Gender and security: guidelines for mainstreaming gender in security risk management
Guidelines for mainstreaming gender across the security risk management cycle, from assessment through to what happens after an incident.
Download the guidelines (PDF, English)What mainstreaming means here
Mainstreaming is not a separate gender policy sitting alongside the security framework. It means that every step of the framework takes account of the fact that gender changes the risk a person carries, and that the difference is currently invisible because the assessment does not ask about it.
The guidelines work through the standard cycle and state, at each step, what has to change.
| Step | What gender mainstreaming requires |
|---|---|
| Context analysis | Understanding how the environment treats women, men and people of other genders differently: movement, dress, employment, public space, and the specific risks of sexual violence. |
| Risk assessment | Assessing exposure at the level of the individual as well as the programme, and recording differences rather than producing one risk level for a location. |
| Risk treatment | Reviewing the measures that create unequal exposure: accommodation, transport, curfew rules, and who is expected to travel where and with whom. |
| Training | Content that addresses the situations different staff actually encounter, rather than a single scenario written around a male international member of staff. |
| Incident response | A route that permits reporting without going through the line manager, and a response that does not impose the operational cost on the person who reported. |
| Monitoring and review | Data disaggregated by gender, so that a difference between groups is visible instead of averaged away. |
The findings behind the guidelines
The guidelines rest on evidence that the sector had been slow to collect. Women in humanitarian roles reported exposure to sexual harassment and sexual violence at rates that were consistently higher than those recorded in incident data, which indicated a reporting gap rather than a difference in experience. They reported additional constraints on movement, frequently imposed by the communities they lived in rather than by their employer, and often accepted by the employer as a fact of the context rather than treated as a security measure to be managed. And they reported that raising a specific concern about their own safety was read as a refusal to do the job.
The guidelines also address the position of men, which is usually omitted. Male staff are less likely to report sexual violence or harassment, more likely to be deployed into the most physically dangerous roles, and less likely to seek psychological support after an incident. A framework that treats gender as a synonym for women misses half of it.
The organisational conditions
Three conditions determine whether mainstreaming happens. The assessment has to be able to record a difference between individuals, which means it cannot consist of a single score per location. Managers have to be accountable for the response to a concern that is raised, rather than for whether it was raised. And the organisation has to accept that some measures which work for one group of staff do not work for another, and to fund the second set instead of declaring the risk unavoidable.
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Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.