Five guidelines: how to address sexual violence alert
An alert is different from a report. A report says that something has happened. An alert says that something may be about to, or that a pattern is forming. Five guidelines for handling one.
1. Take the alert at face value. Alerts arrive informally: a comment from a driver, a change in how a community behaves towards female staff, a story circulating in a market. The instinct is to ask for evidence before acting. The correct first step is to record it, to say who raised it and when, and to treat the pattern as real until something establishes otherwise.
2. Act on the conditions, not on the individual. The usual response to an alert is to restrict a named person: she should not travel that route, she should not work late, she should move accommodation. That transfers the cost to the person the alert was meant to protect. Change the arrangement instead, which usually means changing what everyone does, including the people who set the pattern.
3. Do not require the person at risk to make the case. An alert often concerns a member of staff's own experience, and the organisation's response should not depend on her being willing to repeat it formally. The information is enough to act on. An investigation is a separate question and one she gets to decide about.
4. Give the alert one route and one owner. Alerts that go to several people, all of whom assume another is handling it, produce nothing. One route, one named person, and a stated action within a stated time.
5. Close the loop, carefully. The person who raised the alert should learn that it was acted on, without being told what was done to anyone else. Organisations that act silently teach staff that raising an alert changes nothing, and the next alert is not raised.
The wider point is that an alert is a leading indicator and a report is a lagging one. An organisation that only processes reports is learning about risks after they have caused harm. An organisation that processes alerts is managing them, and it needs the same discipline and the same record keeping that it applies to incidents.
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.