Duty of care: protection of humanitarian aid workers from sexual violence
Sexual violence against aid workers is usually discussed as a protection problem or as a human resources problem. Both framings leave out the obligation that follows from the employment relationship itself.
The obligation
An employer that sends a member of staff into a high-risk environment owes that person a duty of care. That duty is not limited to the risks the organisation had in mind when it wrote its security plan. It covers the risks that a reasonable employer would have foreseen, and the risk of sexual violence is foreseeable: it is documented across the sector, it is reported by staff, and in many of the places where agencies operate it is a known feature of the environment.
Once a risk is foreseeable, the organisation has to do something about it. The paper sets out what that means in practice, and where the common responses fall short.
Where organisations fall short
- Treating the risk as part of the general context. If sexual violence is described as a feature of the operating environment rather than as a risk to identified staff, no one owns the response. The risk assessment has to name it and assign it.
- Relying on the reporting route as the measure. A reporting mechanism records what has already happened. It is not prevention, and an organisation with a good route and no prevention has not met the obligation.
- Placing the response with the manager. The person who line-manages the survivor may be implicated, may be a colleague of the person accused, or may simply be the wrong person to talk to. The route has to allow the report to go elsewhere.
- Ending support with the contract. Psychological and medical consequences commonly outlast the deployment. Support that stops when the contract ends is a cost decision presented as a policy.
- Leaving the survivor to carry the operational consequence. If the response to a report is that the survivor is moved, reassigned or quietly not renewed while the person accused stays in place, the organisation has punished the report.
What prevention requires
Prevention means changing conditions rather than issuing instructions. Four areas do most of the work.
Accommodation and transport. Shared housing, shared vehicles and curfew arrangements create exposure that is unevenly distributed across a team, and the decisions are usually made by people who are not exposed to it. The arrangement should be reviewed with that in mind.
Behaviour and its limits. What managers tolerate sets the standard. An organisation that tolerates sexualised language, unwanted attention or the use of position for personal advantage has told its staff what it will and will not act on.
Training that is specific. General awareness raising does not change behaviour. Training that works deals with the situations staff actually encounter and gives bystanders a defined role.
Belief in the reporting route. Staff decide whether to report on the basis of what happened to the last person who did. Reputation for handling reports well is the only thing that makes a route work.
Related
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.