Themes

Managing sexual violence against aid workers

Sexual violence against aid workers is a security risk management problem, a duty of care obligation and a safeguarding failure at the same time. Treating it as only one of the three is what allows it to continue.

Why it sits in this collection

For a long time the subject was handled as a protection matter, meaning something done to the communities an agency serves, or as a human resources matter, meaning something between colleagues. Neither framing covers what actually happens. Staff are subjected to sexual violence by armed actors at checkpoints, by people in the communities where they live and work, by colleagues and by people employed by partner organisations. The response depends on which of those it is, and an agency that has only prepared for one of them will mishandle the others.

What an agency has to have decided in advance

• A single route to report. One route that works for all of the cases above, that does not require the person to decide first which category they fall into, and that does not run through the manager who may be implicated.
• A named response. Who receives the report, who arranges medical care, who handles the police or the courts if the survivor wants that, and who talks to the family.
• Medical and psychological support that does not depend on the survivor's contract. Support that stops when a contract ends is not support.
• Confidentiality that survives an investigation. The organisation has to be able to look into what happened without circulating the survivor's account more widely than the survivor agreed.
• A presumption in favour of the survivor. Decisions about redeployment, leave and the end of an assignment are taken with the survivor's stated preference, not around it.

Prevention

Prevention is not the same as training. Training tells people what to do; prevention changes the conditions that produce the risk. That means looking at accommodation and transport arrangements, at how curfews and movement rules apply differently to different members of a team, at the behaviour that managers tolerate, and at whether staff believe a report will be taken seriously. The research on diverse profiles is the starting point, because the risk is not distributed evenly.

Reporting

A report that goes nowhere is worse than no reporting route at all, because it teaches staff that the organisation does not act. The report the abuse page sets out how a report is made and what happens after it.

In this collection

• Managing sexual violence against aid workers: the main guidance.
• Duty of care: protection of humanitarian aid workers from sexual violence: the employer obligation.
• Safeguarding aid workers: how safeguarding and security management overlap.
• Study on ways and methods to eliminate sexual harassment in Egypt: a country study.
• Why should we address sexual violence in humanitarian workplaces?
• Five guidelines: how to address sexual violence alert
• Ensuring lessons are learned while remaining survivor focused
• Duty of care and sexual violence in the humanitarian community