Rape in the Peace Corps

[Skeptic]

I just fired my secretary after hearing she got raped. The dirty slut! -- er, I mean, I found out I am "not able to protect her" so I did the "sensible thing".

 

[gumboot]

I just fired my secretary after hearing she got raped. The dirty slut! -- er, I mean, I found out I am "not able to protect her" so I did the "sensible thing".

Is your company operating in a lawless and violent country where you actually can't protect her? Or are you just missing the point entirely?

Also, how exactly do you fire a volunteer?

 

[Visual Purple]

If you can't protect a person in a given spot, you can move him or her. (I say him or her on purpose--I've heard hairy stories from male volunteers.)

Peace Corps "volunteers" are volunteers only in the sense that military members are volunteers. They are paid, if not much.

I think that the problem may go beyond sexual assault. Again, just what I heard, but I have the impression that volunteers were under pressure to not report malaria infections. I can't figure out what is going on with this.

 

[rwguinn]

So in other words they've kicked them out of the Peace Corps and sent them home? To be honest that's probably a pretty sensible move for any volunteers you've found you aren't capable of protecting.

If it's anything like most of the foreign employment stuff, they'd have to find their own way home...

 

[bigred]

I don't think you can apply normal social standards to this context. This are people getting assaulted in often incredibly unstable crime-ridden countries, aren't they?

I mean, if a soldier goes into Baghdad without a vest and gets maimed by a suicide bomber, it's pretty reasonable to blame him for being stupid and not wearing a vest.

I would say that a young western female not going out walking in the evening on their own in somewhere like Niger is a pretty reasonable restriction on their behaviour.

Yep. And pls note I am hardly saying "it's their fault," in fact there aren't words strong enough to describe the revulsion I have both for slime who rape and the other slime who fail to deal with or even acknowledge it, but it seems to me that at least in some cases there is some serious naive/irresponsible/foolish behavior on the part of the victims in terms of not fully appreciating they aren't in Kansas anymore.

That said, I'm all for castration of convicted rapists.

 

[epepke]

There are two issues here. One is that, when you're in another culture, it's necessary to have different behaviors than you are used to if you want to protect yourself. It's even more important in uncivilized places with poor infrastructure and lax law enforcement. This is probably the case, because otherwise why would the Peace Corps be there trying to "fix" things in the first place?

The other issue is how you treat people who have been victimized.

To my way of thinking, these are dramatically different. To most people, they aren't. As I've argued elsewhere, victim-blaming, far from being some rare thing that appalls people when it happens, is a basic part of human psychology.

I would expect conflation of the two concepts to be even worse in the Peace Corps. There hasn't been a draft for decades, so they don't get normal people who don't want to be involved in warfare when their number comes up. In my experience, the Peace Corps tends to attract the contemptuous do-gooder type, the kind with Magik-markered histories showing that only the US has ever been bad, and everyone else is innocent, who expiate their angst with something like the White Man's Burden, though they will never admit it. So they tend to idealize the cultures in which they find themselves.

 

[rwguinn]

Yep. And pls note I am hardly saying "it's their fault," in fact there aren't words strong enough to describe the revulsion I have both for slime who rape and the other slime who fail to deal with or even acknowledge it, but it seems to me that at least in some cases there is some serious naive/irresponsible/foolish behavior on the part of the victims in terms of not fully appreciating they aren't in Kansas anymore.

That said, I'm all for castration of convicted rapists.

^^ This

There are two issues here. One is that, when you're in another culture, it's necessary to have different behaviors than you are used to if you want to protect yourself. It's even more important in uncivilized places with poor infrastructure and lax law enforcement. This is probably the case, because otherwise why would the Peace Corps be there trying to "fix" things in the first place?

The other issue is how you treat people who have been victimized.

To my way of thinking, these are dramatically different. To most people, they aren't. As I've argued elsewhere, victim-blaming, far from being some rare thing that appalls people when it happens, is a basic part of human psychology.

I would expect conflation of the two concepts to be even worse in the Peace Corps. There hasn't been a draft for decades, so they don't get normal people who don't want to be involved in warfare when their number comes up. In my experience, the Peace Corps tends to attract the contemptuous do-gooder type, the kind with Magik-markered histories showing that only the US has ever been bad, and everyone else is innocent, who expiate their angst with something like the White Man's Burden, though they will never admit it. So they tend to idealize the cultures in which they find themselves.

^^and this...