and her daughter. She bears scars from punching a window during a PTSD episode and holds a molar she lost from grinding her teeth at night.
Military rape survivors Jennifer Norris and Jessica Hinves, smoke and discuss their assaults late into the night at Jessica’s home in Biloxi, Mississippi. Jennifer Norris was drugged and raped by her recruiter after joining the US Air Force when she was 21 years old. In tech school, she fought off the sexual assault of her instructor and later evaded the advances of her commanders. “Its like being in a domestic violence marriage that you can’t get divorced from,” she said. Norris reported the assaults, rape and harassment and saw her attackers punished but then suffered a sustained campaign of retaliation by her peers at work. Jessica Hinves, was an Air Force fighter jet mechanic when she was raped by a member of her squadron at Lackland Air Force Base. The case against her rapist was thrown out the day before the trial was to begin by a commander who said “Though he didn’t act like a gentleman, there was no reason to prosecute.” Mary F. Calvert
Kate Weber was raped one week into a deployment to Germany when she was nineteen. “I just lost everything. I know he was a repeat offender the moment he touched me. He was able to get away with it because the chain of command allowed it.” She suffers from severe PTSD brought on by Military Sexual Trauma when she was in the US Air Force. Her seven year old son Ryan suffers from secondary PTSD. They talk at in Kate’s bedroom of their Rohnert Park, California home. Mary F. Calvert
Jessica Hinves, was an Air Force fighter jet mechanic when she was raped by a member of her squadron at Lackland Air Force Base. The case against her rapist was thrown out the day before the trial was to begin by a commander who said “Though he didn’t act like a gentleman, there was no reason to prosecute.” She holds her baby Marley at her home in Hampton, Va. Mary F. Calvert
Gary Noling stands in his daughter Carrie’s bedroom on the anniversary of her suicide in Alliance, Ohio. Carrie Goodwin suffered severe retaliation after reporting her rape to her US Marine commanders. Five days after she was went home with a bad conduct discharge, she drank herself to death. “it destroyed my family. When Carrie died i lost all three of my kids and my grandkids. I lost two thirds of me. Two thirds of me is in that box of ashes.” Mary F. Calvert
Jessica Hinves, right, was an Air Force fighter jet mechanic when she was raped by a member of her squadron at Lackland Air Force Base. She has a word with military officers after a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill to receive testimony on sexual assaults in the military. The case against her rapist was thrown out the day before the trial was to begin by a commander who said “Though he didn’t act like a gentleman, there was no reason to prosecute.” She stands with her daughter in her home in Hampton, Va. Her daughter reaches for her old uniform. “I wouldn’t let my kids join the military, no way in hell, not right now. Not until they make it safe for them to join.” Mary F. Calvert
Military lawyers from the US Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard testify during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill to discuss sexual assaults in the US Armed Forces. Mary F. Calvert
TSgt Jennifer Norris was drugged and raped by her recruiter after joining the US Air Force when she was 21 years old. Nancy Parrish, President, Protect Our Defenders, comforts her as she breaks down after testifying before the sparsely attended House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, to discuss sexual misconduct by basic training instructors at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Mary F. Calvert
Melissa Bania, holds her banner, before hanging it on the foot bridge across from the entrance to Naval Station San Diego. US Navy Military Sexual Trauma survivors got together at Brittany Fintel’s San Diego, California home to make banners inscribed with their sexual assault experiences in the US Navy. That evening, under cover of darkness, they hung them on a foot bridge in front of the entrance to Naval Station San Diego. Mary F. Calvert
Tags: Veterans News
