[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1341-1344]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  ROLL CALL OF THE PEACE CORPS VICTIMS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Womack). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is 
recognized for half the time remaining before 10 p.m., which is roughly 
22 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I want to address an important issue 
that has come to light recently. It has to do with the wonderful group 
of volunteers that serve in the United States Peace Corps.
  The Peace Corps was the idea of John F. Kennedy. He went to the 
University of Michigan way back in 1960, and he started encouraging 
those college students to get involved in other countries and helping 
those countries in their social development and their cultural 
development in the name of peace. A wonderful idea.
  When he became President in 1961, President Kennedy signed an 
Executive order establishing the now important Peace Corps. By 1966, 
there were over 15,000 young Americans, all volunteers, that were 
working in the Peace Corps throughout the world.
  Since those early days of the Peace Corps, 200,000 Americans, mostly 
young people, 60 percent female, have volunteered for their 2-year 
service in the Peace Corps to work in Third World countries on 
everything from health to farming to small business, just helping other 
people throughout the world in a way that not only benefits them 
personally but benefits the recipients in these foreign countries. They 
really are, in my opinion, along with our United States military, the 
greatest ambassadors we have from our country to show that we are 
concerned about the welfare of other nations. And they help build a 
better life for not only the people that they come in contact with, but 
their generations and the children that they have as well. I think they 
are really volunteer angels.
  The work that a Peace Corps volunteer does is hard work. It's 
important, but it's very difficult. They're in a place far from home, 
sometimes very remote and primitive areas, and yet they, on a daily 
basis, are working to improve the lives of these individuals.
  Like I said, I think it's one of the best things that we do in this 
country

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as ambassadors are those young people in the Peace Corps. It's tough 
work. It's hard work. I wouldn't do it. It's so difficult. And you 
know, there are people in our country, a lot of them mainly young 
people who choose that as a calling to help other people in other 
countries.
  I've got four kids, and they're all kind of wanting to save the 
world, too. They've been to Mexico and lived in orphanages in Trinidad. 
They've been to Honduras. They've been to Africa and Zambia, all with 
that mentality of helping other people.
  But the Peace Corps volunteers are people like that who spend at 
least 2 years in service to their country. And sometimes when they are 
in those foreign countries, they stick out. They are noticeable by the 
people who live in that country.

                              {time}  2120

  Because of that, occasionally, more often than it should be, they 
attract crimes that occur against them. That is the issue, Mr. Speaker, 
I want to address tonight.
  Over the last 10 years, 1,000 Americans, mainly women, have been 
sexually assaulted, raped or assaulted in some other way, in a foreign 
country representing the United States in the Peace Corps.
  Between 2000 and 2009, the Peace Corps themselves say there were over 
221 rapes and attempted rapes, almost 150 major sexual attacks, and 700 
other sexual assaults. Sexual assault is anything from groping to 
fondling to conduct that is offensive to that Peace Corps volunteer. 
Once again, 1,000 crimes against Peace Corps volunteers. Recently, the 
Peace Corps has announced that there is an average of 22 rapes a year 
against American Peace Corps volunteers.
  This is not acceptable, Mr. Speaker. We are talking about real 
people. They are real stories and they are real victims, and I want to 
mention just a few of those tonight in the limited time that I have.
  The first of those is a person that I have gotten to know personally. 
A wonderful person, Jess Smochek.
  She joined the Peace Corps in 2004. On her first day as a Peace Corps 
volunteer in Bangladesh, a group of men started sexually groping her as 
she was just walking to the home that she was supposed to live in, but 
no one really did anything. She told the Peace Corps staff over and 
over again that she felt unsafe in Bangladesh in the situation she was 
in, but nobody did anything.
  Months later, she came in contact with some men who kidnapped her. 
They beat her and they sexually assaulted her, but they weren't 
through. They abandoned her and threw her in a back alley somewhere in 
Bangladesh.
  According to Jess, the Peace Corps did everything they could to cover 
this up because they seemed to be more worried about the officials in 
Bangladesh and what they thought might happen to their relationship 
with the United States than they did about caring for this victim of 
crime. Jess says that the Peace Corps blamed her for the conduct of 
others. They blamed her for being a sexual-assault victim.
  Mr. Speaker, a rape victim is never to blame for the crime that is 
committed against her. It is the offender that is always to blame. And 
we need to understand that these precious people who go overseas and 
represent us, when a crime is committed against them, we take their 
side. And we don't assume they did anything wrong, because they didn't. 
They were just a victim of crime, and the criminal is the one that 
should be held accountable for that conduct. Rape is never the fault of 
the victim. It's always the fault of the perpetrator.
  But Jess got no satisfaction from the Peace Corps, according to her. 
When she got home, she was told to tell other people that she was 
coming back to the United States for medical reasons, to have her 
wisdom teeth pulled out.
  Her case and a few others were brought to light recently by ``ABC 
News'' and ``20/20,'' bringing her story and others. There are more, 
and I will try to cover as many as I can in the time that I have.
  Laurel Jackson was sent to Romania, a Peace Corps volunteer. She was 
constantly harassed, both physically and verbally. She couldn't walk to 
her house where she was staying without verbal assaults and things 
being thrown at her. She was spit on, she was punched, and rocks were 
thrown at her and her life was threatened several times. This took 
place on a weekly basis. They told her that a young American with 
blonde hair would stand out, and that she was going to continue to be a 
victim.
  She was fondled over 10 times when she tried to ride public 
transportation. So she quit riding public transportation in Romania, 
and she started walking, to help these folks in Romania. She said that 
the Peace Corps knew that these crimes were happening against her, but 
she says they didn't take it seriously and no legal recourse was 
offered. She was exposed to young men who exposed themselves; and she 
was told, Well, don't be around those people. No one did anything, and 
no one cared.
  When she was followed home by some men, she did talk to the police 
and they gave her some bodyguards. She requested a new location, but 
she was turned down and her transfer was denied.
  When she returned home, she tried to get counseling, but she received 
no counseling for the crimes committed against her. And here is what 
she has to say. She said, I would have liked the Peace Corps to have 
never put me there. They knew it was unsafe for me. They should have 
communicated with the police and the school in their own investigation. 
I would have liked them to take me more seriously when I reported these 
crimes. I would have liked to have had counseling when I returned. But 
once again, Mr. Speaker, no one did anything.
  When she left Romania, she told the Peace Corps not to send anybody 
else over there, but they did. And the person who replaced her was also 
racially abused with swastikas drawn on her residence because she was a 
Jewish American.
  The next individual, I'm not going to use her real name because she 
doesn't want us to know her true identity, but she grew up on a ranch. 
She now lives in Texas, and she went to Lesotho in May of 1996 to 
convince farmers to plant trees and show them how to do that. But Mary 
Jo, as I will call her, stuck out the 2 years in this location, even 
though it was difficult. She lived in a small village in a string of 
villages that were about 80 miles south of Maseru.
  She had arranged her ticket back to the United States when she was 
attacked because she felt unsafe. But here is what happened to her.
  On an evening in 1999, Mary Jo and her neighbor left a village shop 
and were headed down a dirt a path to their home. Her neighbor's ex-
boyfriend followed and after a confrontation struck Mary Jo with a 
rock. The blow knocked out six of her teeth, destroyed her eye socket, 
and left a palm-sized crater in her face. The rock had crushed the 
bones in her face, and blood had started coming down the back into her 
throat. She ended up alone in a deserted section of the hospital when 
she was finally found. She says, It was dark, I was scared, and I 
didn't know where anyone was.
  Taxis only ran from her village at night, and so she couldn't really 
reach the Peace Corps. So some neighbors found someone to drive her 20 
miles to a local hospital. She remembers a young woman stitching her up 
and she remembers being, once again, left alone, abandoned. She felt 
abandoned by her own country.
  The next day, she was moved to another hospital in South Africa, 
where a surgeon installed a metal plate to hold the bones together 
around her left eye and her chin and cheeks and nose.
  The Peace Corps brought her back to her home base, but she said they 
didn't help her in her recovery. Mary Jo and her sister, who had flown 
in from the United States, had to sleep in a hotel because the agency 
wouldn't let them stay in a transit house, and they had difficulty 
getting back to the United States. She even had to beg the staff to 
take her to the airport. At no time, according to her, did the Peace 
Corps ask

[[Page 1343]]

her what they could do to help. She said, It was terrible. I was so 
messed up. She has had 10 operations in 2\1/2\ years, and surgeons put 
metal plates in her face and she also has false teeth.
  Mary Jo, being the remarkable person she is, she wasn't really angry 
at the Peace Corps because she was attacked in this village by 
villagers. She was angry because nobody in the agency seemed to care. 
Once again, no one did anything.
  ``It was like I was never in the Peace Corps,'' she said. And when 
she got home, no one contacted her from the Peace Corps to check on her 
to see how this victim of crime was doing. The attacker went to jail 
for 3 weeks, but he was later released because Mary Jo had come back to 
the United States.
  Kate Puzey was another angel from America who had gone to help a 
country that most of us have never heard of or would be able to locate 
on a map, Benin, where she went in 2007. She was a teacher at a local 
school. She formed a girls' club to help empower the young women that 
were in this school.
  It's hard to be a girl in that part of the world, according to Kate's 
cousin, Ms. Jacobs. And the girls started speaking about some of the 
issues they were facing, and they were starting to communicate that to 
Kate. Before long, the girls began to tell Kate about another person 
who worked for the Peace Corps but wasn't an American. He was a citizen 
of Benin who was paid by the Peace Corps to help work with the Peace 
Corps. His name was Constant Bio, and these girls had said that this 
person was sexually assaulting these young girls.

                              {time}  2130

  She had started hearing that he had been sleeping with some of the 
girls, he had gotten some of them pregnant, and some of them had been 
raped.
  At the request of several teachers, Kate sent an email to the Peace 
Corps in Benin's capital recommending that this person be fired from 
the Peace Corps. She said, ``Please believe me, I'm not someone who 
likes to create problems, but this has been weighing on me heavily.'' 
This was in an email that she sent that was found later and turned over 
to ABC News. ``This man is not someone I want representing the Peace 
Corps to this community.''
  Bio's brother worked as a manager in the Peace Corps office, and she 
asked her role to be kept secret because she didn't want this criminal, 
this rapist of young girls, in this country, to know that she had 
reported him. But he found out about it anyway. And so when he found 
out about it, this is what happened: on March 11, 2009, the day after 
the Peace Corps authorities had fired this criminal, Bio, and just 2 
months short of completing her 2-year commitment to the Peace Corps, 
Kate was found dead on her front porch with her throat slit.
  The Puzey family says the Peace Corps was insensitive in its 
treatment of them until officials had learned about the ABC News 
report, and then they got more involved. Unfortunately, it was too 
late. Unfortunately, no one did anything or paid attention.
  Before the news reported this murder, this homicide, the Puzey family 
believes and states that the Peace Corps did little to show compassion 
or interest. Kate's father Harry says this: She was my hero. I thought 
maybe a representative would come to the house to talk to us, or at 
least a letter in the mail. But that did not happen, because just a box 
showed up with my daughter's belongings that came by deliveryman. This 
is disrespectful, Mr. Speaker, to the life of this wonderful person and 
to her family.
  Now the Peace Corps has changed some of their procedures, and we will 
get to that in just a minute.
  The fifth example I want to talk about is Jill Hoxmeier. She was a 
Peace Corps volunteer in Guyana, which is in South America. She was a 
volunteer, and she had created ways to help young women combat and 
understand the disease of HIV/AIDS and other functions and other 
diseases. She was teaching them life-skill courses and wanted to help 
build stronger relationships between the mothers there and their 
daughters.
  In 2007, a year into her service, she was riding her bike home from 
work when she was assaulted, dragged in the bushes and sexually 
assaulted by a man who had been following her for some time. He choked 
her so hard she couldn't breathe or even scream.
  She believes the Peace Corps needs to do more to help victims cut 
through the bureaucratic red tape and get the care they need. ``It was 
too hard to navigate the problems that I had been going through all by 
myself.'' Once again, insensitivity, and nothing seemed to happen.
  Jess and other victims who are members of the Peace Corps who have 
been victims have formed an organization, a support group, but it is 
going to be a group that is going to be active. They call it the First 
Response Action Group, and we will see more of them hopefully here on 
the Hill.
  Today, I met with the Director of the Peace Corps, Aaron Williams, 
who happened to be in the Peace Corps years ago. He is now the 
director. I explained to him and talked to him about these issues and 
other cases that have come to light, and he and I discussed this 
problem. We are going to have, hopefully, a Foreign Affairs Committee 
hearing on this very issue, the Peace Corps and the relationship it has 
with its volunteers throughout the world, how to make them safe, how to 
take care of them once a crime is committed against them and how to 
take care of them after that crime has been committed against them.
  The Peace Corps Director, Mr. Williams, assures me that they are 
going to develop a victim advocate program and hire a victim advocate. 
They are going to help these victims of crime get counseling services. 
They are going to help them medically, even after they have been 
discharged from the Peace Corps. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor has 
issues in dealing with these Peace Corps volunteers who are no longer 
in Peace Corps service who still have issues that they need to be taken 
care of, and the Peace Corps is going to work with the Department of 
Labor to work out this bureaucratic nonsense.
  Every victim, he says, is going to have access to medical counseling 
and legal services; and when a crime is committed against an American 
in the Peace Corps overseas, the ambassador of that country is going to 
contact the highest ranking official in that country to let them know 
that America wants some results and wants to take care of the victim, 
but also wants the perpetrator held accountable.
  One of the most important things that Director Williams has agreed to 
do is to set up a victims advocacy program, a victims advocacy advisory 
board made up of different groups like RAINN and other NGOs to give 
advice to the Peace Corps on how to take care of victims of crime. So 
we are not going to let this issue die. We are going to continue to 
promote and understand the Peace Corps.
  But we want these wonderful people in the Peace Corps, who have in 
the past been harmed and had crimes committed against them, we want to 
rescue them as a nation. We want to take care of them, and the Director 
of the Peace Corps says we will go back and help those people. We want 
to take care of Peace Corps volunteers now that are being assaulted. 
Twenty-two a year, that is 22 too many. We don't want it to happen to 
anybody. But we want to take care of them, and we want to have 
procedures to make sure the Peace Corps is listening and takes care of 
victims of crime as well.
  You know, Mr. Speaker, I spent most of my life at the court house in 
Houston. I was a prosecutor and criminal court judge for 30 years. I 
saw many of these victims of crime. Sexual assault, rape, to me is the 
worst crime that can be committed against a person. You can understand 
why people steal; you can understand some crimes. But that crime of 
sexual assault is a crime not of sex, but a crime of power; but it is 
also an attempt by the perpetrator to destroy the inner soul of the 
victim. We need to understand that, and we need to take these people, 
these victims, these wonderful volunteers of America, and take care of 
them.
  We are doing a better job as a Nation in taking care of our wounded 
warriors in the military, another great group of

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ambassadors that represents the rest of us. They come home with all 
kinds of injuries, and we are finally taking care of them. We need to 
understand that these Peace Corps volunteers are just as precious and 
take care of them as well.
  People cry ``peace, peace,'' but there can be no peace as long as 
there is one American Peace Corps volunteer that has no peace.
  And that's just the way it is.

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