Sexual Assault Issues with Peace Corps to be aired on CBS This Morning

Health Justice for Volunteers Founder, Nancy Tongue send out this notice:

“The journalist who has been working on the sexual assault issues has notified us that her piece is going live on Monday on CBS This Morning, the national broadcast, sometime between 7 and 9am ET on Monday.”

From the information that Nancy Tongue mailed, my understanding is that the focus will be on Peace Corps’s implementation of The Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011. For a good  overview, read the Peace Corps Performance and Accountability Report FY2015. It has just been published. Here is the link: http://files.peacecorps.gov/multimedia/pdf/policies/annrept2015.pdf

The last section is by the is the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).  The OIG reviews its previous recommendations to Peace Corps management  and the current status of those recommendations. One ongoing concern of the OIG has been the training of overseas staff, particularly in regard to the law and sexual assault responses.

The Kate Puzey Act mandated that an independent Sexual Assault Advisory Committee be established by Peace Corps, and that the Committee issued an annual report to Congress.The previous reports have all been published in September. and using the search box, one could find them on the PC official website.(I complained once that they should have been linked under Agency reports.) The 2015 report has not yet been published. I can’t find it on the official PC website. New members were appointed last Spring. That may be the problem. But it is a legislative mandate, and the year is almost up. It would have been good to have that report available as the CBS report airs.