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Women In The Military Face A Grim Statistic

David Gilkey
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Five stories have North Texas talking: A Texas woman survives a different military battle, local cops fight crime in 140 characters, Cowboys fans brace for more yellow flags and more.

The Pentagon’s own research shows one in four women who join the military will be sexually assaulted while she serves. Jamie Livingston, of El Paso, was abused growing up and saw the military as a way out, a refuge. But her tenure in the Navy was marked by several rapes and assaults. She says her supervisor had a combination lock on the inside of his office and would ask for sexual favors whenever Livingston needed him to sign off on something.

A Fort Worth group called Grace After Fire is reaching out to these victims, building a support network one woman at a time. The most recent estimate shows 19,000 sex crimes take place within the military each year. [NPR]

  • This Friday instead of walking the beat, North Texas police officers will focus on their tweets. To highlight the impact of using social media to communicate with citizens, several area police departments will participate in a global Tweet-a-Thon. Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Grand Prairie and Denton are among the agencies involved. They’ll share information, pictures and even video as they move from scene to scene. If you want to plug in to Friday’s event, use the hashtag #poltwt. [Dallas Morning News]

  • Since the Dallas Cowboys are habitually one of the most penalized teams in the NFL, fans now have two new reasons to worry about negative yardage. Yesterday, NFL owners outlawed peel-back blocks anywhere on the field. That’s when a player moves toward the goal-line, approaches someone from behind and makes contact below the waist. This will most likely come to be known as the “Brian Cushing Rule” after the Houston Texans linebacker who suffered a season ending injury after an inside block. The second concept outlawed yesterday? Overloading one side of the defensive line on point-after and field-goal attempts. [nfl.com]

  • While new football rules aim to prevent injury, a Texas led medical study warns about the potential dangers of a favorite soccer move. New data shows heading the ball may impair a player’s ability to think. Professor Anne B. Sereno at the University of Texas Health Science Center recruited a high school girls soccer team to take a cognition test on an iPad following practice. As a group, their responses were slower than their non-soccer playing counterparts. And the scores got worse if a player had just headed the ball.  [New York Times]

  • Some women like to keep their age a mystery, some women fight for that right in court. A U.S. District judge has ruled that Junie Hoang, an actress who sued Amazon and its Internet Movie Database unit for publishing her age, could proceed to trial. Hoang is claiming breach of contract and is seeking damages related to her career. Using public records and credit card information, IMDB posted Hoang’s actual age on her profile. At one point, the actress submitted a fake Texas identification document to the website to age herself down several years. [New York Times
Courtney Collins has been working as a broadcast journalist since graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2004. Before coming to KERA in 2011, Courtney worked as a reporter for NPR member station WAMU in Washington D.C. While there she covered daily news and reported for the station’s weekly news magazine, Metro Connection.