Army Reserve Capt. Deshauna Barber is thinking big.
The CEO of the nonpartisan Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), which connects female service members with various resources, Barber has spent the last year working to give the 10,000-member-strong organization a larger presence.
“I wanted to use my platform and my previous title to be able to expand on and almost commercialize us a bit more,” the former Miss USA told The Hill in a recent interview.
“As much as I want us to do as much work on the Hill and legislation and things along those lines, I still feel like all the great work that we do, a lot of the world, a lot of the country just doesn’t know about it.”
Barber, the first member of the military to win Miss USA, possibly cemented that victory in 2016 when asked during the interview portion about the Pentagon’s then-recent decision to open up combat jobs to women — a topic that has received renewed media attention in the past month amid policy changes to better accommodate female service members.
“As a woman in the United States Army, I think it was an amazing job by our government to allow women to integrate to every branch of the military,” she said at the time. “We are just as tough as men. As a commander of my unit, I am powerful. I am dedicated. And it is important that we recognize that gender does not limit us in the United States Army.”
An Army reservist since 2011 and SWAN’s CEO since January of last year, Barber has spent her time at the helm making the group more public facing, expanding its social media presence and media connections and “making sure that we’re promoting everything that we’re doing,” she said.
She hopes to grow the organization to mirror some of the oldest and largest military and veterans service groups in certain ways.
The strategy seems to be working. Under Barber and her staff of seven women, SWAN landed two major partnerships in 2020. The first, with Carnival Cruise Line, would establish a veterans’ bar as well as a display case to showcase female veterans in all of the company’s cruise ships, though that move has been paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The second, with Olay and Walmart, linked SWAN to the Face Anything campaign, which saw the release of a limited-edition camouflage print jar of face cream dedicated to celebrating service women.
But the past year also saw struggles for the organization, which was founded in 2009.
The April killing of Army solider Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood, Texas — as well as multiple other cases of sexual harassment, assault and violence against female service members — put SWAN into overdrive on combating the issue.
“A lot of our year was dedicated to focus legislation on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” Barber said.
“It really drove a lot of what we’re working on in general, but it really definitely made it a rougher year for us as an organization and really myself as a service woman.”
Guillén went missing from Fort Hood in April, and some of her remains were found at the end of June. Aaron David Robinson, another soldier who was a suspect in her death, killed himself when authorities attempted to arrest him.
Guillén had told her family before she disappeared that she was being sexually harassed by a superior.
Her death “reaffirms the fact the military definitely has some work that it needs to do when it comes to how it is that we handle sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military — how it is that women’s experiences are not always the greatest,” said Barber.
Meanwhile, the pandemic made it harder for SWAN to do its work with Capitol Hill, and the group had to cancel its biennial conference.
“A lot of our interactions with Congress is in person, so we’ve really had to switch a lot of our interactions obviously to virtual, a lot of Zoom calls, a lot of phone calls, teleconferences. We don’t feel as effective,” Barber said.
“It’s a little bit easier to encourage change when we can have sit-down, face-to-face conversations with people. It’s a little bit easier to hold them accountable for what they say.”
The organization wrestled with whether it should make an extension of itself dedicated specifically to COVID-19 relief efforts. Barber said they scrapped that idea over concerns it would strain SWAN past its limits.
“We decided that we’ve just got to stick with our mission. We felt as though we’d be stretched too thin. If we pull too much of our efforts in a different direction, how effective are we being in our additional missions?”
But the new year and new Biden administration brings with it the potential for significant wins.
President Biden has pledged to “end the scourge of sexual assault” in the military and last month ordered a civilian-led commission at the Pentagon to investigate the pervasive problem.
Despite regular training and roughly a decade of efforts to combat it, the military for years has struggled with preventing sex crimes and holding perpetrators accountable when they are reported. Rarely do those accused face prosecution or get removed from the line of duty.
SWAN is “really connected” to the new Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault but is waiting to see what role the group will play in the effort as it is still “very fresh,” Barber said.
“We’re waiting on them to put the committee together.”
SWAN is also working with Congress on a weekly or biweekly basis to “be able to pass some level of legislation that criminalizes sexual assault in the military.”
Another major focus for the group is the gender integration of the Marine Corps boot camp. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Marine Corps to integrate its training of new recruits on Parris Island, S.C., by 2025, “but they’ve been pretty slow-moving in doing that,” Barber said.
While female Marines have trained for decades at the camp, they do not train with their male peers at platoon level.
“They have the highest level of sexual assault against women statistically and we think that one of those primary contributors is because their boot camp is not integrated,” she said.