The New York Times had a recent front-page story on Peace Corps women who are speaking out about sexual assault while in the program. Lara Logan, the 60 Minutes reporter, also recently discussed her sexual assault while covering Egypt’s revolution on air. Some might read these stories and decide that women can’t work in the Peace Corps or cover war zones as journalists because they risk sexual assault. But the real takeaway is that women can hold any of these jobs, as long as they are given proper training beforehand and the right infrastructure is in place to handle the crimes. None of that can happen with our current “code of silence” surrounding sexual assault. It is vital that we encourage women to both report these crimes and to feel comfortable talking about them.
That’s in fact what’s motivating the women speaking out about the Peace Corps. The Times article reports that from 2000 to 2009, more than 1,000 volunteers reported sexual assaults, including 221 rapes or attempted rapes. Those numbers are likely far lower than the actual count, as reported numbers are always low and there is even more incentive to keep quiet in this program. After all, women in the article report that their treatment in the US after reporting their assaults was sometimes worse than the attack itself, as they were blamed for the crimes and given inadequate care. They were also poorly trained for these circumstances beforehand. Many complain that they weren’t advised on how to prosecute their attackers, leading nearly 40% of those raped and 50% of those sexually assaulted in the program to say in a survey that they didn’t report the attacks.
But by coming forward and speaking out, they’re already making progress. One of the women, Casey Frazee, spent the last 18 months tracking down assault survivors and collecting more than two dozen affidavits. Her work was also featured in a segment on ABC’s “20/20.” After these women came forward, the director of the Peace Corps, Aaron S. Williams, has said he is committed to creating a more “victim-centered approach,” including modernizing its procedures with “compassionate care,” hiring a “victim’s advocate,” signing an agreement with a rape crisis group to examine the organization, and removing a training video that emphasized the role of alcohol in assaults. The women are now pushing for Congressional legislation to require that the Peace Corps develop response teams to collect evidence and provide care for victims, among other things. Jess Smochek, another survivor working on this cause, has said her goal is to alert future volunteers and to let those who already experienced crimes know that “they are not alone.”
That’s also what motivated Lara Logan to talk openly about her attack. In her 60 Minutes expose, after going through all the painful details of her assault, she said, “One thing that I am extremely proud of that I didn’t intend is when my female colleagues stood up and said that I’d broken the silence on what all of us have experienced but never talk about.” Women journalists who cover dangerous situations often feel the need to bury their stories of assault for fear of being treated differently than their male colleagues and kept from assignments in these areas. As Logan put it in her interview, “[W]omen never complain about incidents of sexual violence because you don’t want someone to say, ‘Well women shouldn’t be out there.’” In her 2007 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on this problem, Judith Matloff reports that a meager survey, one of the only ones, of war correspondents by the International News Safety Institute found that of the 29 who took part, more than half reported sexual harassment on the job and two had experienced sexual abuse. “The shame runs so deep–and the fear of being pulled off an assignment, especially in a time of shrinking budgets, is so strong– that no one wants intimate violations to resound in a newsroom,” she says. She even reports that of her own narrow escape from such a crime, “We got away untouched, so why bring up the matter? I didn’t want my boss to think that my gender was a liability.”
What this means is that the issue ends up buried. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports, “We have little on our site [about this issue] because sexual assault is not commonly reported to us–the data, therefore, is not available.” And when the issue is buried, it goes unaddressed and women are left more vulnerable to these attacks. Logan herself reported, “I had no idea how endemic that it is so rife, so widespread, that so many Egyptian men admit to sexual harassing women and think it’s completely acceptable.” As Matloff puts it, “The general reluctance to call attention to the problem creates a vicious cycle, whereby editors, who are still typically men, are unaware of the dangers because women don’t bring them up. Survivors of attacks often suffer in lonely silence, robbed of the usual camaraderie that occurs when people are shot or kidnapped.” And the proper training and infrastructure simply isn’t created to help women prepare for and then deal with these problems. “When one considers the level of detail over protections against other eventualities–get vaccinations; pack dummy wallets, etc.–the oversight is staggering,” Matloff says. “[V]ictims of assault say that some training might have helped them make more informed decisions, or at least live with the outcome more easily.”
Women aren’t the only ones who are attacked in these situations, but the fact that some are is no reason to hold them back from this line of work. They can be unique assets abroad, gaining access to women in countries that divide the genders and the trust of assault victims. But even beyond that, using sexual assault as a reason to keep women from fulfilling important jobs that they are passionate about doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. What is needed is more conversation about the realities they face and what can be done to help them. That starts by encouraging women to come forward about their assaults.
