Get an easy-to-understand printout for our current research. Updated regularly.

OUR APPRACH

One bad outcome is a tragedy. The same outcome, repeating in a documented pattern, is a system that needs fixing.

We're not a crisis line, and we're not a law firm. We're the group that does the research most people don't have time for: the inspector general reports, the internal policies that were never followed, the private contracts and community-care gaps that never get looked at and connects it to what's actually happening to real people, so the fix targets the cause, not just the latest symptom.

01

We find the evidence

We dig through inspector general reports, court decisions, agency and provider policy, and peer-reviewed research to document exactly where a system is failing - public or private, in its own words, wherever possible.

02

We collect real cases

We listen to the people actually living through these failures, and we document the pattern carefully, with consent, and without ever assuming causation we haven't earned.

03

We target the fix

We turn what we find into something specific and actionable like a policy proposal, an updated template or scoring instrument, an oversight referral, a change a provider or agency can actually make all aimed at the root cause, not just a press release about the problem.

WHAT WE'RE ACTUALLY WORKING ON

Multiple research tracks, all built around the same question: what's preventable here?

Currently Active:

Neurotrauma & TBI

Future Projects:

VA/DoD Benefits Ecosystem

PTSD & Mental Health / SUD

Toxic & Environmental Exposure

Military Sexual Trauma (MST)

A harm thread

A missed screening. A misclassified injury. A policy that exists on paper and isn't followed. Those are real failures but they're not the only kind we look for.

Some of the most serious harm isn't a rule being broken at all: it's a rule, a tool, or a training program that was never built right in the first place.

A screening instrument that structurally can't capture the full scope of an injury, no matter how carefully it's administered. A policy written decades ago that quietly excludes certain groups. A workflow inherited wholesale from a system that was already broken. Radiologist training built around civilian injury patterns, reading scans from military and first-responder populations it was never designed for. None of that shows up as someone failing to follow a rule... the rule itself was the problem.

On their own, each of these looks like a small, forgivable gap. Traced together, across a real person's life, they form a single connected thread and the thread, not any one link in it, is what we're built to find and cut.

Each point above is independently documented elsewhere - in an inspector general report, a court record, a clinical guideline. Our work is tracing the line between them.

"These failures almost took my husband from me. Multiple times over 3 years. His time now is for resting and recovering. Mine is for fighting to get him, and people like him, care that fits their complex injuries."

Taylor McGowan

Founder, Behind The 22

Read why we started this

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Our open case files, our data handling, and how to get involved each have their own page.

A mutual-aid and research organization correcting the root cause of institutional harm.

Behind The 22 is a mutual-aid and research organization. Nothing on this site is medical advice, legal advice, or a VA/DoD claim of any kind, and no information here should be used as a substitute for consulting a qualified medical or legal professional about your own situation. Case information we collect is handled under a written consent protocol and is used, in de-identified and aggregated form, to identify recurring patterns never to authorize us to contact any agency, provider, or third party on a person's behalf without separate, explicit permission.

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