New data reveals sexual abuse remains a 'cancer' in the aid sector

A cancer in our system. That’s how Ban Ki-Moon, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, described sexual abuse and exploitation in the organization in 2015. His comments came after peacekeeping forces in the Central African Republic were implicated in the rape of a 12-year-old girl — but nearly a decade later, new data shows that cancer is still deep in the humanitarian sector’s veins. CHS Alliance, a humanitarian network focused on accountability, has found that 1 in 5 survivors of sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment at the hands of aid workers was under the age of 18, and a quarter of all perpetrators held management positions. The data is a result of a CHS pilot program, which asked two dozen international, local, and private sector organizations to track incidents of sexual abuse committed by aid workers between October 2022 and September 2023. Together, those organizations reported 133 incidents against both aid recipients and staff members throughout the year. With just 24 organizations involved in the project, the team doesn’t intend to paint a full picture of sexual violence within the aid sector. But it does provide a glimpse of the trends — along with a streamlined reporting system to track them. “Data and trends are really a roadmap to tell us what we need to prioritize,” said Mathilde Belli, who leads the project at CHS Alliance. The tool was just a pilot, and more results — with a tweaked reporting platform and added levels of granularity — are expected in the coming weeks. But in the first year of implementation, the results were startling. Nearly 85% of all those affected by sexual violence were female; over 90% of all perpetrators were male. Support was only provided to a survivor of sexual violence in half of the incidents — and for 1 in 3 cases, nothing happened after that incident was reported. International staff members made up 13% of all perpetrators, a figure above the typical proportion of internationals present in a humanitarian response: 10%. The majority of incidents took place in the Middle East, followed by Eastern Africa and Central Africa. “This is the first time where we actually have a standardized set of data coming in from multiple sources, rather than this hodgepodge of different organizations gathering different data points,” said Laura Ragan, senior director of safeguarding investigations at Mercy Corps, one of the 11 international organizations that participated in the project. By anonymizing reporting across organizations, CHS Alliance’s project — which is funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — attempts to break down some of those challenges. Individual organizations can’t be called out for over- or underreporting, Belli said, allowing entities to feel more comfortable reporting true figures. And FCDO’s support, experts say, is a huge signal that donors’ attitudes on reporting sexual violence may be changing. “The fact that there are so many incidents we do know about shows us how big the iceberg underneath the water actually is.” --— Melanie Sauter, research fellow in peace studies, University of Oxford “I’m a strong believer that some data is better than no data,” said Belli. “If the aid sector starts being much more transparent about what they’re doing on SEAH [sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment], hopefully in the long run, it will encourage survivors to say ‘There’s action that’s being taken when I report.’ So we hope this will also contribute to reducing underreporting.” Still, reporting on sexual violence of all kinds — whether it be exploitation, abuse, or harassment — is a complex problem to tackle. With organizations self-reporting their incidents to CHS twice a year, some experts are wary about whether the project is picking up the full picture of the problem. But for those behind the initiative, it feels like the right start. A pattern spanning decades Sexual abuse is nothing new for the aid industry. There was the sex-for-food scandal in 2002, where nearly 70 girls reported they had been forced to exchange sex for humanitarian assistance — including medicine, soap, and biscuits — in West Africa. The incidents that rocked Oxfam in 2018, when the organization attempted to cover up sexual exploitation by its country director in Haiti. And the 51 women who accused aid workers — who were supposed to be responding to the Ebola crisis in 2020 — of sexual abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But despite the prevalence of such incidents — and spurts of media attention in their wake — for decades, sexual exploitation has been baked into the humanitarian system. There’s an imbalance of power between those providing assistance and those receiving it, the difficulty to report misconduct if you feel like your aid — or your job — hinges on your silence, and the fact that few donors want to support an organization accused of sexual violence. “The problem is twofold: first of all, organizations need to have the data themselves, and they may miss that if the victims [do not come forward] or perpetrators are not reported,” said Melanie Sauter, a former humanitarian who now studies the aid sector at the University of Oxford. “And if these organizations report on this issue, they will have a problem with their donors — so there’s a high incentive to underreport the data.” Across every setting, sexual violence is staggeringly underreported. Data from the United States Department of Justice found that two out of every three sexual assaults in the U.S. are never reported to the police. Add the nuances of a humanitarian response to the mix, Sauter said, and you enter even more challenging territory. She described a typical humanitarian workplace: A small group of aid workers living in a cordoned-off safe zone, the stress of day-to-day operations only dulled by partying at night, and high rates of alcohol abuse to relieve boredom, loneliness, and trauma. On top of that, there is the resilience aid workers are expected to carry, whether it's their first deployment or their hundredth. “There’s this kind of cowboy mentality among a lot of aid workers, and this notion that only the fittest and the toughest will make it,” Sauter explained. “That will hinder a lot of women from speaking up when something happens.” The data from CHS Alliance doesn’t disaggregate between survivors from beneficiary communities or survivors within the aid sector itself. But Mercy Corps’ Ragan said that typically, staff members will report at slightly higher rates than those on the receiving end of a project. That may be why sexual harassment was the most common incident last year, accounting for 41% of all cases reported. Sexual exploitation followed at 29%, and sexual abuse at 26%. “The fact that there are so many incidents we do know about shows us how big the iceberg underneath the water actually is,” Sauter said. That power imbalance is further elevated when looking at aid workers and the communities they’re meant to serve. Jasmine Westendorf, a professor at Australia’s La Trobe University, studies sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian operations — and in a conversation with Devex, Westendorf stressed how systemic the problem had become. “There’s this narrative that this is a problem of bad apples, but the evidence shows that it’s a problem of context,” said Westendorf. There’s the fact that people in humanitarian settings have often been pushed to the brink, and that many — especially women — are often willing to do whatever it takes to help their families. There’s the breakdown of family and community structures during a crisis, including the systems that often support vulnerable groups the most. And, the disparity of wages, jobs, and basic necessities between a target population and the aid workers around them, many of whom are dealing with trauma themselves. “We can’t actually speak to the scale of this,” Westendorf said, noting the overwhelming lack of sector-wide data. “But what we can say is that it happens everywhere where there is an abuse of power. Churches, schools, Hollywood — as well as the aid sector.” Though senior managers accounted for 10% of the reported incidents and middle managers accounted for 14%, the data also showed that more than a quarter of all incidents were perpetrated by field staff, and three-quarters were perpetrated by national staff. Senior managers were most likely to have been involved in incidents of sexual harassment and sexual exploitation, while field staff were represented in all three types of sexual violence, including abuse. “Perpetrators of abuse and exploitation are from a whole range: they are both expatriate staff and locally hired staff,” said Westendorf. “Everyone from senior managers to drivers and security guards. And anyone that has more power or privilege as a result of their job and their wages than others in a host society, who can use that to abuse or exploit local women, children, boys and possibly men.” The power of patterns The data report is the second phase of CHS Alliance’s project. The first included a study into what types of reporting systems currently exist across the industry, which concluded that the only harmonized data collection system was the United Nations iReport platform. From January to May of this year alone, iReport tracked 74 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse across nine U.N. entities, nearly 30% of which involved survivors under the age of 18 or with an age classified as “unknown.” Still, that platform excludes cases of sexual harassment and only includes incidents involving the U.N. and its implementing partners, leaving out the thousands of international and local organizations across the sector. “One thing that we realized [three years ago when the CHS Alliance started the project] is that a lot of the work we do in preventing sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment is not evidence-based,” said Belli. “A lot of organizations were at a moment where they did collect this data, but we didn’t have an actual system to put that data together and compare it.” Now, CHS Alliance hopes the project will do just that. As the months go on, CHS and its partners will continue to scale up the platform, pulling more organizations into the fold and producing biannual analyses on reported figures. It’s those analyses, experts hope, that can really make a difference. “I think patterns are actually more important [than prevalence numbers], and what this report does is give us great insight into those patterns,” Westendorf explained. “We know that expatriates, for example, are disproportionately responsible for allegations — but we also know that the vast majority of allegations are against national staff. That allows us to think about how we target our prevention and training to really respond to the different needs that nationally and internationally hired staff have in terms of prevention.” There were other notable patterns. The fact that the highest proportion of incidents took place in the Middle East — and the country with the most reported allegations was Syria. And nearly 41% of reports went directly to a staff member at the organization, while less than 6% went through a community-based complaint mechanism. The latter data point, the report stated, highlighted the need to consult communities to better understand how those mechanisms can be more accessible. “Cases are being reported to staff, face-to-face, so what does that tell us?” said Belli. “That organizations should really train their staff to know how to safely receive disclosure and refer it to the right person within the organization. That’s just one example of how data and trends are really a roadmap to tell us: this is what we need to prioritize.” In the coming weeks, CHS Alliance will release another report on incidents collected between October 2023 and March 2024. This report will be more comprehensive, Belli said, and is the result of a platform enhanced with learnings from the pilot project. “We’re at the very beginning of this,” said Belli. “But the idea is that the more organizations that join, the more representative the data is going to be.”