Somehow the phrases “Family Values” and “Support our Troops” have become partisan, Republican mantras in today’s divisive political climate. Yet, both those phrases ring hollow when we see what the Bush administration is doing to the families of our soldiers.
A few days ago, I stopped by a corner market to buy some ice and saw a rather shocking story in the USA Today:
Army wives whose husbands are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have committed markedly higher rates of child neglect and abuse than when their spouses are home, according to a study Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Army-funded study found child neglect was almost four times greater during periods when the husbands were at war. Physical child abuse was nearly twice as high during combat deployments.
That isn’t the first story they published either, from a story almost three months ago:
The study among military families shows that reports of emotional, physical and sexual abuse and child neglect peaked during the main deployment of troops to Iraq. When deployments began, reports of abuse quickly jumped from 5 in 1,000 children to 10 in 1,000.
This is a tragic, although somewhat understandable result of the stress military wives are under when their husbands are away risking their lives for their country. It must be a huge emotional strain to wonder if your loved ones are going to come home, and try to act towards your children and the outside world as if nothing is wrong. Clearly we are offering the wives and children of our soldier abroad too little support in dealing with the stress we are asking them to bear.
That stress is manifesting in other ways as well. From as far back as 2005 there has been evidence that the divorce rate amongst our military personnel has been rising.
Statistics are hard to come by, but one study of U.S. soldiers in 2005 put the returning infantry divorce rate at almost 20 per cent.
More recently an Army survey of soldiers before and after their tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan shows that the divorce rate almost doubled from 9% to 15%. Amongst officers the rate is even worse:
As of May 2005, stop-loss orders are affecting 14,082 soldiers–almost 10 percent of the entire forces serving in Iraq with no end date set for the use of these orders. Long deployments and high levels of soldier’s stress extend to family life. In 2004, 3,325 Army officer’s marriages ended in divorce–up 78 percent from 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion and more than 3.5 times the number in 2000.
Thinking about these two stories together makes me want to cry. I believe we sent them to Iraq on platter of lies, and should have already finished our business in Afghanistan. We are asking too much of our troops, we have already heard too many stories of inadequate health care or armor, now we find that too many of them face troubled family lives at the same time.
Regardless of the mission we ask them to undertake the bold men and women who fight for our country deserve our support and our gratitude, as well as an understanding of the depth of sacrifice we ask them to take and a commitment on our part to reduce that need to sacrifice as much as possible.
