Hello.
A common theme that women veterans experience through the transition to civil life is to be left with little support or concern about their gender conditions related to service, or to be forgotten, frankly, or pushed to the side. In terms of asking for help, you shouldn't have to lay down all your pride, or be so low in life that suicide is the only option to remove the pain, to finally receive help from CAF or Veterans Affairs.
I understand that CAF, Veterans Affairs and most people don't consider me a veteran because of my short service. They like to highlight that I'm an “employment casualty”, as some Veterans employees have stated. I can't speak on the transitions of women veterans who have served full careers in the military, whom I highly respect, but I have highlighted, in the written statement I've submitted with my opening statement, that I reached out to some women veterans' networks and received from them the direct barriers they've faced when transitioning to civil life.
I never had transition services when I was released from the military. My human rights and my employment rights were extremely violated. I was silent out of fear that I would be killed, raped again or put in military corrections, as it's in the best interests of national defence that Canadians don't know there's a serial rapist group in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I was 19 years old when I started with the Canadian Armed Forces. My whole life was ahead of me. I signed up to see the world. Instead, I was left with debilitating trauma that affected every aspect of my life. Both my labours were high risk because of my untreated military service injuries. My daughter developed neonatal subcutaneous fat necrosis with hypercalcemia caused by me having to push at nine centimetres due to scarring from my sexual assault. She spent the first two years of her life in and out of hospital and developed food restrictions after that. She became stable at three years old.
I was on bedrest for the majority of my second pregnancy. At 20 weeks, I was contracting with high-risk premature labour. I was put on bedrest and had long stays in hospital, with no one to care for my four-year-old child at home. At 33 to 34 weeks, I was bleeding, with a risk of developing infection, and it was safer to deliver him at this point. When he was delivered, he wasn't able to breathe on his own and had to stay in the NICU.
Even being on the Veterans Affairs rehab program—only for a short period of time—I received no support during this time. I was left to figure it out for myself. While fleeing domestic violence, I received very little help—