Reported sexual incidents involve paid international and national aid workers as well as volunteers, says HAP study
LONDON (AlertNet) - People receiving aid in Haiti, Kenya and Thailand say they feel at risk of sexual exploitation by humanitarian workers who are meant to help them, according to a report published this week.
The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Human Accountability Partnership (HAP), said reported sexual incidents involved paid international and national aid workers as well as volunteers.
Researchers for HAP, the humanitarian sector's first international self-regulatory body, spoke to 732 recipients of aid - 411 female and 321 male - in the three countries between July and October this year.
The report gave the example of Haiti, whose capital Port-au-Prince is awash with aid workers helping more than 1.3 million homeless survivors of the January earthquake.
“The person in charge of making the list of people eligible for the cash-for-work schemes will put your name on the list in exchange for sex,” the researchers quoted a women’s group in Haiti as saying.
One of the aims of the study was to gauge the success of initiatives to combat sexual exploitation that were introduced after a 2002 report highlighted the abuse of vulnerable people by aid workers in West Africa.
The new study said the most common complaint from the people surveyed was that humanitarian organisations had not discussed the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse with them, and that little had been agreed to prevent it from taking place.
"Under-reporting is still a major issue. Most beneficiaries say they would report SEA (sexual exploitation and abuse) by humanitarian workers, but the actual number of reported cases does not appear to bear this out," the authors noted.
Another problem, they said, was the fact that people in Kenya for example did not perceive the complaints boxes to be confidential so they weren't using them.
"Reporting also depends on whether or not beneficiaries see the incident as exploitative - consensual sex between humanitarian workers and beneficiaries may not necessarily be considered exploitative - and whether beneficiaries feel they have enough evidence to make a report," the study added.
The report also focused on extensive sexual violations by other people, such as camp residents, describing abuse by aid staff as “just the tip of the iceberg when seen in the broader context”.
In a number of camps in Haiti, it said, some residents volunteered to give away food in exchange for sex and women offered sex for something to eat.
“The risk of SEA by humanitarian aid workers is still significant, but is part of a bigger picture of abuse and exploitation taking place more generally,” the report said.
HAP was set up in 2003, partly in response to the longstanding debate about whether humanitarian resources were being efficiently and effectively managed.
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