The duty to be caring
Duty of care is usually discussed as a question of legal exposure. That framing answers the wrong question, and it produces organisations that are defensible rather than caring.
The legal version of the duty is straightforward to state. An employer owes a duty of care to the people it employs, and the duty is more demanding where the work is more dangerous. The practical version is harder. It asks what an organisation owes a person it has chosen to send somewhere difficult, when that person is far from home, when the organisation's decision is the reason they are there, and when the organisation can end the arrangement at any time by bringing them back.
Three things follow from taking the second version seriously.
The obligation starts before the offer. A candidate who is told that a posting is difficult but manageable, when the organisation's own assessment says otherwise, has been recruited on a false description. Honesty at recruitment is the first duty of care decision an organisation takes, and it is the one most often skipped because it makes the post harder to fill.
The obligation is individual. A duty of care runs to a specific person, not to a category of staff. It is why a single risk level for a location is inadequate: two members of the same team do not carry the same risk, and a framework that cannot see the difference cannot discharge the duty to either of them.
The obligation outlasts the contract. Psychological consequences commonly appear after a deployment has ended. An organisation whose support stops at the end of the contract has arranged its obligations around its administrative convenience.
None of that is an argument against the legal framing, which is real and enforceable. It is an argument against treating it as the whole of the obligation. The test to apply is not whether the organisation would win a claim. It is whether the organisation could explain its decisions to the person affected by them, and to that person's family, without needing to refer to a policy document.
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.