Violating peace: What you didn’t know about sexual abuse in peace operations
Jasmine-Kim Westendorf
Every year or so, new allegations of sexual abuse or exploitation perpetrated by peacekeepers ricochet around global media. It shocks international audiences, leads to statements about how such abuses will not be tolerated by the United Nations and undermines the capacity and credibility of the UN. However, there are major gaps in our understanding of the nature and impacts of sexual abuse and exploitation in peace operations. First, it involves a more complex range of behaviours and choices than is commonly acknowledged by policy-makers. Second, sexual exploitation and abuse has significant impacts on the outcomes of a peace operation. Third, substantial damage is done to the broader perceptions of the legitimacy of peacekeeping and, by extension, to the UN more generally.
Scale of the problem
The nature and scale of sexual misconduct in peace operations is often poorly understood even in peacekeeping circles. This is due to the limited reporting and data collection on these issues and because they are often dismissed as less important than other challenges facing peacekeeping, as Louise Searle and I demonstrated in our 2017 article in International Affairs.
The fact is that allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse have arisen in all peace operations deployed by the UN — albeit to varying levels. The allegations have ranged from sex trafficking, rape, and murder to prostitution, the production of pornography, and transactional sex, with differing degrees of coercion, consent and criminality. They have targeted adults and children alike, with the primary victims being women and children (both boys and girls). Furthermore, the perpetrators are not just soldiers deployed into peacekeeping operations; they include the full range of uniformed and civilian UN peacekeepers as well as private contractors, aid workers and others associated with peace operations.
Consequences for individual missions
Moreover, based on extensive field research in multiple contexts, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Geneva and New York, I found that the perpetration of sexual exploitation and abuse by international interveners affects the goals and outcomes of individual peace operations in three primary ways — all of which undermine peacebuilding. First, it has significant and immediate impacts on the individuals involved, their family and communities, primarily by compounding human rights abuses and poverty in already vulnerable communities. Second, it effects the structures of postwar states and societies, by normalizing sexually exploitative and abusive behaviours and institutionalizing impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse in both host state security sectors and among intervener communities. Third, it undermines the operational effectiveness of peace operations themselves, by diverting resources available for other vital human rights work towards responses to allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, seeding mistrust of interveners among local communities, undermining a mission’s impartiality in the eyes of local communities, and diminishing the confidence interveners themselves have in their organization and in international peacekeeping and peacebuilding projects.
Broader impacts for peace operations: legitimacy
Perhaps more far-reaching is that sexual exploitation and abuse has implications for the operational capacity of the international community that reach beyond individual missions. Cases of sexual misconduct by interveners in peace operations diminish global perceptions of the legitimacy of peacekeeping and of the organizations involved in peace operations — particularly the UN and humanitarian organizations. Both the UN secretariat and UN member states actively work to legitimize the UN’s engagement in peacekeeping in the eyes of the global public as well as among UN member states. These processes of legitimation are critical to maintaining support for the organization, but are fundamentally challenged by revelations of sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated in peace operations by those sent to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations, and by institutional failures to hold perpetrators accountable. Diminished perceptions of legitimacy for the UN and humanitarian organizations can result in staff attrition, decreased funding to peacekeeping and can bolster the arguments of those seeking to limit their country’s participation in peacekeeping and peacebuilding internationally.
Broader impacts for peace operations: other failures
Furthermore, I have found that sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations is not a standalone issue but rather is deeply connected to the other causes of peacekeeping failures. This is something that policy responses do not adequately grasp and that existing scholarship has not explored in great depth. In order to better address the broader challenges facing peacekeeping efforts, we must understand the intersections between the factors that give rise to sexual exploitation and abuse and those that lead to peacekeepers failing in their protection responsibilities. For instance, in Srebrenica in 1995 peacekeepers refused to allow Muslim Bosniaks to shelter in the UN base, leading to the eventual genocide of more than 8,000 men and boys by Serb militias. In interviews, local respondents spoke to me about the deep racism and lack of empathy those peacekeepers had shown to the local population before the attack by Serb militias. Many connected those behaviours to both the exploitation and degradation of local women in and around the peacekeepers’ base, and to the ultimate complicity of peacekeepers in the genocide. Considering these various behaviours and failings together is useful for developing a sound understanding of the cultures that develop within peace operations and their implications for peace outcomes.
In conclusion, sexual exploitation and abuse is deeply linked to the broader cultures and structures within which peacekeepers work, and which shape their perceptions of and interactions with local communities. Moreover, the sexual behaviours of interveners — including both those behaviours prohibited under sexual exploitation and abuse policies and consensual relationships not defined as misconduct but characterized nonetheless by unequal power dynamics — intersect with other aspects of peacekeeping cultures and behaviours. Together, this produces dynamics and outcomes that are incompatible with the goals of peace operations and fundamentally undermine the outcomes of peacebuilding efforts. Understanding sexual exploitation and abuse in the context of these broader cultures, structures and pressures is necessary if the international community wants to stand any chance at effectively addressing it.
Jasmine-Kim Westendorf is a senior lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe University in Australia. Her new book Violating peace: sex, aid, and peacekeeping is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.
Together with Louise Searle, she co-authored ‘Sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations: trends, policy responses and future directions’, which was published in the March 2017 issue of International Affairs.
The article won the International Affairs Early Career Prize 2018.
It is free to access online here.
