The idea wouldn't go away. For more than 10 years, I have rou- tinely scanned inspectors' general re- ports to Congress for database and story ideas. Thick reports from these internal government watchdogs about large agencies get nearly all of my at- tention. Still, I usually scan shorter re- ports from smaller agencies such as the Federal Maritime Commission and Office of Personnel Management, just to make sure I have looked at them all.
Peace Corps reports were the very last places I thought I would ever find tips about computer databases for a major project. But beginning about four years ago, I kept noticing vignettes about rapes and other attacks on volunteers. These brief, graphic descriptions told of violent attacks, mostly on young women serving overseas. As a citi- zen, I was shocked this was going on at all; as a journalist, I was sure oth- ers would be shocked, too.
Year after year, the reports kept coming. I lacked the proof but got the feeling that the number of vignettes - and the problem - was increasing. So I put the idea on a story list, not as an idea for a major project but just a suggestion for a single story that someone else might consider. Years later, during a meeting to discuss project ideas in early 2002, projects reporter Mike Wagner con- vinced Daily Newseditors to pursue the idea as a major project, asserting that most Americans would be shocked.
Following that February 2002 meet- ing, I started filing the first of more than 75 federal Freedom of Informa- tion Act requests and appeals with the Peace Corps, including one for the agency's main database of assaults, the Assault Notification Surveillance System. The database contains records for nearly 3,000 attacks on volunteers since 1990. Two months later, I appealed for lack of proper response, and in May the agency re- leased the first version of the data- base at no cost.
What we got was virtually worthless. The Peace Corps denied us the unique number assigned to the assault, the country of the assault, report date, time, day and date of assault, type of place where the assault occurred, a brief description of the attack, whether local authorities were notified, and whether the victim was medically evacuated. All this information, according to the Peace Corps, was being withheld to "protect the privacy interest of individu- als." Since we weren't demanding the names of the victims and since just about every law enforcement agency in America releases the same informa- tion, I appealed and challenged the agency to defend how such things as the name of a country would violate someone's personal privacy.
In the meantime, we continued to pur- sue the story, by interviewing hundreds of people in 11 countries and collect- ing thousands of pages of paper records, many of them overseas. Our newspaper sued the Peace Corps in federal court in November 2002, and the agency suddenly became much more cooperative. Underreporting also appeared to be a special problem for the Peace Corps. By July 2003, we had a copy of the database with nearly all of the fields.
We also were able to get two other databases: the Epidemiologic Surveil- lance System, containing monthly re- ports of burglaries, alcohol-related in- incidences, pregnancies, STD cases, and other problems encountered by volunteers; and the Deaths in Service, which provided details about how more than 200 volunteers had died since 1962. I analyzed the data using Para- dox database manager. Our analysis and other records found: The number of all assaults increased more than 200 percent 1990-2002, while the number of volunteers in- creased about 29 percent.
We found a 300 percent increase in aggravated assaults, the most serious type of physical assaults. In 2002, there was an assault or robbery of a volunteer every 23 hours. Many assaults were linked to a de- cades-old practice the agency refuses to change: Sending young volunteers - the majority of them women - just out of college to live alone with virtu- ally no supervision in remote regions of some of the most dangerous coun- tries in the world.
Volunteers frequently arrive at their sites fresh out of training without adequate housing or a job that keeps them busy. Some turn to drink- ing, using drugs, traveling to unsafe areas or engaging in other activities that put them in danger. Volunteers who were alone frequently were the targets of assaults, and young women appeared the most vulnerable. In 62 percent of the more than 2,900 assaults, the victim was identified as being alone, and in 59 percent of all assault cases, the victim was identified as a woman in her 20s.
Alcohol was identified as a factor in nearly one in three assaults since 1999, although the assailant was the sole person drinking in some of those cases. Alcohol was also linked to nearly one in six deaths since 1962. Families of dead volunteers were un- aware of crucial details in the data- bases and other records we obtained. One mother didn't know her daughter had attempted suicide with aspirin in Ecuador before lapsing into a coma and dying.
The brother of another vol- unteer said the family had never been told that his 22-year-old sister had writ- ten a resignation letter the day she dis- appeared in Africa or that the Peace Corps suspected suicide. Her body was found five days later floating in a river, and the family was led to believe that a crocodile had killed her. As helpful as the databases proved to be, there were a number of problems with the way the agency collected in- formation.
The Peace Corps failed to collect worldwide crime statistics until 1990, 28 years after it first sent volunteers overseas. Certain crimes still weren't specifically identified in the assault database. Abductions, kidnappings and even murder usually were recorded as assaults in the data. Some crimes that should have ap- peared in the data weren't there at all. We couldn't find two known murders in the database.
In January 2001, weeks before a vol- unteer disappeared in Bolivia, Mike Mulvaney and another volunteer were abducted in a taxi, the second such abduction of a volunteer within 11 months in that country. Mulvaney was beaten during the incident but managed to escape. Both the Peace Corps country director in Bolivia at the time and the agency's worldwide security director confirmed that Mulvaney spoke to them about the abduction, but the incident wasn't recorded anywhere on the assault database.
A written response from the Peace Corps says, "Not having a record of this alleged assault was not an error." Mulvaney, it says, should also have reported it to the medical office. Underreporting also appeared to be a special problem for the Peace Corps, since volunteers risked be- ing moved out of the country or even out of the Peace Corps by simply making an assault report. Govern- ment auditors estimated that underreporting was as high as 50 percent.
When we asked Elliot Jaspin of the Cox Newspapers Washington Bu- reau, and founder of what is now NICAR, to review our findings before publication, he found something even more troubling: The crime rate the agency was making available to Con- gress and the public was based on incidents, not the number of victims. After three women were raped in El Salvador in 1996, the incident was recorded as a single rape.
About one in every five assaults in- volved more than one volunteer; but it was impossible to determine what hap- pened to the other volunteers in each case by using the data we had. At a meeting in Washington, Jaspin, reporter Mei-Ling Hopgood and projects editor John Erickson and I confronted Peace Corps officials, but they insisted their data collection methods were the best way to make volunteers safer.
They also said the U.S. General Accounting Office, dur- ing an earlier audit, had validated the Peace Corps' data collection meth- ods. The GAO later said it was un- aware that the Peace Corps failed to count all victims. Problems with the way the agency collected and interpreted data was one of several reasons the extent of dangers facing Peace Corps volun- teers had been disguised for de- cades. Another reason is that the at- tacks occurred thousands of miles away.
Still another reason is that the agency made little effort to publicize them or deliberately kept people from finding out - while emphasiz- ing only the positive aspects of Peace Corps service. Contact Russell Carollo by e-mail at rcarollo@coxohio.com