Corruption, negligence of participants within institution unacceptable, must be reformed
Of the organizations in America we would expect to be corrupt, the last thing on the list would be a service group that claims to be devoted to world peace and friendship. Every year, thousands of young adults sign up to be a part of the Peace Corps, one of America’s most respected national service organizations, with grandiose ideals of devoting their years of selfless service and sacrifice to better the lives of the underprivileged all around the world.
However, a recent unveiling showed that numerous Peace Corps volunteers got a little more than what they had signed up for. In January of this year, ABC News aired six women who told stories of being violently raped and assaulted, even almost killed while abroad. Not only did they undergo traumatic experiences, they were offered no support by the Peace Corps and were instead blamed for the rapes. The Peace Corps told them to lie to cover up their experiences, telling one woman to tell others that she had to go back to America to get her wisdom teeth removed. Another woman was forced, in one of the only three counseling sessions she was given, to write down everything she did wrong that caused her to get raped.
These women are not alone. Between 2000 and 2009, there have been 221 rapes or attempted rapes, 147 major sexual attacks and 719 other sexual assaults — instances the Peace Corps have succeeded in masking the public from for over a decade.
There are few words that can be used to describe how disgusting it is that something like this could stem from an organization of our own federal government, and it is even more disgusting that there are thousands, if not more, eager young volunteers out there who are not informed of the dangers involved with the Peace Corps and the maltreatment to which they would very likely be subjected. Rather than openly admit its mistakes and restructure the program to begin to fix what obviously are serious, life-threatening problems, the Peace Corps has instead tried to hide them, luring naive volunteers into a false trap of security in order to maintain their image and reputation.
This is just another tragic case of politics and the failure of those too blinded by it to realize that there are few things in the world more important than the preservation of a human life. It is ironic that in attempts to better the lives of those in the rest of the world, we are allowing hundreds of our own lives to be lost, endangered and irreversibly damaged.
Congress has been investigating these Peace Corps cases, and we can only hope that in the future, people will be more wary before signing themselves into this corrupt organization. At the same time, the Peace Corps would do well to remind itself of what it truly stands for, because any “philanthropic” organization that guilt-trips rape victims and promotes hideous lies does not deserve to exist.