{"id":19714,"date":"2018-09-27T10:52:50","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T14:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/?p=19714"},"modified":"2018-09-27T10:52:50","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T14:52:50","slug":"corbey-dukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/corbey-dukes\/","title":{"rendered":"Far from Home: Corbey Dukes '84, M '94"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alumni<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

As the director of Oasis, a residential refuge for abused girls in Guatemala, Dukes is determined to find justice for them \u2014 a home as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cTO SEE AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TESTIFY in court about \u2014\u201d Corbey Dukes pauses for a moment, the long-distance call falling silent, \u201cjust horrors<\/em>. It\u2019s overwhelming at times.\u201d
\nThe girls at Oasis are brave. Braver than anyone should have to be. And Dukes, the director of the residential program for sexually abused girls in Guatemala, witnesses their bravery every day.
\nAfter graduating from Clemson in 1984, Walter Corbett \u201cCorbey\u201d Dukes III and his wife Janie Stevenson \u201984 began careers in engineering and nutrition, respectively. The couple eventually settled on Pawleys Island. During this time, Dukes worked a corporate job, earned his MBA from Clemson and was very involved in his church, which often hosted mission trips to Oasis. Dukes got to know the residential program and staff through these mission trips, and on one significant trip, he was surprised to learn that the current director was leaving. In 2009, Dukes and his wife found themselves back in Guatemala, this time with Corbey as director of Oasis and Janie managing nutritional needs.
\nAs soon as he arrived, Dukes began building up Oasis\u2019 staff of social workers and psychologists; more were needed to treat the depth of the girls\u2019 trauma. Over time, the home\u2019s capacity grew from one part-time social worker and one part-time psychologist for 36 kids to five full-time social workers and four psychologists for around 100 kids. Working without a background in psychology \u2014 or a lick of Spanish \u2014 Dukes remembers this early period as being particularly difficult:
\n\u201cI\u2019m not a psychologist,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I got here, I was just trying to figure out what was going on. The biggest challenge was understanding why the kids were acting the way they were acting. Basically, I taught myself child psychology to figure out what system we needed to have here and the funding infrastructure needed to put that system in place.\u201d
\nGirls are sent to Oasis under court order for protection and rehabilitation after being removed from abusive environments. The healing process is long and hard as are the investigation and judicial proceedings that follow. According to Dukes, the rate for a successful prosecution of a sex crime is 6 percent in Guatemala. To improve the chances of a better outcome, Oasis staff work with Guatemalan prosecutors and provide resources for thorough investigations. Above all, the girls courageously testify against their abusers in court \u2014 efforts that yield a 70 percent successful prosecution rate.
\n\u201cIt took us a year pounding the doors, getting the district attorneys to pay any attention to us,\u201d Dukes says. \u201cEverybody was saying, \u2018You\u2019re wasting your time. Nothing will happen. It\u2019ll re-traumatize the girls, and the bad guys will come and kill you for revenge.\u2019 None of that was true.
\n\u201cThe girls are always<\/em> better on the other end of the justice system. They get their voice back. We get threats, but we\u2019re all still here. Just because something looks hard and is dangerous, it\u2019s not an excuse not to do it.\u201d
\nBeyond working with the justice system, Dukes and his team have also been meeting with government officials to advocate for adjustments within Guatemala\u2019s foster\/adoption system that will help bridge the age gap between young children who are being adopted and older children who still desperately need families. The girls at Oasis range in age from five to 17, but most of them are adolescents. Placing traumatized, adolescent girls into families (whether it\u2019s their biological, foster or adopted family) is difficult, requiring serious rehabilitation and preparation often for both parties. Oasis oversees this whole process and sometimes struggles to find appropriate placements for girls due to limited options. But the struggle is worth it. And Dukes isn\u2019t giving up:
\n\u201cThese kids deserve what any kid deserves: to be heard, to be loved and to have a family.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the director of Oasis, a residential refuge for abused girls in Guatemala, Dukes is determined to find justice for them \u2014 a home as well. \u201cTO SEE AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TESTIFY in court about \u2014\u201d Corbey Dukes pauses for a moment, the long-distance call falling silent, \u201cjust horrors. It\u2019s overwhelming at times.\u201d The girls at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":19715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[1156,1445,2122],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-19714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumniprofiles","tag-fall-2018-alumni-profiles","tag-guatemala","tag-oasis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/09\/Corbey_Dukes2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19714"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=19714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}