Men who asked, “When are you going to tell our story?”
For the past six years, the news photographer Mary F. Calvert has been taking pictures that reveal the civilian lives of veterans with trauma that lingers long after their discharge from the military. Her journalism has focused primarily on women who were victims of military sexual assault. But after that work was published, she said she started to hear from men who asked, “When are you going to tell our story?”
“Sometimes a story just finds you,” Ms. Calvert said.
Women are more likely than men to experience sexual assault in the military — in a 2019 Pentagon report, 6.2 percent said they had, compared with 0.7 percent of men. But the overwhelming prevalence of men in the ranks means that about half of military sexual assault cases involve a male victim, amounting to about 10,000 per year.