 Good morning everybody, welcome. We're delighted to have you here. I apologize, I've had a little cold that's going around and it caught me yesterday and I'm on the mend, but I promise I will get closer to you than this. I want to say sincere thanks to all of you for coming today and special thanks to you, Kerry. We're delighted that you are willing to do this. There's probably, if you ever want to feel good about America, I just want to ask you to think about one thing, Peace Corps. You know, it's what makes you feel good about this country. There are an awful lot of things that get a little sour in our way these days and do make us wonder where we're heading and what we're trying to accomplish as a nation. But when I come back and think about what the Peace Corps is doing every day, I just feel so happy because I think it really is one of the most underappreciated positive attributes of America's soft power in the world. So this is in part an opportunity to celebrate what we should celebrate every day is more consciousness about what the Peace Corps is doing. This particular session grew out of a painful experience that I had. About two years ago, one of my goddaughters was gang-raped in a university here in Washington. I'm still very angry about it. And in the context of that, and I reached out, in the context of that, learned of the work that you were pioneering at Peace Corps. I went everywhere to try to find what can I do. I was quite, I was so unhappy and wanted to confront the university about what I thought was quite uncaring attitude and approach. And so as in the context of that, I learned of the work that you were doing at Peace Corps. And I had not really understood how complicated the environment is for this issue, for Peace Corps volunteers. They're posted forward in often alone. There isn't a support structure around them. The overwhelming image that America sends through its movies and TV is of a licentiousness that makes young women vulnerable, frankly. And so I started to learn more about what you were doing. And in my grief, I learned about hope and what you've been doing. Now it goes beyond that. I think that, excuse me, I think that Director Hesler Radelet will talk more broadly about what the Peace Corps is doing and about the reforms that you've been bringing to the Peace Corps. I know this will be a bit of it. And because it has been an important commitment that she has brought, she started off in the Peace Corps. I think in Western Samoa, if I recall, Anne has spent the rest of her professional life around this orbit of trying to create wholesome societies and positive cultures and environments. We came to know her from the work that she was doing on global public health, especially on AIDS, HIV-AIDS. And that's how we had this earlier connection. But now we have a much broader, richer connection. And I'm just so grateful that you were willing to, this is not a happy topic. But I'm so glad we have to talk about it. I must say, I just want a bit of personal disappointment. And I wrote to all of my staff in my anger and said, our responsibilities. And I asked for help. I probably had a dozen women that contacted me on my staff saying, I'd be glad to help. Not a single man. That's part of the problem, isn't it? It's not viewed as being our burden to solve this problem. It's being viewed as your burden to solve this problem. That's not right. That's wrong. We all have to embrace this solution. And I'm so glad that you're here, Carrie. Thank you for coming today. Would you, with your warm applause, please welcome Carrie Hessler-Reverend. Good morning, everyone. And I just want to really thank you, Dr. Hamry, for that warm welcome, for being such a champion for this cause, and for sharing your personal story. That's very painful. And it's real. And that is what we're addressing every single day. And thank you to CSIS for convening this forum. This month is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And we at the Peace Corps are joining with President Obama and federal agencies across the government in raising awareness about sexual violence and the importance of supporting our victims and ways to prevent those crimes. We dedicate this month every year to raise awareness about sexual assault. But I'm sure it will not be much of a surprise to any of you that the safety and security and medical care of our volunteers is our number one priority every single day of the year. I'm told often when I introduce myself, when people learn that I'm the director of the Peace Corps, they say to me, wow, you have the best job in Washington. And I agree with them. I really do. And it's on those days, as I will be next week, actually, when I visit volunteers in the field and I see the incredible work that they're doing and I talk to my own staff and I see their incredible commitment and passion for our mission. And I feel that I am honestly the luckiest woman in the world. But there are other days when it's really tough, when the challenges of operating in the world that we live in and in the environments that you just described are really acute and the weight of responsibility for the thousands of lives on my shoulder can weigh me down tremendously. And nowhere do I feel this more acutely than that issue of sexual assault, an issue that we have confronted head on as an agency since we had the passage of the Cape Pusy Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011. As a mother, as a woman, as a return Peace Corps volunteer and as a public health professional, there's no issue that I take more seriously than sexual assault. And as a survivor, myself, there is no issue that I care about more deeply or personally. My story is not very different from those I hear about every single day from Peace Corps volunteers. During my service, I was sexually assaulted by a person in authority over me and I chose not to report. I was embarrassed, I blame myself. I feared that I had somehow behaved in a culturally inappropriate way that may have led my assailant to believe that I was interested in him. And in fact, in the beginning, I actually mistakenly regarded his overtures as attraction rather than the sexual violence that it actually was. I was 24 years old and I was afraid that nobody would believe me because my assailant was a very prominent member of my community. I wanted to be a model Peace Corps volunteer. I come from a family of Peace Corps volunteers. And being a model Peace Corps volunteer did not include being a victim. I was afraid that I'd be taken away from my community, from my site where I developed incredibly strong relationships with people that I loved and respected. I finally did report my sexual assault but only after I was attacked by the same individual on three separate occasions. Looking back, there's part of me that is incredibly baffled by the fact that I did not come forward sooner. But when I think back on my own experience, I can also understand very well why it is that so many volunteers are reluctant to report their sexual assault. And it's not only in Peace Corps, here in this country as well, and even more so I would say. When I first came to the agency as its deputy director, almost immediately, immediately I was confronted by the real, painful, deeply personal accounts of returned Peace Corps volunteers who had been sexually assaulted during their service. And even more painful perhaps was my first meeting with the Pusey family who had lost their incredibly beautiful, courageous daughter, Kate, a whistleblower who had been tragically murdered and been in. Both groups shared their deep grief, concern and disappointment with the way that Peace Corps had handled their situations over the years. And some of these cases stretched back decades. I am so grateful to them, those who came forward, for having the courage to come forward publicly with their heart-wrenching stories because their accounts pointed both to the love that they feel for the Peace Corps and their desire for real, measurable improvement. Their stories were clear evidence of our need for a new approach. It was born out of love for our mission. That's why they came forward. As a survivor, hearing their stories, seeing their pain forced me to confront my own sexual assault because for 30 years I had buried that event or those series of events deep within myself and I had told nobody, not even my own family. If I was to lead the agency in its time of crisis then I also needed to be able to speak publicly and honestly about my own past. As a director, I see no higher priority for our agency than the safety and security of our volunteers. To implement the kind of world-class sexual assault risk reduction and response program that our volunteers deserve, we needed to take a top to bottom assessment of our agency's policies, programs and procedures. And in grappling with the complicated issues surrounding sexual violence and volunteer safety, we have reevaluated not just our approach to sexual assault but also how we train and support our volunteers in every aspect of their service and how we operate our agency as a whole. The resulting reforms that we have implemented over the last four years go well beyond a new model for responding to sexual assault. Over the past few years, what we have achieved is nothing short of culture change at Peace Corps, a shift to a culture that is volunteer-centered, purposefully volunteer-centered in every sense. While Peace Corps has always been deeply committed to supporting our volunteers, and there is no doubt that our staff are among the most caring, compassionate people there are, I truly believe it. We needed to operate with even greater transparency and inclusion than ever before while respecting volunteer confidentiality and maintaining our ironclad commitment to volunteers' physical and emotional well-being. We recognized that social, sexual and gender norms had changed greatly since Peace Corps' finding in 1961, along with the tools that we now have at our disposal to provide effective support and deliver compassionate care. Definitions of what constitutes sexual assault have evolved so much, enabling more open acknowledgement and broader discussion of these complex issues in our own country. The field of sexual assault risk reduction and response has grown. Technology has advanced, enabling us to provide evidence-based support and care in ways that were not at all possible before. Whistleblower protection is now the norm. We sought out best practices pioneered by other leaning institutions and hired experts in the field to help us adapt evidence-based approaches to reflect Peace Corps' unique model and the daily realities of volunteers in the field, who are alone and vulnerable most of the time, although they are surrounded by an incredibly loving community, and that's something that's hard for most Americans to understand is that in fact, they're very safe because they're surrounded by people who love them deeply. We have been grateful to collaborate with some of our nation's leading experts in the field of sexual assault, from experts at the Departments of Justice and Defense, to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, the National Centers for Victims of Crime, and our own Sexual Assault Advisor Committee, and you're gonna hear from Susan in a few moments. She and others have done so much to help us along the way and to improve the rigor of our program. We are so grateful to them and to our own staff. We have some true experts on our staff. Working together, we've developed a model with real impact, what we refer to as our SAR, our Sexual Assault Risk Reduction and Response Program, which went into full effect globally in September of 2013. It's based on a two prong approach. First, we're working to reduce risks by training volunteers on bystander intervention, risk assessment and mitigation, and other best practices. That includes making sure that volunteers are aware of all the resources and options available to them and empowering them to report all incidents of sexual assault, from harassment, to unwanted touching, to forced kissing, to rape. We want people to come forward to get the care that they need so that they can be productive volunteers. Secondly, we have implemented policies and practices to improve the quality of our response, which when incidents do occur. We do this through special sexual assault training for every single one of our staff, along with specialized training for first responders, the provision of victim advocacy services to volunteers, the appointment of trained sexual assault response liaisons at each of our country posts, and the development of policies designed to facilitate an effective multidisciplinary response, including the option of restricted reporting, which I'm sure we'll talk about sometime today. Our goal is to create an environment that empowers volunteers in every sense of the word, one that puts them in the driver's seat, and one that builds trust at every level and encourages them to seek the support they need and deserve. We want Peace Corps to be a safe space to come forward for whatever is troubling our volunteers. Our goal is to create an environment that empowers volunteers to increase reporting and access to services, in which tells us that we are moving in the right direction, and we have seen a 20% increase in reporting and access to services since we began our comprehensive program. While we cannot eliminate any risk, not at all, every risk at least, we still have things that we are improving on. I am confident that today our volunteers are better informed, better trained, and better supported than ever before. We continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of these reforms, and we commit to work diligently, to refine and improve our model, and to seek greater efficiency and effectiveness in our work in the future. We are committed to doing our best for our volunteers. Over the past four years, and grappling with the challenges of sexual assault and volunteer safety, we have continued to learn to grow, to critically examine our policies and procedures, and to lead in our commitment to the people and communities that we serve. Some of the reforms that we have made have struck at the very core of our culture, going well beyond safety and security. From the very beginning, the culture of peace corps has always put volunteers first. Our very first director, Sergeant Shriver, famously inverted a triangular, you know, a typical org chart with the director at the top and volunteers at the bottom. He inverted it so that the volunteers are at the top and the director was at the bottom. Our staff have always cared deeply about our volunteers and have worked tirelessly to support them. So what about our culture has changed. Here's how I see the changes that are being manifested now in Peace Corps. Number one, we proactively strive to empower volunteers as much as possible to take care of their own or take control of their own care and their own safety and their own service. From implementing historic reforms in our recruitment and selection process, offering them choice, to elevating volunteers' voices in all aspects of our communications, to placing volunteers firmly in the center of our new IT strategy. Volunteers are at the center of every single thing that we do. Number two, we provide volunteers with far greater support than they ever have received before. From establishing a new office of return Peace Corps volunteer services with the dramatically enhanced career services for return Peace Corps volunteers, to the development of a Medevac support team and our new post-service medical unit, to our new intercultural and diversity support initiatives. Our focus is on supporting our volunteers throughout their time in Peace Corps and beyond. Third, we have embraced proactive use of evidence-based best practice in all of our work, whether it's revamping our technical training and program support for our volunteers, utilizing updated new standards of medical care, or prioritizing monitoring and evaluation frameworks across the agency. We strive to ensure that data drives all of our decisions. Our reforms have not only strengthened our safety and security programs, they have transformed all other aspects of our agency as well. The path we have taken in addressing sexual assault has not been easy. It has been very hard and I have wrestled personally with it, but it has been an important journey and I am so grateful to you to CSIS for providing a forum for us so we can discuss here how this transformation has come about and where we hope to go in the future. Our hope is that by sharing our experience, others will learn. Our hope is too that we can learn from the experiences of others. And it is our hope that this forum will give rise to an open, hopeful, honest, empathetic and effective dialogue that deepens our understanding of sexual violence and sexual assault, whether in a faraway developing country or right here at home. So thank you for being given the opportunity to be here with all of you today and I look forward to our conversation with Susan and Natalia. My name is Talia Dubovie. I'm the deputy director of the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS. And it's my pleasure to be here this morning to lead this discussion with Carrie and Susan. I'm gonna kick it over to you, Susan. Susan Smith-Halley is the director of public policy for the National Center for Victims of Crime. She is also a member of the Sexual Assault Advisory Council at the Peace Corps. You've got her full bio in front of you, so I'm gonna turn it over to you, Susan, to give some remarks and reactions to what you've just heard from Carrie. Great, thanks. I'd like to take a few minutes to explain the role of the Sexual Assault Advisory Council and how we have seen this evolution at the Peace Corps. The Sexual Assault Advisory Council was created by the Kate Puse Act. The composition of that council is mandated to include both returned Peace Corps volunteers, some of whom have been victims of sexual assault, and then experts and professionals from both government and non-government. That has included people from the FBI, the State Department, DOD, it's included advocacy organizations, medical professionals, counselors, and experts in evaluation. So that group comes together and under the Kate Puse Act is supposed to look to see have the elements of risk reduction and response been implemented in implementing it, has the Peace Corps consulted with the best experts, and are those new policies and practices in compliance with best practices? Now, I believe the drafters thought that might be a fairly easy task, but it's not. If you think about how our evolution of understanding of trauma, of sexual assault, of evaluation of adult learning has changed, you can see that there really isn't a set, a solid set of best practices for sexual assault in existence anyway. Look at how much the military has been evolving. Even though they're making great strides, each year you can find new things that need to be changed, the same with campuses. Campuses have been dealing with sexual assault for some time, but it's still continuing to evolve. Even in our general population, we don't have solid best practices for sexual assault. Then you take what we're learning there and try to apply it to a completely new context of the Peace Corps. So unlike, let's say, the civilian world campuses or the military, the Peace Corps has no control over the cultural norms. So if you, much of risk reduction in this country is trying to change social norms, but if you don't control the local culture, that's not a great avenue to get at the potential perpetrators, which are host country people. Then you look at the response. So much of our response in this country is related to the adjudication and judicial response, but the Peace Corps has no control over that. They have no control over the perpetrators. Unlike the military or campus, where you do have some control and where much of the response is making sure that the victims' rights are implemented and that the local services are available. So the struggle has been to take what we know of best practices and try to apply it. So as the Sexual Assault Advisory Council has looked at the great work that the Peace Corps is doing, we've often had to fall back on, okay, is this compatible with what we know as best practices? And if there are not best practices, how about the foundational principles of victim support and response? And this, the Peace Corps has done very well. Kerry mentioned many of these. It includes transparency. So making sure that the victim fully understands what the process is in the Peace Corps and what people's roles are. It includes options so that before the victim is required to make a choice, they understand the implications of those choices and what their options are. It's giving people a voice in what happens to them and in maintaining confidentiality. Now, because we don't have these best practices and can't simply say this is what the Peace Corps really ought to be doing, the Peace Corps' embrace of a robust system of monitoring and evaluation has been key. So what they've done is put their very best efforts forward at both risk reduction and response and then have solid systems in place to monitor and evaluate so that then they can tweak, change, alter what they're doing. So for risk reduction and response, I mean for risk reduction training, it's pre and post-testing. It's looking at are the processes working? Are do staff understand what their roles are? Are staff following the procedures and then looking at the impacts? So are the trained volunteers using that bystander intervention that they were taught? Are victims satisfied with the response that they're getting? Does our data show that victims are receiving what they're supposed to receive? And importantly, are more victims coming forward? Because that's a clear sign of success. We know from looking at sexual assault around the country that if people don't see a reason to come forward, there's no benefit. They don't know whether they're going to be helped. They won't come forward. But if they understand here's what we can do for you, here's what you're coming forward can do for us, we expect reporting to go up. That's why the council has been very pleased to see an increase in victims coming forward. Some of those restricted confidential reports but many of them standard reports. So it's been really a privilege and an honor to be part of the sexual assault advisory council and to work with the Peace Corps as they have struggled through these issues and are creating a world-class risk reduction and response program. Great, thanks very much. I'm wondering if we can take it down a level and talk about the actual policies. What does that training look like? What is the reporting mechanism? What happens when someone has an experience in country? What are their options? What are their resources? Can you take us through a little bit more concretely what the program looks like now? Sure, I'll start and then I'm sure you're gonna add to it because in fact I'm gonna pull something out because when someone reports a sexual assault they get eight services right away and I don't wanna leave any out so I have a list here. The first is they get the option of choosing either restricted reporting which means they report only to those people who provide direct services and that's important for the maintenance of confidentiality which is one of the main reasons why people don't come forward in the first place. Or a standard report which is an option that people select if they wanna pursue a legal process. The second is services from a victim advocate and a sorrow our sexual assault responsibly is on in country. That's really important. One of the most important things we did when we started our program is we created an office of victim advocacy and we have staffed it with some of our nation's leading experts who are really very proud of it and they reach out to every single person who has reported. Third of all they have a forensic exam if a volunteer desires and that's usually if they choose to adjudicate or pursue legal course of action. Emergency health care if necessary. Counseling and psychiatric care and medication if necessary. A safety and treatment exam with a volunteer if necessary. A safety plan for when they return to their site. Evacuation for medical treatment if it's not available in their country of service. An explanation of law enforcement and prosecutorial options and legal representation. So those are the eight services that are available to anyone. Now it's one of the things I talked about earlier is the desire to put the volunteer firmly in control of his or her process and it's not just women it's men as well. And so volunteers get to choose which of these services they wanna access. So that's what it looks like on the ground in terms of when someone reports a sexual assault. I don't know Susan if you wanna add anything. Or maybe explain something maybe. Sure one of the things I really admire about the Peace Corps approach is that reports are the default for reports is restricted. So they are presumed that it's going to be confidential unless and until the victim chooses a standard report. And then that providing them legal information giving them information about what is the process in this country, how does the local jurisdiction handle sexual assaults? How long do you have to report? What are the hurdles? And connecting victims at their request with a local legal advocate, a counselor who can really explain the process. And part of our process actually, I think it's actually lifted all boats related to crime against volunteers because we have sent our lawyers out and they have done a very thorough legal environment assessment. The other thing that we found is that in some cases where volunteers have chosen to prosecute, they are prosecuting against laws in some cases that have been on the books but never have been adjudicated. So we're actually helping some of our host countries legal systems evolve through the testing of laws that had never been tried. But on that point, just to continue on the legal piece for a second. A lot of these countries are places where there may not be laws on the books. They may have never been tried. And if they are tried, there are going to be extra judicial implications for either the volunteer, him or herself, or the Peace Corps community more broadly, right? Corruption is rife in a lot of these countries. So how does Peace Corps navigate that with the volunteer? You could see easily situations where supporting the volunteer might mean prosecuting, but supporting the broader Peace Corps community and country might suggest otherwise. How does that decision get made and how do you balance those competing interests? For us, it's in consultation with the volunteer. I mean, that's one reason why we do such extents of legal environment research because we don't want the volunteer to be surprised by anything. And anyone who chooses to go through a legal process is accompanied at every step of the way with our victim advocate, who is really familiar with every aspect of that work and our sexual assault responsibly is on. And we also have a safety and security team on the ground as well. So we have people on the ground who are very, very familiar with the legal environment. And there may be a recommendation that no matter how much you want to prosecute, it won't be in your own best interests. And part of it is being completely asked about what they're gonna expect and giving them the option of either choosing to face a very tough situation or not. I mean, what we really believe is that people need to have informed choice. And that means that we need to give them all the information. That is why we have put such extensive care into this research and analysis around what the legal environment is. Not only what does it say on the books, but what does it actually mean in terms of the public, in terms of, you know, a lot may be on the books, but it may not even be practical to try to go through a legal process for a whole host of other reasons. So part of our responsibility is providing complete information so a volunteer can make their own choice. Right, and that really is a best practice to give all that information to the volunteer so that they can decide what's best for them. Now it can be, as you mentioned, extremely difficult for a victim in a third world country to step forward and be part of a sexual assault prosecution. But sometimes these young men and women are motivated because they want to show the people in their community that you can stand up to sexual violence. And in that case, the Peace Court does its best to support them. But by letting that volunteer know, here is the lay of the land, and here's a legal expert you can turn to for advice. And then empowering that victim or survivor to make the choice is really a wonderful principle to fall back on. You know, one of the things that I'm really proud of is the fact that we have amazing host country national staff who, you know, undergo training and themselves become activists within their own community for best practice. In many cases, they are leading change in their own communities. Do you have these conversations at a country level when a country requests a Peace Corps presence or expanded Peace Corps presence? Is this part of the negotiation or conversation with that country? Not only kind of sexual assault response, but broader safety issues or cultural issues that would put any cohort of volunteers at risk. I mean, when we place a volunteer in a community, for example, it involves multiple visits to that community to talk to, not only a potential workplace, but also to talk to the local police to talk to host families. We do extensive interviews with host families. We talk to other community leaders because we want them to understand the responsibility that comes with having a Peace Corps volunteer in their community. There is responsibility that is implied. So it is part of our conversation. I'm not certain to be honest with you how much depth we go into the issue of sexual assault on a site visit, but I do know that it's something that we spend a lot of time talking to our volunteers about. And we also raise it in the issue in the context of domestic abuse, actually, which comes up quite a lot as well because there are different norms and standards related to domestic abuse and laws, actually. So it is a place where we have conversations. And so our host country national staff, who are, in fact, the people who are conducting most of these conversations with communities, have to themselves be activists and advocates. And they need to be really informed by best practice as well. If you read the Peace Corps information about these programs, and if you listen to what you had said earlier, the word compassion comes up quite a bit. That seems to me to be one of the harder things to implement. It's not a rule. It's not a policy. It's a quality of the staff who work all the way down to the community level. How do you implement that throughout the huge network that is the Peace Corps? Well, I think that compassionate people are naturally drawn to the Peace Corps. I have worked in 25 years, for 25 years in the development field. I don't think I've ever met such incredibly dedicated, hardworking, compassionate people who care deeply about world peace and building strong relationships of trust between nations. So I think that Peace Corps by nature attracts people like that and always has. But I think also our understanding of what happens when someone is sexually assaulted, I know that even I didn't really understand the effects of trauma on the brain and why it is that immediate compassionate care that's non-judgmental is so very important. And that's why our training is really critical because although people are compassionate by nature, oftentimes we operate within our own cultural norms, our own biases, and we may be somewhat judgmental about particular practice. And what's really important to understand is even if there are underlying issues that you eventually need to address, use of alcohol, for example, you do not wanna address that when someone has been sexually assaulted at that moment. There is a time and a place for addressing every single issue with counseling, with a trained provider. Your job as a first responder is to be compassionate and to put control back into the hands of a victim because control is what you lose when you are sexually assaulted. You lose all sense of control. And so you need to be able to restore dignity and control so that that person can begin to heal. And then if there are issues, then they can be addressed by a trained provider at the right time. I think Carrie has just outlined the real evolution at the Peace Corps because even before the Kate Puse Act, well before these changes and the development of the sexual assault risk reduction and response program, you had compassionate, empathetic professionals who were doing what they thought was best in responding to the volunteer. But without the training and the policies in place, they were making a lot of mistakes. But now that the staff is understanding here are the dynamics of trauma, here is how what you do affects the way that the victim recovers and their view of the Peace Corps and here's how it fits into our mission has really been remarkable. So one of the things Susan you mentioned was the monitoring evaluation. And I pulled the advisory council report from I think six months ago, which I think is the most recent one that had a couple of themes throughout the report of things that the Peace Corps needed to improve, including more focus on trauma-informed, being coming a trauma-informed organization, some staffing issues, the need to clarify and streamline policies and trainings and a more strategic approach to prevention among a few others. Can you talk a little bit about those findings and have you seen improvement over the last six months? What's left to be done and where is this headed? Well, I should say that the council only comes together twice a year. One is fact-finding. So we learn what have been all the changes in the past year, and then the other is to come together to write our reports. So we really have not looked at the changes that have taken place in the past six months. But some of the staffing issues that we noticed were a need to clarify roles and responsibilities of different staff, because one of the keys to a strong sexual assault response is a coordinated response with various professionals. But we have learned, and the Peace Corps has learned, that unless you are very clear about individuals' responsibilities, you can have two or three people who think it's their job to do X for the victim, and if someone else is doing it, they feel disempowered or frustrated so that's the basis of the staffing issue. Another, can you run through a few more? A more strategic approach to prevention. Right, the Peace Corps is doing a lot in the way of risk reduction and prevention, but just to have an overall strategy in place can make further progress easier, because you know where, if you see new research, you know where that can plug in. It's a lesson that's been learned by the Department of Defense, and so we have applied it here. And then reviewing, clarifying, and streamline policies and training. The policies and procedures that have been developed are terrific and thorough and very long. This thing. And it's just hard for professionals to really be comfortable with a thick manual and knowing that they've done it. So it's now that you have created it, look to where you can streamline back and make it easier to work with. So maybe I could say a few things. First of all, I wanna say that we rely so much on the guidance and advice of our sexual assault advisory council, and every time they meet, they give us valuable insight that then provides us with both the guidance to know what to do, but also the permission to do it, if I can say that. So a couple of things, the ones that you mentioned. The policies, I mean literally they were this thick. So we have gone through since that time and have streamlined them to, we have eliminated redundancies. We have clarified where there's maybe some murkiness. So next time the sexual assault advisory council meets, they will see a new policy manual. In terms of training, we are working on improved training, especially around risk reduction. And I believe that the new training is just now being sort of pretested. We're piloting it in the first group, some new aspects of it. Actually we were talking in the car on the way over how we're doing bystander intervention, which is a leading practice that some of the universities have really piloted. We learned it from the universities. But some of our own staff have requested mail only bystander intervention, because they feel like they would be able to ask more questions, be more comfortable. And I think that's important. Staff are starting to say, I want this, I need this, and this is the kind of change. This is what I need in order to really feel like I'm gaining most out of it. So that makes me really happy that both staff are asking for it, but they're also asking for it in a form that they feel would be most useful for them. The trauma informed care, we met after this meeting, we had the trauma specialist on the sexual assault advisory council come and meet for a whole day with our staff, our counseling staff, and really to talk about what exactly we do. We gained understanding from his approach. I think he gained an appreciation for the depth of what we're doing as well. And I can only say that our staff was really grateful to have had the opportunity to spend an extensive period of time on this topic because one of the issues is that the council comes together and there's a whole lot to review and we don't get the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with individual experts. And that may be something in the future we want to spend, you know, do. If we identify a particular area where we need strengthening that we make, you know, time with that individual to really do a deep dive into our work. So I know that they have, we have responded to that and have spent significant time with him. And then the staffing, I mean, we have added a new team lead for our sexual assault risk reduction response program, Kate Raftery, who's here today and is phenomenal and is really doing a lot to bring us together as a team to identify where are the gaps in overlaps but especially the overlaps in terms of roles and responsibilities so that people feel that they're able to do their professional job because we have incredible professionals have so much to add, but we need, you know, people need to know this is where I come in and this is where you come in and we value each other's work and this is how we're gonna work together. And going through a process, actually they spent a whole week doing this, that has by all accounts really helped all of us to, first of all, feel good about our own contribution but also have really a lot of appreciation for what others bring to the table. So, you know, next time we come together you'll see the progress that has been made in this area and then you'll find other things that we need to work on and that's the nature of the beast and that's what's so important to us that there's this continual quality improvement. There are always things we can do better and we want it to be that way. We will never be satisfied until, you know, I can't imagine a time when there isn't something we could do better. You know, and one of the things the Peace Corps is doing is implementing a case management system that will allow data about the response provision to be analyzed without violating confidentiality. So they'll be able to really look at where are the gaps or where are the successes and how have we improved from year one to year two? Yeah, and just that, I mean, and I referred to this briefly in my remarks but technology is changing so much. I mean, for decades, forever, Peace Corps has been operating with paper files. So we literally used to have to send, you know, all people who were medevacked back from their country of service to the United States holding onto their paper file. But now we're implementing both the case management system but also an electronic medical reporting system that will allow us in real time to be able to sort of evaluate cases and identify whether appropriate care was given and how we could do better and where we did it well, which is also important. So I don't know that we need to get into the whole controversy with the Inspector General and the sharing of information, but will this system help with that conversation? Yeah, it will, absolutely. I mean, right now it's not like we don't have a system, we do have a system but it's cobbled together. It's not seamless and we have, you know, various databases that are not talking to each other and so we're having to do a workaround. So it will make it much easier. You know, honestly, what's at the heart of the issue with the Inspector General is the restrictive reporting. And whether or not, you know, how we interpret the law that only those people who are responsible for direct provision of care will know about the details of the case and the personally identifiable information. That's really what the situation is about. We wanna follow the law. I also wanna say that our Inspector General is fantastic. We have a great relationship with her. And her team. We work very closely on a whole range of different issues. We wanna comply with the law. That is bottom line. There is a lack of clarity in the law that we hope will be addressed. We're actually talking to the Hill about perhaps clarifying that. And I would say that actually our relationship with the Inspector General is very strong now. And I think that's because both the Office of the Inspector General and the Peace Corps want to do what's best for victims, but they have different roles. And they both wanna comply with the law. But the question is, when the Inspector General comes in, they normally think they should have access to all of the information. But then you really have to look closely how much of this personally identifying information or the real details of the sexual assault is it necessary for you to know to be able to do your job? And then if there's a given case where you wanna talk to a victim who thinks that they're operating under complete confidentiality, how best can that be facilitated that it doesn't traumatize the victim? So can there be advanced notice? Can you give the victim an option to speak with the Attorney General saying that this is part of the quality improvement process? And that's how it is right now, that they can ask for the information and the volunteer can say yes or no. We wanna make sure that volunteers feel that they have the confidentiality so they can come forward. Because we have seen an increase since restrictive reporting has come about. But it is also the Inspector General's job to make sure that we're doing our job right and that we're delivering the promises that we have made to our volunteers. And so the truth of the matter is we all absolutely are aligned in what we wanna do, like you say. We all care deeply about making sure that we provide the support and the care needed for volunteers. And actually when the law is clarified, we will work together. I mean, we're already working together, but some clarification will be useful to all of us. Let's just put it that way. But I think that's another benefit of the ongoing monitoring and evaluation activities of the Peace Corps because you've already created an atmosphere that we are looking for our own mistakes all the time and it's not to play gotcha, it's so that we can improve. So then I think there's less concern if the Office of the Inspector General looks at data and finds a problem because that fits into what the Peace Corps is already trying to do. Yeah, a lot of it is what I was saying earlier too, trying to build a culture of trust where we trust each other, volunteers trust staff. The agency trusts the IG, the IG trusts us. If we can create a culture of trust, it just makes everything so much easier. And I would say we've gone a long way to building trust. Well, I can keep asking questions but I'd like to open it to our audience. So if you can raise a hand if you've got something to ask. We've got a couple people with microphones. Please say who you are, where you're from. We'll do, we're gonna take three or four questions at once and then I'll take it back to the panel and then we'll come back to the audience for a second round and if you can keep your questions short, that would be appreciated. There's a gentleman right here on the aisle. However you want to, the gentleman. We'll do all three, please. There's a, my name's Doug Samuelson. I divide my time between a little company called Infelogix and a larger company called Group W. There's a trade-off in reporting. There are some incidents that you really wouldn't want to prosecute but you don't want to ignore either. And if this penalty is severe, once you get over the threshold for prosecution, there's a tendency for people not to want to report anything until you hit that, or for people investigating not to want to take it further until you hit that threshold. Below that threshold, minor incidents. The guy grabbed her hand and said, I really would love to go out with you. And that's technically sexual battery as soon as he touched her. But it's really more like sexual harassment is all you'd get in court. You counsel the guy, don't do that again. And if she's convinced that he won't do that again, she might want to let it go. That's the opportunity to prevent, that area is the opportunity to prevent more severe things later. So how, what's your view of the trade-off of when it should be reported, when it should be handled in a less open fashion? And I'm thinking of this from the standpoint of the military where if you sent a Peace Corps volunteer home halfway through his tour, it's probably not a career record. You send a light Colonel home. He's done. Go to the two in the hair in the front with their hands up in the purple and then in the blue behind you. I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Naval Postgraduate School. But my first job, I was hired two days before the Peace Corps was announced on the Peace Corps staff. I was there first off the street employee. Everybody else had come out of the campaign or it was on TTY. I was trying to understand what do you explain about how do you protect it from happening? I mean, I guess the other thing I'm concerned about is your incredibly long directions. Government does that. Academia does that. And I think you have to start demanding from the people who do this work what both Eisenhower and Reagan demanded. You tell me what I need to know in two pages. And all of the other detail is an addendum. Nobody has time to read. The Department of Transportation just put out a transportation report, 340 pages. Who the devil is gonna read that? And you also have to, if you have new ideas, you wanna highlight them upfront and what you can do with these new ideas. You don't wanna have to struggle through these academic reports. Thanks, if you could hand the microphone to the woman right behind you. There we go. Okay, the flame is passed on. My name is Mindy Reiser. I have the opportunity to do a lot of development work particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus. And in the case of, in the course of that work, I met with the United Nations Population Fund and I'm wondering what kind of liaison you have with them. Many folks don't know that one of the three pillars of the UN Population Fund work is violence against women. And that is part of the broader UN context which Secretary General of the UN has also flagged as really important. And of course, this is a chance to work with the various NGOs. Some of them, for example, I met with a Muslim women's NGO, very interested in some of these issues. And I think this is a great chance for dialogue. So my question is how you're accessing the UN system, the UN agencies, particularly those that have programs. There's something called 16 Days Against Violence that happens across the world, usually in December. So I think these are good connections to make. All right, well, we have three questions there with some additional aspect. But there's the trade-off between kind of reporting and prosecution and when you can handle things before they rise to that level. Questions of prevention and how you, the most effective training that people are really gonna read and engage with. And then engagement with the UN. And I would add other partners. So US agencies as well as other international agencies who work on these issues. Do you wanna start and then I'll take up after you're done? Sure. With the responsibility to report and prosecute, we don't wanna put too much, we don't wanna put a burden on the individual victim or volunteer to say it's your responsibility to make sure that the societal system changes because we know how difficult it can be. So that's just one factor that they have to figure in. So we know that we want the volunteer victim to know they will be supported, whatever they choose and fully informed. But then your remark also talked about what happens to the perpetrator. The Peace Corps has developed a separate system for volunteer on volunteer sexual assaults that the volunteer can choose that's a disciplinary proceeding because many volunteers don't have confidence in the local criminal justice system. They don't wanna subject a fellow volunteer to the vagaries of that system but they want some form of accountability. So the Peace Corps is developing a disciplinary system. Is there anything to add? No, I think that's right. For volunteer, if it's within the Peace Corps, can they access the US justice system? They could if the perpetrator volunteer returns to the United States. I don't have any more to add on that. I would like to go to the next question actually and that is about the training and how can you prevent it? I mean, for Peace Corps, one of the most important tools that we can give our volunteers is language, the ability to speak the language, to understand the language, to understand the culture, to understand the cultural norms. I mean, in some places, if you accept a dance with someone, let's say at a party, then that's an invitation. Our volunteers need to know that. So understanding the cultural context is probably the most important thing we can do for our volunteers. But we also train and buy standard intervention which is really a pact among volunteers that we will watch out for each other, that we will not leave people behind, that we agree not only to intervene if we fear that someone is in a situation that is risky, but also that they will be intervened upon. If your peers, you know, it's really, it's an agreement to support each other. We also have peer support networks so that volunteers can talk among themselves about some of the challenges they're facing in integrating to their host community. One of the things that we, pardon me, it might be, yeah, or we have peer support networks in countries, but even that, because our volunteers are placed throughout the country, often it is either done by phone or online or text message or however it is, they do it. You know, one thing that Dr. Hamry mentioned is just sort of the influence of American media and how that affects how communities view Americans. That's a challenge for us because how we are portrayed as a people is not very attractive, frankly. And so our volunteers can support each other. I mean, what our volunteers are doing is offering an alternative view of America, which is such a wonderful thing. You know, then there's situational analysis, being able to interpret situations and being able to think about what's risky and what's not. And it's also just sort of how you every day your level of consciousness about what are the risks. Actually it's interesting, we see that the times when in the volunteer life cycle where people are most likely to be a victim of crime is at the very end of their service when they're so comfortable in their environment that they kind of lose that vigilance. So we talk about that and we have training that is designed to adapt to the life cycle. So we reinforce the message of don't let up your guard just because you're in the last six months of your service where you are fully integrated and fluent in the language. You still need to be really careful. So that's some of the ways in which we're training. And I'd love to hear your perspective. You talked about how difficult it is if you overwhelm someone with a bunch of written material and expect them to digest it. One of the strengths of the Peace Corps training is that they've really worked with adult learning experts to figure out what part of this can we put online and what's the best online system even before people start their service. What can we do that's part of their pre-service training? What can we do mid-service? How can we reinforce messages rather than assuming that they're gonna remember from this point here? How can we integrate the most important messages through? So it's really not putting it so much on the volunteer to try to learn themselves and absorb it but how can we make it easy to do that? And even when they complete their service we do a lot of work around transitioning back to the United States because in some ways that's the most painful experience of all. Coming back to a place that is very different. You're a different person and you're coming home to a place that's very familiar but you yourself have changed. And like you said, I mean we really have a life cycle based training program which we've gotten a lot of support from our team, our sexual assault advisor council. Then the other thing is just your question about the UN agencies, the population fund. Just yesterday actually we co-hosted with the UN volunteers a big meeting of international partners, 75 different international partners on the topic of volunteerism but it's also volunteer support. We work, partnership is our main strategy, frankly. We never do anything all by ourselves. Our volunteers are trained to work within the cultural context of their community with the partner organizations that are there. Often they're local NGOs but sometimes they're UN agencies. Sometimes there are US government partners, USAID or PEPFAR. But we work with many, many NGOs that are committed to women's health, to reproductive health, to gender equality, to girls' education. We just recently launched a new initiative we're very excited about with First Lady Michelle Obama, Let Girls Learn, which is a community focused approach to increase access to education for girls around the world. It's girls' education and empowerment. So we talk about, as part of that, we talk about domestic abuse. And it's not just about reaching out to the girls, it's also to reach out to the boys, to create allies among young men and adolescent boys. We want to encourage young men to be allies to speak out against domestic abuse and sexual violence, to be supportive of their female peers in terms of education, to be good fathers and partners. And so we work with partners who are experts. In this case, actually we're working with CARE that's helping us develop some of our gender materials. We also have a very strong women's empowerment and gender equality team at Peace Corps that's helping us craft our work. But we are working very actively with partners, including the UN agencies. To go back for one moment to the prevention piece, you could see a situation where you have an incident take place, the victim for whatever reason canter doesn't prosecute, and then you have a known perpetrator who is still in that community. Does the Peace Corps have tools to do anything about that? I mean, are people kept away from Peace Corps activities? Are they, I mean, you obviously don't want to target people who have just been accused and not prosecuted. But how does that, when that situation arises, how do you protect other volunteers and other people in the community from someone who you might know as a... Well, we would remove a volunteer from a site if we felt that they weren't safe. And we have site history forums, we would record that, we would not place another volunteer there. That's the idea. We have stronger tools to do that than we used to and technology has allowed us to do that more effectively now than we have been in the past. Before it used to be paper reports and now we have electronic reports that you can update and reference and easily search. We are very attuned to putting, once a volunteer has been assaulted, we want to make sure that it's safe to return him or her to that site. And we would not knowingly put a volunteer back into that site if there's someone that we were really concerned about still being there. You know, we often work very closely in collaboration with local police, other law enforcement. So it may be that there's a local solution to that problem. I mean, often when volunteers are confronted with these individuals, it wasn't the first time this has happened in the community. So we work very closely, our safety and security team works very closely with local authorities as well. We'll go back to the audience for a few more. Let's go to Janet up here on the front and then to the back. Thank you very much. My name's Janet Fleischman here with the Global Health Policy Center at CSIS. And just following up on that point, I wonder if this is expanding a new dimension of Peace Corps. So if you are enhancing your own understanding and response to these issues of sexual violence, is it also affecting the kind of programming that you're doing? Is it linking with the issues that those communities are facing? And are you seeing a new dimension of Peace Corps' work on the ground, in part based on your own increased awareness of the prevalence of these problems? Yes, I'm Gayle Maddox and with the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. I'm a big advocate of the Peace Corps. I think it's a terrific organization. I have a question that's a little bit broader than sexual assault risk and programs because I think there are a lot of different areas where the Peace Corps volunteers do take huge risks and do have many, many challenges. But I wanted to just question knowing the German system, the development program, where the young people receive regular salaries. I would like to know whether there's ever been a look at the Peace Corps, these very competitive, ambitious young people who come back and go off to graduate school and everything and after over two years of service, walk away with after taxes $5,000. And if there isn't sometimes a little bit, a question about shouldn't we be compensating them more? I remember when Obama announced that they will give all government contractors have to at least get minimum wage. I'm not advocating for a full salary. I understand the concept and I definitely think that it shouldn't be on a monthly basis, but with the cost of education going up, up, up, it seems to me that we should be giving, rewarding some of the risks and everything that these volunteers take with a little more help toward graduate school and towards some of the career choices that they then have to make after they've given two and a half years of their lives. Thank you. Why don't we go in the back here and then we'll take maybe one more and come back up. Hi, my name's Katie Northcott and I'm actually a return Peace Corps volunteer. I just came back in November. So I was a volunteer during the rollout of the Kate Poozie policies. And I know that you were talking about trust between volunteers and staff earlier. And I was just wondering, so there's still an ongoing culture of mistrust between volunteers and staff, whether it's because of staff points of view about harassment or poor implementation of site reporting forms or even confidentiality breakdowns where staff have private phone conversations with volunteers in front of other volunteers. So all of these things are still creating a culture of mistrust between volunteers and staff. So I'm just wondering, I know you mentioned that building this trust is extremely important for the effective rollout of these policies. So I'm just wondering what exactly is being done to change this and to make these policies more effective and have volunteers actually trust the staff enough to report. Great, thank you. Why don't we come back on that one and start there with this question of the ongoing culture of mistrust and then the other two questions are the broader impact of these policies on Peace Corps activities in country and the question of payment for Peace Corps service. Sure, thank you so much. Well, first of all, thank you for your service and thank you for your honesty. I mean, seriously, this is not an issue that can be addressed overnight. I mean, a lot of it is based on sort of on cultural norms and ways of working that are inherent in a culture and people have grown up in those societies. So it's a generational change and we're working really hard and that's why we have sort of continual assessment, evaluation, continual training. I mean, it's not like you're trained once and that's the end of it. I mean, it's a continual quality improvement initiative. We have developed several mechanisms for volunteers to confidentially report when they feel that they have not received adequate care. One of them is around medical care. We have a quality nurse. Box. We now have a sexual assault hotline that is just actually gonna be rolled out in the next couple of weeks so people can speak to someone, actually we're contracting out to someone who's not affiliated with Peace Corps at all if you feel like you don't trust the system at all. That's an excellent place to go. We also do evaluations of all medivacs. We ask them to rate their services. I also personally, I go and visit a lot of programs. I write quite extensively in our Peace Corps times and some other blogs and what have you. Volunteers reach out to me occasionally and talk about experiences that haven't gone well. Not everything is perfect. We're not there yet but we are putting in place an environment that enables us to get to where we wanna go. It's not as fast as I would like. We're still dealing with people who have decades of lived experience that may be different. Maybe more judgmental attitudes about certain things that it takes a long time to change those attitudes and those patterns of behavior. We have worked extensively with our own staff to try to create a culture where trust can build. If there is a situation where confidentiality is breached, I really want people to come forward. Another avenue that's available to everyone and it's fact used on a fairly regular basis is the IG. And we have posters as you may recall, posters and also our victim advocate, posters saying if you see either a violation of confidentiality or any of your rights called the IG or if you need to reach out to a victim advocate in Washington so not in your post you can contact our victim advocate. So we've tried to create places where volunteers can go if they feel that they aren't receiving the care that they need and deserve. And then we do remediation. We take those very, very seriously and we always follow up on them. Now we wanna also ensure confidentiality so then it becomes a conversation with the volunteer. Are you comfortable with us going back to the person who you're saying wasn't providing adequate care or support, et cetera? Can we, are you comfortable with us addressing it? Would you wish we'd address it in a different way? It becomes a conversation where the volunteer is in control of the response. So that's our approach. It's not easy changing it and I think the universities are seeing that too. I mean, universities have been dealing with this for decades, so has the military. It's hard, but we are trying to create an environment where there is safe space. So that is our goal and that's what we're working towards. I think that's why the M&E is so important. So having those surveys of returned Peace Corps volunteers, if there's not a place yet on there that talks about confidentiality or other issues that could be incorporated there. Working with the employee, the staff evaluations to incorporate many of these issues too is another place, but the point is to try to set systems in place and then measure, evaluate, have opportunities for input, tweak, change, is it working and continually monitor your progress. Yeah, and counseling staff. I mean, we often need to counsel staff so that they can change their practice and their attitudes. We also have the all volunteer survey. Every year we do a volunteer survey. We have very high response rates, around 90%. And that's an opportunity for volunteers to rate their country director, give comments about the level of support around their staff, country director staff, their program staff, their medical officer, et cetera. We also take those very seriously as well. So to the other two questions, they're payment, salary for Peace Corps volunteers, whether that's been considered and then also the- The new dimensions of our work. Yeah, I think we try to incorporate a lot of these principles, especially issues related to gender equality and empowerment that has been a big part of our work in all of our technical sectors. We have six sectors. Let me just say what they are. Education, health, agriculture, environment, community economic development and youth development. So within the context of our programs, we try to, we do incorporate best practice and some of them are issues related to sexual violence, domestic abuse, et cetera. Now, we don't want our volunteers to intervene in the middle of a domestic abuse situation because we don't want harm to come to our volunteers. So we train our volunteers what to do, for example, if they see domestic abuse happening in their community. There are ways of getting other people, I mean, one of the most, I would say, effective ways of addressing the issues, getting other people within their community who are themselves natural leaders and natural advocates to raise a conversation and then the volunteers support them with additional information. But when you're talking about really difficult and tensed issues like gender roles and especially where abuse is related, we really work through existing natural leaders and other organizations. We, our volunteers hook up with other organizations that are indigenous that deal with those issues so that they can support kind of from behind. I would say that's the way we deal with it more because we are worried about our volunteer safety. But I would say even though, even if you're not addressing the issues in a formal programmatic way, there's a lot of informal influence, I think that's happening. So when the safety and security officers are interacting with the local law enforcement and saying here are our standards at Peace Corps for how we're responding, they're influencing change. When the Peace Corps medical officer may have to find a local medical provider who's authorized to do the forensic exam and explaining here is the sensitive approach we use and may I be in the room while the exam is happening. And then too, we were talking about today's volunteers are coming to the Peace Corps with so much more awareness and tools themselves from what they're learning as being active on campus or in other organizations that they will have an influence as well. Yeah. I mean, it really infuses everything we do through our lived experience in communities. I mean, I think that's probably the way in which we are most likely to be influential in that area. You know, even something as simple as looking at gender dynamics within the family, a married volunteer, my own experience, I was a married volunteer, I served with my husband. The fact that my husband was washing clothes by hand and helping with shopping in the market and really being a partner in domestic chores was itself a big statement and he took a lot of grief for that. But it helped, you know, it helped to have the discussion. He was able to then talk to some of the, you know, the men, the chiefs, the Matai, we call Matai in Samoa, about why is it that he felt it's important to share domestic responsibilities? And that, you know, leads to a conversation about, you know, gender equality. And then you can go from there to a conversation about how do you treat an equal partner? So there are ways of doing it in a way that are culturally sensitive, are safer, and that enable to sort of lead by example. And then the last question about compensation. I'm not tackling that one. Yeah, you know, I have to honestly say, you know, we feel very, we're all about service. It really is about service. We feel that the concept of service is so important that we don't want to turn it into a job, to be honest with you. Our volunteers have most everything they need, you know, sort of taken care of in their living allowance. And we actually have made changes to the adjustment allowance. Now when you emerge after two years, you get $8,000. Frankly, I have, you know, my son is 24 years old. He's working, he's making a dramatically higher salary than what our Peace Corps volunteers make. And he's not able to save a penny. Our volunteers come back after two years of service and have much more money than their peers who've been working at, you know, $40,000 a year. Now part of it is the lifestyle they're living. The other thing is we have a lot of other benefits to Peace Corps service that others don't have. For example, we have student loan deferment for federal loans, not for commercial loans yet, although we're working on that. But while volunteers are in service, their loan debt service payment is deferred. We have master's degree programs with whom we have relationships. So there are two programs, the master's international, which is where volunteers apply to both graduate school and Peace Corps service at the same time. They do their master's work, they get some academic credit for Peace Corps service and they merge at the other end after three years typically with a master's degree and Peace Corps service. We also have an extensive range of fellows programs which are scholarships and teaching assistantships that are awarded to return Peace Corps volunteers and they are quite substantial. We have relationships with more than 100 universities that offer those. So there are benefits to service that aren't available to other people. The other thing we see is that the number of applications is rising every day. We have done some pretty massive changes to our application process. We've streamlined it. We've introduced the option of choice so applicants can now choose the country in the program where they'd like to apply. It's a much more transparent process. You can see where you are in the process. You learn where you're going much more quickly, et cetera, et cetera. And what we've seen is a dramatic increase in the number of applications. So there is still so many more people who wanna serve than we actually have opportunities for service. I have to say that our volunteers themselves actually, in a number of countries, quite frequently actually, we do regular cost of living assessments to see how much we should be paying volunteers for their living allowance. Quite frequently it's the volunteers themselves that say please don't increase our money anymore because it will set us apart from our community. Our model is one of complete integration. If we paid them a lot of money, they would not have the same relationship with their neighbors as they have now. And that is central to who we are as a Peace Corps volunteer. So for all those reasons, we haven't really considered paying them a regular high salary. I know there are lots of other organizations that do that. And actually if people come and they're interested in that, we can refer them to a whole host of other partners. It's just that our model is really based on the premise that you live like people in your community. And if you have a high salary, that's gonna change the dynamic in your community. I think we have time for a couple more questions. Open it up again. I think you've been waiting for a while here. Hi, my name is Sarah Lynch. I'm with CARE. CARE first, I just wanna say thank you for sharing your personal story. That really means a lot to all of us. So thank you for doing that and for taking on this initiative on behalf of an agency that's important to all of us as Americans. My question actually was very similar to Janet's. So I won't ask to repeat, but I just wanna say thanks for taking this on and to know that the work that you're doing to empower the volunteers will have huge ripple effects for the communities in which they serve. So thanks for that. Well, and I just wanna say that Sarah and her team here at CARE has been just really fabulous in terms of helping us launch, let girls learn CARE as a partner with us. And as I was saying earlier when it comes to Janet's question, I mean, one of the most important things that Peace Corps volunteers can do is link people with other services. So even though we may not do everything, we, along with CARE and other partners, can identify someone else who does and we can link people appropriately. So we have a lovely partnership with CARE. They're helping us build the technical content of our program around girls' education and gender empowerment, but they also CARE addresses some issues that we feel, we can't take on, but they can. So it becomes just another avenue of providing additional resources to our volunteers so they can help their communities. Come up here to the second row here. Oh, okay. I'm Mark Hathaway. I'm an employee at Jepago, an NGO that does maternal child health care around the world, but perhaps more importantly, I was a Peace Corps volunteer several years ago, many years ago. And I'm thinking a lot about the comments that were made at the beginning from President Hamry about males not being involved. And I often feel I need to apologize for my gender, but that's tricky to do, there's so many of us. Yeah, I feel as though male involvement is really important in this issue. And I'm curious about twofold what's being done at pre-service training, because I think many of us as males perhaps may have paid more attention to the issue if we were made aware of the issue, especially as males in general, and perhaps more importantly in the context of new cultures that we're all introduced to it. So I'm curious about that. And also the lessons that are being learned are somewhat encouraging from what's taking place in college campuses. And I know you mentioned that earlier, but I'm kind of curious what you're taking from college campuses around the country in terms of their endowing males. Thanks very much. Before I could hang up. Thank you very much for bringing this to the forefront and taking this issue on. Thanks. Coming up to the front here. Hi, I'm also a returned Peace Corps volunteer from Fiji. And I think it's really important to talk about this issue, especially because sexual assault does not only happen within communities, but also between Peace Corps volunteers, unfortunately. And I think that that's an issue that often isn't addressed because we want to think of Peace Corps volunteers as the best, but these instances do happen. So I'm wondering what program is being put in place to prevent Peace Corps volunteers from being perpetrators and also how to ensure that if an instance between Peace Corps volunteers does occur, how to make sure that the survivor feels protected and that there is some sort of sense of justice to it. Thank you. Let's do one more if there is. Okay, oh, right in the back. Hi, my name is Jenny Vanier and I'm with Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the health care services that are provided to sexual assault survivors, especially reproductive health care and if there are ever any challenges to providing those immediate services given the varied levels of access and legal context in which Peace Corps volunteers work. So a number of big issues in that group. See how many we can get through. The involvement of men and not only men kind of in correcting the problem, but there are male victims as well and that's an issue that we haven't talked a lot about today. What you're learning from college campuses, the separate system I think you mentioned earlier with volunteers as perpetrators and how that training and prevention and response is done and then accessing health care for victims. And I will add to the last piece the importance of the health care equity work that's been done on the Hill for the last couple of years and kind of where that stands and what role do those issues play in the broader sexual assault response platform? Sure, do you wanna start and then I'll follow up? Sure, especially with the involving males. First, males as victims, one of the recommendations that the Sexual Assault Advisory Council made this year was to incorporate that message throughout the volunteer training. It was stated before, but to make sure that there are sufficient examples and hypotheticals throughout the training just to reinforce that yes, Peace Corps recognizes that males can be victims and it is okay and we expect you to come forward and you will be supported. So that's been very important. Also, the bystander intervention training has been just terrific and we have learned from the volunteers that they are putting those tools and skills in practice, a very high percentage, I can't remember, maybe 20% have said they have used something they learned in bystander intervention training in the past year. And then also, I have been impressed with the way that headquarters staff, including the males, has really taken this on. Today, the Peace Corps is holding a Sexual Assault Awareness Month event and having the It's On Us campaign where many staff members have photos of them holding pictures of themselves, holding a message, an anti-sexual violence message that's posted down in the lobby and others are encouraged to write their own message. So it really has been, the male involvement has been incorporated throughout Peace Corps response. I mean, basically, everyone receives training, male and female, like volunteer and staff. We feel like it's an important issue that we all have to own. And so that's been part of our approach. You mentioned It's On Us, that's part of a federal sort of campaign, a larger US-based campaign that I have signed on, I've taken the pledge and I have encouraged all of our volunteers and staff to do that. I've sent out notices that I have done that and I encourage everyone else to do it. So yeah, I mean, we think it's really important, not only in terms of sexual assault, but just all the work that we do around trying to create a place where all people can achieve their potential, but we need to just be continually working on gender inequality. The volunteer and volunteer issue is really the toughest issue we face. And this is why the universities and the military have had so much trouble, because they own the perpetrator and the victim and we do the same when it's volunteer on volunteer. We have, I mean, a lot of, I mean, training, I hope we talk about that. That's certainly part of our curriculum. I mean, it is designed as part of our training program to talk about volunteer on volunteer. You know, the norms have changed. Sexual rules have changed. And it's hard now. I mean, it's much more complex, more nuanced. I mean, it's a different time than it used to be. I think people understood, when I was younger, I sort of understood what the rules are and the rules have changed a lot and they are changing as we speak. And so it means we need to, all of us have a continued dialogue. We have set up a, there's a whole sort of hearing panel process when there is an allegation of volunteer on volunteer, we guarantee the safety of volunteers who come forward, the victims. We also have a responsibility to allow some sort of process for the perpetrator as well. But I have to be honest to say that those are the issues that are most difficult for any of our agencies, for the universities, for the military, for Peace Corps. And often what we find is that it can really have far-reaching impacts beyond the individuals involved as their peers line up with them. And so it is the most devastating, I would say, of all of the situations we face. It's a smaller, much smaller percentage of those that are reported. It may be, though, that those are the most under-reported. I would suspect that it is because people understand the implications of coming out against one of their peers. And you know from being a Peace Corps volunteer that you have, you come in with a group, it's usually not a very big group. You're a tight group and it's a very painful experience to have to report against someone with whom you serve. And I'm sure there are a lot of social pressures against doing it, frankly. And we're trying to break that down through conversation. But again, it's a process. It's, you know, and actually, you know, one of the reasons I'm so happy that this is being addressed in the universities is because more and more people are coming into Peace Corps with an understanding already. And so they're already more able to talk about it than even five years ago. So we have to create an environment that is safe for our victim through a volunteer-unvolunteer process. And we have created procedures for supporting that. We monitor and evaluate to make sure they're being followed well, but that's why we have our process. And then we have to make course adjustments or we have to do counseling or we have to remediate when we find situations where it hasn't been followed properly. And with every, honestly, with every situation we learn something more. You know, oh yes, we're following this procedure and this part went well, but this part, you know, it wasn't great. I really think we need to delve a little bit more, which is why we're so happy to have our Sexual Assault Advisory Council, because we can come to them with specific issues and say, how do we address this? You know, what is the research showing about that? You know, it's a constant process and honestly, it's generational. It's gonna take a long time to fully address this. It probably will never address it, but what we're trying to create is an environment where we can have an honest dialogue where people feel safe coming forward, where they get the compassionate and effective care that they deserve. Where there's some sense of justice for those who have been, you know, who have been violated in a profoundly personal way and where we can deal effectively with really tough issues. And one of the things that strikes me is, you know, Peace Corps does have a culture. You talked about the burden of one volunteer not wanting to accuse another volunteer because that's destroying the circle, but it's something that we see in so many other cultural contexts, you know, this religion or this community of deaf people or this community of immigrants. And so what Peace Corps is doing in training all of the incoming volunteers on, this is our norm. We support each other. If anyone comes forward, we will believe and support them, which does not mean that, you know, that we would have a skewed disciplinary process, but that it's safe to come forward. We must be safe for each other. That that can help eliminate that barrier, but it is a real struggle. The Sexual Assault Advisory Council has been looking at that and looking at how disciplinary proceedings do and don't function well on campuses and what part of that could work here. You know, the Peace Corps does have an immunity policy, which is good. So in so many of these volunteer on volunteer situations, there has been drinking or other activity, but to make sure that that kind of, that that will not be seen as an excuse and won't even be considered while the underlying Sexual Assault is being considered. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, it's important because the immunity policy makes it possible for people to come forward and talk about something that happened even if they were violating a policy, for example, or they were in a situation that they normally wouldn't want to report and would fear for their service. That's a policy that we've enacted that I think has really helped in terms of making it possible for people to come forward. So I think we're at the end of our time, but can we very briefly touch on the health service issue and then we will wrap up? Yeah, thank you very much for this question. It's a question I care about deeply. We provide a whole range of, I mean, outside of Sexual Assault, a whole range of reproductive health support services, the Peace Corps Equity Act. I'm delighted to say that this past year we now are eligible for the Hyde Amendment exception, which allows for the use of federal funds to pay for abortion in the event of rape incest and to protect the life of the mother. For a long time we were the only federal agency that didn't have those protections because of the good work of many people we now finally do and we're so grateful. We provide plan B for people, for those who've been raped. We also have that in every, our volunteers receive that as part of their medical kit so it's available to them also. That's something new that just has taken place over the last year. I guess that's what I would say. Okay, great. Well, I wanna thank you both, Carrie and Susan for being here with us this morning and for being so open in this conversation to be continued. I think there's a lot more to talk about and we hope to continue the conversation with the Peace Corps and other institutions that deal with these issues. Thank you all for being here this morning.