Managing the security of diverse profiles
The research on diverse profiles produced one finding that managers found difficult: the risk a member of staff carries is not determined mainly by the programme they work on.
It is determined by how the environment reads them. Gender, nationality, ethnicity, faith, age, disability and sexual orientation all change what happens at a checkpoint, in a market, on public transport and in the communities where staff live. Two colleagues in the same vehicle on the same road can be having two different journeys.
Security risk management, as it is normally written, cannot see this. It assesses a programme, produces a level of risk for a location, and applies that level to everyone. The level is a rough average, which means it overstates the risk to some staff and understates it for others. The staff for whom it is understated are usually those with the least standing to say so.
What the research found about how concerns are handled is the part that should concern managers most. A member of staff who raises a profile-specific risk is frequently told one of four things: that the risk applies to everyone, that they are being difficult, that they knew what they were signing up for, or that perhaps this posting is not right for them. Each response moves the problem onto the individual, and each is a decision that the organisation will not change anything.
The alternative does not require a large programme. It requires the assessment to record differences instead of averaging them. It requires a route for a member of staff to raise a concern about their own exposure that does not read as a refusal to do the job. It requires the practical arrangements that create unequal exposure, accommodation, transport and curfew rules in particular, to be reviewed with that in mind. And it requires the organisation to accept that some risks that it can mitigate for an international member of staff cannot be mitigated in the same way for a national one, which is a programme decision and not only a security one.
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.