They gave Karen Curtis her earrings back.
She was 19 and had just reported being sexually assaulted while walking to her barracks on her Army base, Fort Benjamin Harrison, in Indiana.
When she told military police what had happened, Curtis said, “their reaction was very negative, as if it was my fault.”
They questioned her, then left. “Two to three hours later they said they couldn’t find the person.” They found the place where the assault had happened, and her earrings, records show.
As far as base officials were concerned, Curtis recalled, the case was closed. “No one offered counseling.”
“I was so young and so naive,” she recalled of that time in 1968. “I was a virgin. It traumatized me.”
Curtis became promiscuous and got pregnant to get out of the Army. She was given an honorable discharge three months after the rape, in August 1968.
She married and lived a normal life for more than two decades. But when she turned 45, she began to melt. “Life became intolerable,” she said. She attempted suicide. Then she divorced.
A Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist diagnosed her with depression. As she began experiencing flashbacks, Curtis started therapy in Seattle.
Curtis, now 55, feels as if she is just starting to live again.
“I had blocked everything. It has been a horrendous trip because it hurts a lot,” she said of her therapy. “But now, there’s a wonderful reawakening.”
She wants the issue of sexual assault in the military to be out in the open.
“It is time for these women to be recognized,” Curtis said. “The military and the government have ignored these women over the years. It’s time somebody understood this.”
