The media has a critical role to play in increasing the public’s understanding of intimate partner violence (IPV), its consequences and effective strategies for preventing it. On October 21-22, 2011, Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma held “Out of the Shadows: Reporting on Intimate Partner Violence,” a workshop for media professionals addressing the challenges and opportunities to improving coverage of this serious and complex social issue.

The interactive two-day workshop brought together award-winning journalists, national and local health experts, practitioners, educators and prevention advocates. It provided participants with new research, resources and perspectives on IPV to better enable them to produce more informed, effective and independent reporting on the issue.

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — Before going to war, Susan Max loved tooling around Northern California in her maroon Mustang. A combat tour in Iraq changed all that. Back in the States, Ms. Max, an Army reservist, found herself avoiding cramped parking lots without obvious escape routes. She straddled the middle line, as if bombs might be buried in the curbs. Gray sport-utility vehicles came to remind her of the unarmored vehicles she rode nervously through Baghdad in 2007, a record year for American fatalities in Iraq.

“I used to like driving,” Ms. Max, 63, said. “Now my family doesn’t feel safe driving with me.”

For thousands of combat veterans, driving has become an ordeal. Once their problems were viewed mainly as a form of road rage or thrill seeking. But increasingly, erratic driving by returning troops is being identified as a symptom of traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. — and coming under greater scrutiny amid concerns about higher accident rates among veterans.

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As troops surge back into domestic life, incarceration isn’t always the answer

Most courtrooms in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas hadn’t yet opened for normal business at 8:15 on a recent Friday morning, but onlookers filled the benches in Judge Mike Snipes’s court. Snipes sat erect, grasping a gavel and looking magisterial in his robes. The two tables in front of his bench were laden with cakes and breakfast tacos. A Congratulations banner, in gold and silver, hung behind him.

“Ryan Adams and Kinikia Burdine,” Snipes barked in a clipped voice that betrayed his history as an Army colonel. “Front and center.”

The roughly 30 people in the court, most of them veterans, stood and faced the back of the courtroom. Several smiled as “The Army Goes Rolling Along” began to boom from an iPod next to the judge’s bench. The doors flew open and in marched Adams and Burdine, in civilian dress. Everyone clapped. Snipes, who’d come down from the bench, shook their hands. He gave them each a plaque and said, “I am proud to say that you are reintegrated back into society.”

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Obama Administration on Track to End Veteran Homelessness by 2015,

Announces $100 Million to Expand Homeless Prevention Program

WASHINGTON – The Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development today announced that a new national report shows that homelessness among Veterans has been reduced by nearly 12 percent between January 2010 and January 2011. The 12 percent decline keeps the Obama Administration on track to meet the goal of ending Veteran homelessness in 2015.

“This new report is good news for the tens of thousands of Veterans we have helped find a home. Our progress in the fight against homelessness has been significant, but our work is not complete until no Veteran has to sleep on the street,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki. “We have been successful in achieving this milestone due to strong leadership from the President and hard work by countless community organizations and our federal, state, and local partners who are committed to helping Veterans and their families get back on their feet.”

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan added, “We’re absolutely headed in the right direction as we work to end homelessness amongst those who have served our nation. This significant decline tells us that the Obama Administration is on the right path, working together across agencies to target Federal resources to produce a sharp and measureable reduction in Veteran homelessness. As we put forth in the first Federal plan to prevent and end homelessness, there’s plenty of work ahead to reach our goal, but these numbers validate the work done by both HUD and VA to reach our nation’s homeless Veterans and get them into permanent housing.”

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VA is working to get the right information to the right Veteran at the right time. Millions of Veterans and their family members use social media each day, and VA is continuously expanding its online presence using social media like Facebook. In this directory, you’ll find links to all VA organizations, many in your state, currently using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs. This list is being updated each week, so be sure to check back frequently!

Click here for National Resource Directory.

Click here to follow the National Resource Directory on Facebook.

Click here to follow the National Resource Directory on Twitter.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23, 2011 – A range of information about Defense Department benefits information and eligibility is now available online, the director of the Defense Manpower Data Center said yesterday.

Two new online efforts — milConnect and eCorrespondence — give beneficiaries 24/7 access to personnel information; the ability to update information related to health, education and other benefits; and e-mail notifications about changes in benefits, Mary Dixon told American Forces Press Service.

“At the Defense Manpower Data Center, one of our many responsibilities is to be the interface with beneficiaries, especially on benefits and eligibility for benefits,” Dixon said.

MilConnect, available online and through a mobile application for the Android smart phone, was known for a year as the mydodbenefits website.

The revamped milConnect site is available online, around-the-clock, to all DOD beneficiaries and their spouses and children age 18 or older.

Users can sign on in several ways, Dixon said.

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WASHINGTON, Nov. 21, 2011 – President Barack Obama delivered a clear message today when he signed two new tax credits into law to increase the hiring of military veterans and wounded warriors.

“For businesses out there, if you are hiring, hire a veteran,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do for you, it’s the right thing to do for them, and it’s the right thing to do for our economy.”

In August, Obama called on Congress to enact tax credits, included in the American Jobs Act, that will help to get unemployed veterans back to work.

“While we’ve added more than 350,000 private-sector jobs over the last three months, we’ve got 850,000 veterans who can’t find work,” the president said. “And even though the overall unemployment rate came down just a little bit last month, unemployment for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan continued to rise.”

Obama said “that isn’t right,” and he lauded veterans as the “best that America has to offer.”

“They are some of the most highly trained, highly educated, highly skilled workers that we have,” he said. “If they can save lives on the battlefield, then they can save a life in an ambulance.

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This Month’s Feature: Honoring All of Our Veterans – Veterans Day 2011

Not all Veterans have seen war, but they share an oath in which they expressed their willingness to die defending this nation. We take this opportunity to express our humble thanks to all of those outstanding men and women who sacrificed for us and our country. For those Veterans who served, as well as for those who now serve in the Active Duty and Reserve Components, and each and every one of their family members, in both peacetime and in war… thank you.

True appreciation is better expressed in action. Do something in the next week to help a Veteran. Employers: consider hiring a Veteran; teachers: ask if children have parents that deployed to war, campus personnel: provide adult Veteran students some time to reintegrate into civilian life; primary care doctors: remember to ask your patients about trauma and screen for PTSD. Community members all are stepping up, because as a whole, American society has learned over time from the sacrifices of Veterans who have come before.

This PTSD Monthly Update contains information that is pertinent across all era’s of Veterans; from those who have recently served, to the largest group of Veterans we have, Vietnam Veterans, who along with all of us, are now aging.

Learn about trauma in our military including the unique effects of the Persian Gulf War, the mental health effects on our recently returning Service Members, military sexual trauma, and how older Veterans may develop symptoms later in life. If you or someone you know is a Veteran in need of help with symptoms that developed following war or other trauma, see Help for Veterans with PTSD, call VA’s new program Coaching into Care, or talk to another Veteran on the 24/7 Veteran Combat Call Center: 1-877-927-8387 (WAR-VETS).

Although there are universal effects of trauma on all humans, individuals differ. These differences can lead to some special considerations. The era a Veteran served in, ethnicity, and trauma type can have some effect. View one of six different videos on specific considerations for women, Latino, African-American, Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islander Veterans.

News Release Courtesy of RAND Corporation—Nov. 9, 2011

More than 200 programs are available to help U.S. military members and their families with psychological health and traumatic brain injury issues, but better coordination of those efforts is needed, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The RAND project compiled the first comprehensive catalog of programs sponsored or funded by the Department of Defense to aid military members and their families with psychological health or traumatic brain injury issues. The work was sponsored by the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.

“The good news is, there are a lot of programs to assist military service members who are dealing with such psychological health issues as post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, or the short- and long-term psychological and cognitive consequences of a traumatic brain injury,” said Robin M. Weinick, the study’s lead author and a senior social scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

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WASHINGTON, Nov. 9, 2011 – Until the 1960s, veterans groups used the red poppy as the symbol of Veterans Day. In Great Britain, it still is.

The symbol comes from a poem, “In Flanders Fields,” written by Canadian doctor John M. McCrae in 1915.

The first two verses of McCrae’s three-verse poem read:
“We are the Dead. Short days ago“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.”

McCrae tended to the first victims of a German chemical attack on the British line at the Belgian town of Ypres during World War I.

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