There's a high release of people who were victimized by sexual violence—especially medical release for mental health reasons. That's a high one. There are obviously people quitting.
There's not a lot of research or work done to look into the care of how to rehabilitate people who were victimized by sexual violence. What concerns me is that in the SMRC report that came out a couple of months ago, the leadership had their top three priorities. One of them was to ensure rehabilitation of the perpetrators, but there was nothing said about the victims. It kind of shows where the priority is. What do we do? Right now it's outsourced to a civilian system. What are they saying to the victims? How do you make sure these programs are efficient? Are they working? Is the focus to rehabilitate them to come back?
One thing is, what does the chain of command do to make sure secondary trauma doesn't happen? This is usually what makes people not come back. You can see tons of people who were victims of sexual violence who didn't say anything. They stayed in the ranks and you never hear about it, and they kept doing their job fine. Yet, when they report, there are a lot of people who are gone. Obviously, something happens after they report that creates an additional trauma that makes people unable to stay.
They have to look into how to mitigate those things like the secondary trauma, the additional trauma or what we call “sanctuary trauma”. This is within the control of the military to do. They may not be able to erase all harmful or inappropriate sexual behaviour, but they sure can do something when it happens, to mitigate the factors that cause a person to leave.