Mental health experts and practitioners working with veterans are uncovering a different kind of assault front: sexual attacks made against and by soldiers with the same uniform on.

“Military sexual trauma is a betrayal,” Rowan Flamm, a staff psychologist with the VA Butler Healthcare and military sexual trauma coordinator, said during the VA’s sixth annual Mental Health Summit Friday.

Military sexual trauma is the term professionals use to describe an array of sexual assaults — from verbal to physical — that service members face. The victims are usually, but not always, women — according to a 2017 report by the VA, 1 in 3 women in the service are sexually assaulted.

“You’re told your fellow soldiers are your brothers; that you should trust in them explicitly,” Flamm said. “(Victims) learn that not every veteran is honorable.”

Dozens of behavioral health practitioners who deal with veterans in their work attended the Mental Health Summit in an attempt to help those who have been sexually assaulted while serving in the military.

Among the specialists in attendance were members with the Veterans Court unit, a group in the court system that identifies veterans in the criminal justice system and tries to work with them in identifying and solving the issues that led to their arrest in the first place.

Flamm and others said assault from people wearing the same uniform as them causes victims to suffer deeply and often, for many years after the event.

Often, treatment is approached in much the same way as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder since so many sexual assault victims experience the same kind of malaise, according to Mary Niebauer, the lead psychologist at the VA.

Therapy and group support networks are bolstered with psychiatric medication, she said. Support groups are especially important, Niebauer added, because it helps the victim emerge from isolation and see that they are not alone in their suffering.

This abuse, according to experts, is usually inflicted by a superior and that is one of the reasons “it’s different than civilian sexual assault,” Flamm said.

Flamm told conference attendees that along with having to continue to take orders from the attacker, the victim has to continue living in the same area. And in the unlikely chance that the victim decides to report the incident, they will have to go a few rungs up the chain of command to make sure their attacker doesn’t suppress the report and use their superior power to punish the victim, he said.

Sexual abuse in all branches of the military is so prevalent, Flamm and others said, that if you meet a female veteran you should just assume that they’ve been sexually assaulted. But that doesn’t mean they’re weak, he said.

“They also want you to know they’re not broken,” Flamm said. “We see them as bent, not broken.”