A Department of Veterans Affairs accounting released in response to inquiries from The Associated Press shows a heavy financial and emotional cost involving vets from Iraq, Afghanistan and even back to Vietnam, and lasting long after a victim leaves the service.

Sexual assault or repeated sexual harassment can trigger a variety of health problems, primarily post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. While women are more likely to be victims, men made up nearly 40 percent of the patients the VA treated last year for conditions connected to what it calls "military sexual trauma."

It took years for Ruth Moore of Milbridge, Maine, to begin getting treatment from a VA counseling center in 2003 — 16 years after she was raped twice while she was stationed in Europe with the Navy. She continues to get counseling at least monthly for PTSD linked to the attacks and is also considered fully disabled.

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He crossed many boundaries, many times, in ways which make me shudder looking back. He was too frail at that stage of his life to ever attempt anything more than a kiss in return for money, but police later told me that other victims from his youth were not so fortunate.

I don't believe in monsters, or the devil, or the concept of evil. Dehumanization is counterproductive: The guy who groomed me was just one of many millions of screwed-up human beings with serious issues. And maybe (for the sake of his victims) if someone had tried to help him in his early life, hundreds of young girls could have been spared from those depraved compulsions.

“I am a sexual predator. I need help.” These are the chilling words in a letter penned in 2004 by Ariel Castro, the man accused of abducting three women and holding them hostage in his Ohio home for 10 long years.

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The Cleveland story fits every societal expectation of what sexual violence looks like: Young girls, abducted off the street, imprisoned by grim-faced perpetrators whose mug shots are straight out of a crime procedural. And even then, it was allowed to continue, hidden in plain sight.

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As you can probably tell, I've decided to not name the rapper. It isn't difficult to figure out who he is, of course, but it seems a matter of principle to keep his name out of this article. After all, we're talking about an incident that at least one person is calling a sexual assault, and which Pryde argues involved reverse sexism and double standards when it comes to sexual assault.

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From the age of three until she was a teenager, said Esposito, who was born deaf, her father and two brothers abused her. Confused and scared, she said nothing until her adult life unraveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol.

Part of her recovery has been to recount her experiences.

“I can’t change my past, but I decided and committed myself to make this world a better place so other deaf children don’t go through what I did,” said Esposito, who is now 38 and serves as the Executive Director of Advocacy Services for Abused Deaf Victims, a national non-profit based in Rochester, NY.

One obstacle, according to Esposito who communicated with The Crime Report through a video relay service that uses a translator to communicate in real time, was that “people tend to think deaf and disabled people are stupid and can’t communicate.”

“That,” she added, “makes us a very vulnerable population.”

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More on the lawsuit, from the New York Daily News:

"In papers filed in Manhattan federal court, Kevin Kiadii said he met Clash, who's 27 years Kiadii’s senior, in 2004. Kiadii, who was just 16 at the time, says he 'went on a gay telephone chat line to meet friends who were also gay,' and wound up meeting Clash, his suit says.

'Clash invited Kiadii to come to his apartment in Manhattan,' and sent a luxury car service to pick the teen up in Brooklyn, the filing says.

When he got to Clash's pad, the puppeteer plied him with 'alcohol and groomed him with attention and affection,' the suit says. They then 'engaged in sexual contact,' the suit says.

Clash's lawyer responded in a statement, calling the lawsuit "meritless" and "barred by the statute of limitations."

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I never called it sexual abuse, because it felt like an overly dramatic Oprah-ization of what happened. The word "abuse" seems to imply victimization and has always made me uncomfortable in this instance. Until now, I have been far too politicized to admit the chief reason I never called it sexual abuse in spite of the fact that it would be considered as much from both a criminal and a clinical perspective. The real reason is because I believed I asked for it.

The summer I turned 12, I went to sleepaway camp. I shaved my legs for the first time, dumped Sun-In in my hair and tanned with baby oil. I had my first boyfriend -- a skinny, freckly arrogant kid a year my senior who took me for two paddle boat rides and then broke up with me, declaring me a prude and, I was sure, ruining my romantic life forever.

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In response to the woman's disclosure, Laws asked her if she may have somehow provoked the abuse or if it was "in any way" her fault.

The exchange, as reported by Anette Sharp at The Daily Telegraph:

"My God they were having a good time with you," said the broadcasting legend, missing the sensitivity of the subject matter.

"Was it in any way your fault?" he then asked.

"No, I don't think so," the woman, a nurse, said.

"You weren't provocative?" Laws pressed.

"I was a little girl. I don't think so John. No, I was just a little girl."

After nine years of abuse the woman finally found the courage to consult a social worker at age 15 - the year before her father kicked her out of home.

As she broke down on air, Laws asked: "Are you unattractive?"

"I don't think so. I think I'm all right," she said.

"You sound all right," Laws encouraged.

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Over the past few months, I have written this letter a dozen times. At moments, I would give anything for someone to wave a wand and let me know what I should do, but at the same time, I cannot bring myself to believe there is an easy solution to my issue.

Apparently, I am unlovable on certain levels. When I write this, I do not just mean as a person, but also the efforts of my hands.

My parents were both pedophiles, and I grew up feeling less real than that life-sized doll my mother bought me at age seven so I could have a "friend." When puberty finally rendered me into a monster to them, I was relieved -- but the abuse never stopped. It just changed character. Suddenly I became irredeemable and disgusting. My older brother spent most of my childhood tormenting me, which typically made my parents laugh or chastise me for not fighting back. Even though it pained me beyond words, his uncontrolled anger made me cut off contact with him when I did the same with my parents. My ex-husband spent 12 years of our 14-year marriage encouraging me to be on fertility meds while he knew he had taken measures to never have children (measures about which I knew nothing) because "God told him that He wanted me to be alone." I only found out what he had done when I hit menopause early. God's hatred was how he rationalized his actions when asking me for the divorce. For six months between that request and the marriage ending, he told me nearly every day that he had never loved me or wanted me or even liked me. He had married me out of pity. Given my family, no one else would ever be able to want me. It has been four years since then, and I have only now begun to date again. Finally, I thought I had found someone with whom I could at the very least enjoy physical contact and to whom I could give some delight, and yet he broke up with me so he could go back to the woman who had pureed his heart.

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I've followed your advice columns for quite some time now and have been compelled to write for quite some time.

I am a woman in my early 20s, just getting my start in the creative field of my dreams in a large city 800 miles away from home. I've fought my way to the top of my class in every instance, and the past year has been filled with amazing opportunities and work that I never imagined would come my way. I have a long-distance boyfriend and several wonderful friends in this city. The eight months or so that I've been working have been some of the greatest, and worst, months of my life.

The transition from school to work was very rough, and I spent much of my summer holed up in my bedroom and attempting to shut out the world. Not being around other people daily as in college was, and is, quite hard and my relationship with my boyfriend suffered as I spiraled emotionally. Shortly after, I began seeing a therapist and for the first time in my life brought up the sexual abuse that I suffered at the hands of my older brother when I was around 6 years old. The abuse continued for many years, even after my parents walked into a compromising situation in the first few months of the abuse. They have never spoken about it since.

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According to the Hollywood Reporter, the report "also said officials mishandled evidence amid a 'cultural mistrust' of evidence from children, and victims at times were simply dismissed. It concluded that Savile, who died in Oct. 2011, could have been stopped as early as 1964."

"It is clear that because of Savile's celebrity status and the power, maybe people do look for that extra piece of evidence, behaving with an extra sense of caution, because of the power he wielded," HMIC's Drusilla Sharpling told BBC radio on Tuesday.

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Sadly, I was even less surprised when the suit was amended in January to include Covenant Life Church (CLC), the congregation I had attended for nine years, and to add new charges of physical and sexual abuse by pastors, as well as allegations of abuse on church property. From what I’d seen inside Sovereign Grace and Covenant Life from 1996–2005, the alleged abuse seemed almost predictable—the result of the group’s toxic teachings on parenting, gender, and sexuality.

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Bridie Farrell tells WUWM, a public radio station in Milwaukee, that she had sexual contact with Gabel repeatedly over several months in 1997 and 1998 while both were training in New York and Michigan. At the time, she was 15 and Gabel was 33.

Gabel competed in short track at three Winter Games and won a silver medal in the relay at Lillehammer in 1994. He also served as president of U.S. Speedskating and is currently chairman of the short track committee for the International Skating Union.

U.S. Speedskating says it will "look into this matter immediately to determine what action should be taken." There's been no comment from Gabel and an attempt to reach him by phone was unsuccessful.

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And for more than two decades, police say, Levy was illegally filming and taking pictures of his female patients.

On Feb. 8, Johns Hopkins Medicine dismissed Levy after another employee told hospital officials that the physician was inappropriately photographing and videotaping his patients during appointments.

Little over a week later, Levy was found dead in his Towson, Md., home from what investigators are calling an apparent suicide.

Police say they have uncovered an “extraordinary” amount of evidence at Levy’s residence.

According to NBC affiliate WBALTV, Hopkins officials said a few of Levy's patients had been notified of the allegations, but beause he treated hundreds of patients over a career spanning decades, not all of them have been identified.

But many patients are angry with what they say is a lack of transparency from the hospital after the scandal broke.

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I was 36 years old and I’d never had a lover, a fact I was ashamed to admit and had only divulged to my therapist.

Although I’d wanted to be in a relationship, my attempts to date brought on a total body fight-or-flight response. I played out idealized romantic scenarios in my mind, but when it came to actually being with a man, I felt like somebody’s prey. At the same time, I was terrified of being abandoned.

When I noticed a potential boyfriend looking at me with interest, I was convinced he’d pass me over once he saw through my superficial appearance: with my clothes on, I believed, I was false advertising. I imagined that once he saw me naked he’d view me in a light of lesser worth, because of what had happened to me, because of what I’d been involved in when I was a child.

As a girl, I’d been sexually abused, manipulated into acts that entailed the same body parts and motions as intercourse, but that was rape, my therapist said, that wasn’t the same thing as having sex: I was a virgin.

But I didn’t consider myself to be a virgin. I considered myself to be an anomaly.

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Shankar was motivated to tell her story for Jyoti Singh Pandey, the Indian woman who died as a result of a gang rape she suffered in New Delhi late last year. "Enough is enough," Shankar contined. "I am rising, for Jyoti and women like her. I am rising with the amazing women of my country ... I am rising for the child in me, who I don't think will ever forgive and recover from what happened to her."

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Washington already has partner rape provisions for first- and second-degree sexual assault – rape that includes violence, overt threat of violence, or is perpetrated on someone physically or mentally incapacitated. Yet the state's current legal system means that prosecutors have to pursue "lesser misdemeanor assault charges" in cases that would otherwise qualify as third-degree if the victim and assailant weren't married. Washington law defines third-degree rape as occurring when "that person engages in sexual intercourse, not married to the perpetrator … where the victim did not consent … to sexual intercourse and such lack of consent was clearly expressed by the victim's words or conduct." There you go. You can say no, clearly and explicitly, but if you're married and your assailant didn't slap you around, it's not rape.

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This is about my birth father, whom I found when I was 34, and how to have a relationship with him, if at all. He split the scene in 1971 when I was a baby.  

First some history: Things were not good between him and my mother (teen parents). When he got a low draft number, he quickly entered the Navy, and I never saw him again. My mom, newly divorced and with a small infant, remarried a man who turned abusive. By the time I was six, he had adopted me and I had a half-sister two years younger than I was. Unfortunately, my mom was getting beaten up regularly.

She courageously left him (when I was six), and he started molesting me during each visit we had with him. My mom remarried again, and then that stepfather started molesting me. The police found out, and by the time I was 12 no one was abusing me anymore. The second stepfather did come home after about a year (county jail-work furlough program). We did some family counseling, which was over by 13. As I became an adult, I started to go back to therapy. I got my B.A. (in child development), married my best friend, did some more therapy. My mom left that guy and found the man she should have spent her life with, a sweet man who treats her very well. And I found a way to deal with toxic people -- I cut them out entirely from my life.

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