A joint investigation by The New Humanitarian and Thomson Reuters Foundation found that more than 20 women have accused aid workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo of sexual abuse that amounted to rape and “unwanted pregnancies”. Moreover, these 20 claims only accounted for the city of Butembo, where the two organisations spoke with 22 women, demonstrating the sheer pervasiveness of the problem. The women they interviewed said that the abuses occurred when aid operations were deployed ruing the Ebola crisis in August 2019, when many women were “offered jobs in exchange for sex.” In total, seven organisations are implicated in the scandal, including three United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is at the receiving end of 14 complaints.
The latest damning report follows a similar investigation conducted by The New Humanitarian and Thomson Reuters last September, through 51 women in the city of Beni accused aid workers from the WHO, UNICEF, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, ALIMA, and the International Organization for Migration of “abuse and exploitation.”
Furthermore, just last month, two senior managers from Oxfam’s operations in the country were suspended owing to allegations of sexual exploitation, bullying, and fraud.
In response to this week’s report, WHO spokesperson Marcia Poole said, “WHO is committed to taking prompt and robust action, including collaborating with relevant national authorities on criminal proceedings, in all cases where WHO staff may be found guilty of perpetrating [sexual exploitation and abuse].” To this end, she said that the WHO had launched an investigation into the claims, while a number of organisations have fired the workers involved in the acts.
These findings though, are hardly surprising, and represent the constantly overlooked dark side of aid operations across the world. In 2018, Oxfam aid workers in Haiti were accused of using sex workers, some of whom were underage.
Furthermore, last September, the United Nations (UN)’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) launched an inquiry into allegations by an apparent whistleblower in Uganda who accused a UN Population Fund (UNFPA) staffer of exploitation and sexual abuse of a “female victim”. The allegations opened up a larger investigation into a more general trend of serious misconduct by other UN workers stationed in Karamoja, one of the country’s most poverty-stricken regions, where UN staff from the World Food Programme (WFP) allegedly demanded sex from local women in exchange for food.
In fact, Human Rights Watch notes that peacekeepers have a track record of abuse, with the DRC, Haiti, and Uganda being just a few of many countries where workers have either raped or sexually exploited women and girls in exchange for security or food. UN forces in the Central African Republic and African Union troops in Somalia have all faced similar accusations.
The full report can be found here.