Posts by Relief from Relief
Sexual Harassment in Humanitarian Agencies, Part 2
Published February 03, 2009 @ 07:15AM PT
A continuing series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.
To read the first part of the post on sexual harassment, see here.
Sure there’s lots of consensual sex. And there are plenty of humanitarian workers wondering what strings they need to pull to get into that setting because they haven’t seen anyone but an old German WatSan engineer for the past 9 months. (Nothing personal, old German WatSan engineers.)
Its not just lecherous men abusing helpless innocent girls on their first mission either. In headquarters, the rhetoric seems to be around training our national staff not to take girlfriends in the field with the racist overtones that African (and Asian and Latino) men can’t seem to keep it in their pants and must find wives while they are away from home.
Drivers in NGOs will tell you stories of both male and female Western (i.e. white) aid workers running around outside of bars with prostitutes and various unsavory types. Drivers see it all. At a gender-based violence training, I heard about all the male program managers running off to have sex with the prostitutes at the bars. Another friend told me about a guy who she had to share a house with bringing home different 15 year old girls every night and not knowing what or how to talk about it with him.
One coworker of mine was despairing because she had to deal with a female expatriate who was keen to have a mixed race baby so was sleeping with the drivers in Haiti. Another seemed to be trying to sleep her way through all the male national staff.
Women are also just as happy to solicit prostitutes as the men. Read Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures for a refreshingly candid look at this phenomenon. So everyone is sleeping with everyone else. And somewhere in there, people are being abused, pressured, and even raped.
Don’t rape your co-workers. It’s a pretty simple rule. None of us were drafted against our will into these organizations. Don’t want to deal with rules about your personal behavior? Don’t go to work there. Most corporations in the US have laws and policies designed to protect the secretary from the boss chasing her around the copy machine at the office Xmas party.
Yet working in a humanitarian agency is sometimes like joining the world’s biggest dating service. People hook up and break up at a breakneck speed in the field. At a work gathering one night, someone told an amusing story about a beloved coworker who when he was asked to implement the new code of conduct rules, he adamantly refused. “This is my sex!” he roared, “you can’t take away my sex from me!” Everyone laughed.
"Go Tell Your Manager": Sexual Harassment in Aid Agencies
Published February 02, 2009 @ 09:03AM PT
A continuing series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.
So, without further ado, Relief from Relief on Sexual Harassment in Humanitarian Agencies:
It’s the dirty little secret of humanitarian agencies in the field that not every humanitarian worker is Mother Theresa. Heck, not even Mother Theresa is Mother Theresa if Christopher Hitchens and some of my friends who have worked in India are to be believed!
In 2002, in Sierra Leone there were widespread reports of humanitarian workers trading food for sex. In 2006, in Liberia, there were more allegations.
Donors such as the US government have started requiring that their aid be tied to making sure that there are “codes of conduct” in place and there have been initiatives to “build safer organizations”. But when you step outside of the headquarters and out of the spin zone of reports to donors and the UN, what do you see? You see organizations that are unwilling to even take the smallest steps to protect their own employees from each other.
What should be one of the basic protections in war zones (we take care of our own) is something that is belittled, minimized, and shorted when it comes to implementation.
Most female aid workers have heard the stories warning her about certain “grabby” coworkers. At a recent training I attended, female coworkers unwound by trading stories of attempted rape and sexual harassment from their country managers after nights out dancing and drinking at bars. Often the refrain from the woman was – “I made a mistake in going out drinking with him but everyone had warned me so I couldn’t say I didn’t know.”
When I spoke about this with a male coworker about it, he said – but our women are tough. I can’t imagine anyone of them not telling the guy to piss off (despite the fact that one of the stories involved a head of mission banging on the door of the young woman all night and trying to break into her bedroom).
When I mentioned that the guy had been with the organization for over ten years and that the idealistic young woman was on her very first mission, he still didn’t get it. I tried to explain to him how weird and awkward it feels when someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys does that shit to you, the first thing you do is wonder if you provoked it and read the situation wrong.
So go tell your manager, is the refrain. In my NGO, we’re told to solve the problems ourselves and then put it in writing if you can’t. But the guy was her manager. What then???
It all seems to come down to sex – and confusing sexual harassment with consensual sex. European NGOs seem particularly reluctant to “moralize” to their employees because they are not “prudes” like the US. They seem to say - we don’t want to regulate what you do with your sex life. But its so cloudy when you live and work together – particularly when it comes to remote areas when there is little opportunity to socialize with others and when you are forbidden to socialize with the locals due to strict security regulations.
Relief From Relief: Sexual Exploitation by Peacekeepers, Part 2
Published January 31, 2009 @ 10:59AM PT
The second in a small series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.
So, without further ado, Relief from Relief on Sexual Exploitation by Peacekeepers:
More and more, the UN Security Council is asking countries to send combat-ready troops to places like the DRC who are ready to kick some ass - hunt down the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA); in UNMIS, there was discussion about adjusting the rules of engagement to better instruct them how to fight child combatants around the LRA in South Sudan.
And there really aren't that many places where international militaries can go to learn the gentle art of peacekeeping. Western countries invest more energy and time in discussing international human rights, the Geneva Convention, and discipline. But you don't see that many Western countries clamoring to send troops to the DRC, Sudan, or other difficult Chapter 7 missions.
Who does the burden of troop contributing fall too? The top four troop contributing countries are India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Jordan. Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani armies have all been accused of the same such behaviour in their own countries. The behaviour of these armies in Manipur, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the Kashmir region have been brutal.
Sending cold-blooded killers from countries where the army has a reputation of conducting human rights abuses and running them through a 2 week UN training program about human rights and gender sensitivity doesn’t seem to have created wholesale behavior change from peacemaker to peacekeeper. Yet that is the response.
Instead the UN, in its desperation and own uniquely bureaucratic and inept way, uses gender advisors and code of conduct offices to handle what are really serious allegations of lawbreaking and abuse.
Where's the UN's Internal Affairs division? Why doesn't the UN just say NO! Don't send us these guys! The Republicans in the US would have you believe that its because the UN is filled with pedophiles and rapists and this is why we should disband it right away.
But the UN (or rather the member countries who make up the UN and the hapless bureaucrats in that crumbling building in New York City) can't turn away ANY troops because they are desperate for troops and they'll take any that they can get.
Peacekeeping missions are slow to deploy and involve complicated negotiations about what the UN will give to the troop contributing countries. Everyone has heard the stories of Bangladeshi troops arriving with just the clothes on their backs and flip flops and met some of the overweight US cops who were sweating it out in Liberia to pay their kids college education while they wail and moan about the heat, the crappy food, and the stupid natives.
There are professionals, sure. Some of them will impress you with their discipline and go get 'em attitudes. But the stories keep coming out of peacekeepers keeping prostitutes busy in Goma, abusing civilians in Monrovia, and running around with guns and speedos in Bangui. Unless there is a serious attempt to instill respect for human rights and protection of civilians in these armies, we'll just keep seeing the same stories come up time and time again.
But those folks who rush off to wars without guns to “help the people” can be just as guilty of abusing women and children. More on this later...
[UN Peacekeepers in eastern Congo - Photo from AFP / Getty]
Relief from Relief: Sexual Exploitation by Peacekeepers
Published January 31, 2009 @ 07:58AM PT
Today, the first in a small series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.
So, without further ado, Relief from Relief on Sexual Exploitation by Peacekeepers:
There has been a lot of the attention in the media in the past three years focused on sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers. Jordanian, Pakistani, Moroccan, and Uruguayan peacekeepers in MONUC in the Democratic Republic of Congo were accused of buying children for sex, trading food for sex, and generally acting like all around jerks.
In MINUSTAH in Haiti, Sri Lankan peacekeepers were kicked out of the country for their behaviour. (But maybe because they were needed at home for the last push of the LTTE offensive?)
In Juba, South Sudan, UNMIS soldiers were accused of picking up street children for sexual purposes.
In Bosnia, peacekeepers were accused of actually owning some of the women trafficked into the brothels put up there to service the loads of UN employees deployed there. Some of these were US contractors working for Dyncorp at the time.
Who got fired? The whistleblowers. Time and time again, allegations come out that these peacekeepers are up to no good! Yet we're always unable to get around the fact, despite copious amounts of evidence, that this is a legitimate problem that needs to be dealt with immediately.
Why is that?
Maybe it is because the name “Peacekeeper” conjures up kindly images of good sheriff John Wayne shooting evildoers and protecting little ladies and children from the encircling natives. Maybe if we called the peacekeepers by a more descriptive name, we wouldn’t be so shocked and horrified that they are raping women and abusing children.
For example, let’s call the MONUC’s recent addition, the Guatemalan Kaibiles, a specialized group within the Guatemalan Army whose nickname is Messengers of Death - DeathEnforcers.
Or if we want to carry our Western metaphor further – maybe we should call them "Peacemakers", the infamous name of the Colt 45 used by such legendary badass cowboys as Wyatt Earp.
[UN Peacekeepers in Haiti - Photo from Getty Images]
