Rape, murder and the Peace Corps?

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It was an unfortunate, though likely unintended, editorial choice. On Jan. 18, America Online’s Politics Daily ran a column by poet and essayist Donna Trussell in which she advocated dismantling the U.S. Peace Corps because of its apparent failure to protect female volunteers. “Peace Corps Turns 50 Amid Charges of Rape, Murder and Cover-Up” read the headline.

Hours later, the nation was memorializing Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of President Kennedy, who had appointed Shriver the Peace Corps’ first director in 1961. Shriver, a political force who ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1972, died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 95.

Founding the Peace Corps, Shriver said, was among his –– and the nation’s –– greatest achievements. I agree.

I served in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria from 1991 to ’93, just as the country was emerging from a peaceful Democratic revolution that overthrew one of Eastern Europe’s longest-standing communist governments. I count my service as one of the best experiences of my life.

That’s because I had a good experience. There are volunteers who have had terrible experiences, even volunteers who have been brutalized, raped and murdered. Trussell focused on those cases.

She based her column on a recent ABC News “20/20” report about a 24-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, Kate Puzey, who was murdered on March 11, 2009, on the front porch of her ramshackle house in Benin, in West Africa, allegedly by a host-country national who was hired by the Peace Corps as a teacher in Puzey’s village.

Puzey had reported to organization officials that she believed the man had raped several of his teenage students. Her report was supposed to have remained confidential. It didn’t. The man in question, who apparently received word of the report from a relative who worked in the Peace Corps’ central office in Benin, allegedly slit her throat while she slept.

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