Trigger warning: this contains a story of sexual violence including trauma responses.

Hello, my name is Anna DeWitt, founder of Davy Jane’s Bluejackets, and this is the organization’s origin story. I started this non-profit because of both a personal experience, as well a client I worked with during my time as a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC) with the Navy and Coast Guard’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program (SAPR).

This client was stationed on a ship and had been sexually assaulted by another member of the crew. She didn’t report it at first, but decided to come forward months later after a doctor’s appointment which, due to the type of exam she was having, triggered her trauma and caused the memory of the assault to come rushing back. Struggling to combat the severe reaction she was having, she decided to file an unrestricted report and tell her leadership what had happened. This client had no interest in getting a transfer or taking a break from work of any kind. She is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, and one of the most resilient clients I’ve worked with. She was not going to let what happened get in the way of her career. Her goal was to get better as quickly as possible so that she could go back on deployment.

Despite her willingness to engage in mental health care, calls and emails to the Base clinic from myself, her XO, her SAPR VA, and her HSC went unanswered, and she spent months waiting to receive a mental health referral. During this time, while not receiving the treatment she desperately needed, she steadily declined. I’ll never forget the day she told me that she slept with a gun under her pillow, and baseball bat next to the door, in such a state of depression that she could barely get out of bed to go to the bathroom.

The clinic eventually got her an appointment with a psychologist at an AirForce Base nearby and those physicians are truly the heroes of this story. Unfortunately, that Base was about 1.5 hours away from where she was stationed and she had to drive herself to her her appointments every week, until her panic attacks during the car ride there became so bad that the command started sending a coworker with her as an escort.

Her doctors quickly put her on limited duty status and she was removed from the ship while she underwent treatment. This was a devastating blow to the hard working, mission focused client, who wanted nothing more than to uphold her duties as a surface warfare officer and go underway. The fact that she was not considered deployable was the worst news you could give her.

I could tell she felt like a broken failure, no longer of any use to the service, but this motivated her to “get better” even faster. However after a few months, both the doctor and the client realized that once a week talk therapy simply wasn’t enough. We tired to convince her to do a short term inpatient program or an intensive outpatient program, but she refused as she didn’t want to be “locked up in a psych ward”. She may have been struggling and could barely function at work, but she wasn’t interested in taking meds or attending a program full of civilians patients who wouldn’t understand her experience run by civilian doctors who couldn’t speak military lingo.

Her psychologist and I began to research options, but nothing nearby fit the bill for both what she needed and was willing to do. We began to realize that if she didn’t start to show improvement soon, she was going to be medically separated against her will, and we knew this news would not sit well with her. I finally remembered a program that I had heard of the year prior when I had worked in Boston which was specific to military members and veterans experiencing PTSD. I called up the client and told her about it, and hoped that even though it wasn’t specific to sexual assault, she might be open to it. Luckily my client agreed to attend and actually seemed to enjoy the program! She did have to spend the night, but it wasn’t in a hospital settings, which she liked.

Meanwhile, probably midway through her case’s lifespan, I took a trip to Hawaii shortly after a break up. As I was floating in the ocean soaking in the sun one day, letting the salt water hold me up, I realized that I finally felt relaxed for the first time in months. I could tell how healing the saltwater was to my mind and spirit, and how wholesome it felt to watch the sunset and smell the flowers while I was swimming. It was an experience I had not realized I deeply needed to heal from the sadness of the breakup, the stress of work, and the constant disappointment I felt from delivering bad news to clients who never seemed to get the justice they deserved from the criminal justice system.

In addition to all of my personal realizations, it was then that I suddenly thought, “If only my client could be here. She needs this experience so much more than I do. Maybe if we had gotten her treatment sooner, especially something out in nature like this, she could have truly healed, instead of being dragged through the military’s broken medical process. Perhaps she needed more than just therapists, meds, and hospitals.”

In realizing how much she could have benefited from swimming in the ocean like I was in Hawaii, the idea for Davy Jane’s was born. I wanted to create something like what she had asked me for - a program run by people familiar with the military for service members who had been victims of sexual assault to work through their PTSD together and wasn’t an intensive treatment program in a sterile setting filled with civilian doctors and bright hospital lights.

My hope for Davy Jane’s is that survivors will find community amongst the participants, and empathy amongst the facilitators in a trauma informed, healing environment that will impact them positively for years to come.