Haïti [2015] Now: UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Members of a U.N. peacekeeping mission engaged in "transactional sex" with more than 225 Haitian women who said they needed to do so to obtain things like food and medication, a sign that sexual exploitation remains significantly underreported in such missions, according to a new report obtained by The Associated Press.
The draft by the Office of Internal Oversight Services looks at the way U.N. peacekeeping, which has about 125,000 people in some of the world's most troubled areas, deals with the persistent problem of sexual abuse and exploitation.
The report, expected to be released this month, says major challenges remain a decade after a groundbreaking U.N. report first tackled the issue.
Among its findings: About a third of alleged sexual abuse involves minors under 18. Assistance to victims is "severely deficient." The average investigation by OIOS, which says it prioritizes cases involving minors or rape, takes more than a year.
And widespread confusion remains on the ground about consensual sex and exploitation. To help demonstrate that, investigators headed to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
A year ago, the report says, investigators interviewed 231 people in Haiti who said they'd had transactional sexual relationships with U.N. peacekeepers. "For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items were frequently cited as the `triggering need,'" the report says. Urban and suburban women received "church shoes,' cell phones, laptops and perfume, as well as money.
"In cases of non-payment, some women withheld the badges of peacekeepers and threatened to reveal their infidelity via social media," the report says. "Only seven interviewees knew about the United Nations policy prohibiting sexual exploitation and abuse." None knew about the mission's hotline to report it.
Each of those instances of transactional sex, the report says, would be considered prohibited conduct, "thus demonstrating significant underreporting." It was not clear how many peacekeepers were involved.
For all of last year, the total number of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation against members of all U.N. peacekeeping missions was 51, down from 66 the year before, according to the secretary-general's latest annual report on the issue.
The draft report doesn't say over what time frame the "transactional sex" in Haiti occurred. The peacekeeping mission there was first authorized in 2004 and, as of the end of March, had more than 7,000 uniformed troops. It is one of four peacekeeping missions that have accounted for the most allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation in recent years, along with those in Congo, Liberia and South Sudan.
One of the U.N. staffers who produced the report would not comment Tuesday, saying it was better to wait until it was released publicly. A spokesman for the peacekeeping office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.N. doesn't have a standing army and relies on troops contributed by member states. The states are responsible for investigating alleged misconduct by their troops, though the U.N. can step in if there's no action.
In their response to the report's findings, which is included in the draft, U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous and field support chief Atul Khare point out that while the number of peacekeepers has increased dramatically over the past decade, the number of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation have gone down.
The U.N. prohibits "exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex," and it strongly discourages sexual relationships between U.N. staff and people who receive their assistance, saying they are "based on inherently unequal power dynamics" and undermine the world body's credibility.
But that has led to some confusion on the ground, the new report says, with some members of peacekeeping missions seeing that guidance as a ban on all sexual relationships with local people.
The report says the guidelines need to be clarified.
"Staff with long mission experience states that was a `general view that people should have romantic rights' and raised the issue of sexuality as a human right," the report says.
Source : http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_UNITED_NATIONS_PEACEKEEPERS_SEXUAL_EXPLOITATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
The report, which should be released this month, makes no reference to the time frame of the alleged violations, but the 7,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti started in 2004. The investigation also does not mention the number of peacekeepers involved.
The report says that the lack of any clear action is "demonstrating significant underreporting," while noting that assistance to those that suffered is "severely deficient." The average investigation by OIOS takes more than a year, according to AP.
Sexual abuse by peacekeeping troops, some 125,000 of which are currently deployed around the world, has undermined the credibility of their missions. A rapid increase in prostitution and abuse in Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Sudan and Kosovo were documented after UN peacekeeping forces moved in.
Earlier this year it was revealed that UN peacekeepers raped and sodomized starving and homeless boys in the Central African Republic, some as young as nine.
However, the number of documented cases of sexual abuse and exploitation by members of UN peacekeeping missions was 51 in 2014, down from 66 the year before, according to the secretary-general's latest annual report on the issue.
Source : http://rt.com/news/266179-un-peacekeepers-haiti-sexual/
Then:
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/25/unitednations
The reputation of United Nations peacekeeping missions suffered a humiliating blow yesterday as an internal report identified repeated patterns of sexual abuse and rape perpetrated by soldiers supposed to be restoring the international rule of law.
The highly critical study, published by Jordan's ambassador to the UN assembly, was endorsed by the organisation's embattled secretary general, Kofi Annan, who condemned such "abhorrent acts" as a "violation of the fundamental duty of care".
The embarrassment caused by the misconduct of UN forces in devastated communities around the world - including Haiti, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Cambodia , East Timor and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) - has become an increasingly high profile, political problem.
Allegations have recently surfaced that troops sent to police Liberia were regularly having sex with girls aged as young as 12, sometimes in the mission's administrative buildings.
In the DRC, peacekeepers were said to have offered abandoned orphans small gifts - as little as two eggs from their rations, says the report - for sexual encounters.
Kosovo&Bosnia [1999]
The presence of peacekeepers in Kosovo is fuelling the sexual exploitation of women and encouraging trafficking, according to Amnesty International.
It claims UN and Nato troops in the region are using the trafficked women and girls for sex and some have been involved in trafficking itself.
Amnesty says girls as young as 11 from eastern European countries are being sold into the sex slavery.
A Nato spokesman said some details of the report seemed out of date.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Moran said some policies had changed. Peacekeepers were "not allowed" off base in civilian clothing or to go to bars and nightclubs, he said.
"Each nation is responsible for the conduct of their soldiers, and if they find a soldier that is breaking the law, it is up to them to bring them to justice," he added.
There has been no comment from the UN.
Trading houses
Amnesty's report, entitled "So does that mean I have rights? Protecting the human rights of women and girls trafficked for forced prostitution in Kosovo," was published on Thursday.
It is based on interviews with women and girls who have been trafficked from countries such as Moldova, Bulgaria and the Ukraine to service Kosovo's sex industry.
They are said to have been moved illegally across borders and sold in "trading houses," where they are sometimes drugged and "broken in" before being sold from one trafficker to another for prices ranging from 50 to 3,500 euros ($60 - 4,200).
The report includes harrowing testimonies of abduction, deprivation of liberty and denial of freedom of movement, torture and ill-treatment, including psychological threats, beatings and rape.
Instead of getting a proper job the women and girls find themselves trapped, enslaved, forced into prostitution.
The report condemns the role of the international peacekeepers.
Slavery
It says that after 40,000 K-For troops and hundreds of Unmik personnel were sent to Kosovo in 1999, a "small-scale local market for prostitution was transformed into a large-scale industry based on trafficking run by organised criminal networks".
The number of places in Kosovo where trafficked women and girls may be exploited, such as nightclubs, bars, restaurants, hotels and cafes, has increased from 18 in 1999 to more than 200 in 2003.
The report claims international personnel make up about 20% of the people using trafficked women and girls even though its members comprise only 2% of Kosovo's population.
read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3686173.stm
Dynocorp. & The "Kathryn Bolkovac" case
A former United Nations police officer is suing a British security firm over claims that it covered up the involvement of her fellow officers in sex crimes and prostitution rackets in the Balkans.
Kathryn Bolkovac, an American policewoman, was hired by DynCorp Aerospace in Aldershot for a UN post aimed at cracking down on sexual abuse and forced prostitution in Bosnia.
She claims she was 'appalled' to find that many of her fellow officers were involved. She was fired by the British company after amassing evidence that UN police were taking part in the trafficking of young women from eastern Europe as sex slaves.
She said: 'When I started collecting evidence from the victims of sex trafficking it was clear that a number of UN officers were involved from several countries, including quite a few from Britain. I was shocked, appalled and disgusted. They were supposed to be over there to help, but they were committing crimes themselves. When I told the supervisors they didn't want to know.'
DynCorp sacked her, claiming she had falsified time sheets, a charge she denies. Last month she filed her case at Southampton employment tribunal alleging wrongful dismissal and sexual discrimination against DynCorp, the British subsidiary of the US company DynCorp Inc.
DynCorp has the contract to provide police officers for the 2,100-member UN international police task force in Bosnia which was created to help restore law and order after the civil war.
Bolkovac has also filed a case against DynCorp under Britain's new Public Interest Disclosure Act designed to protect whistleblowers.
As well as reporting that her fellow officers regularly went to brothels, she also investigated allegations that an American police officer hired by DynCorp had bought a woman for $1,000.
Bolkovac's British lawyers say her evidence will highlight how the underground sex trade in Bosnia is thriving among the 21,000 Nato peacekeepers and thousands of international bureaucrats and aid workers.
Read more : http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/29/unitednations
Congo [1999]
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 26 -- Sexual exploitation of women and girls by U.N. peacekeepers and bureaucrats in the U.N. mission in Congo "appears to be significant, wide-spread and ongoing," according to a confidential U.N. report that documents cases of pedophilia, prostitution and rape.
The report by a U.N. peacekeeping official who recently visited Congo says that some U.N. personnel paid $1 to $3, or bartered food or the promise of a job, for sex. In some cases, U.N. officials allegedly raped women and girls and then offered them food or money to make it look as if they had engaged in prostitution.
read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15363-2004Nov26.html
and a lot more cases:
source: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/30/nine-times-peacekeepers-have-sexually-abused-those-theyre-supposed-to-protect/
Haiti: U.N. peacekeeping troops have been present in Haiti in some capacity since 1994, and they returned in 2004 to aid in suppressing violence on the island nation. In 2011, a video surfaced of Uruguayan U.N. soldiers seemingly raping a Haitian teenager. In 2012, a court martial convicted three Pakistani peacekeepers serving in Haiti for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy.
Ivory Coast: According to a 2008 BBC report, a 13-year-old girl told the news network that she was gangraped by 10 peacekeepers in a field near her home. In 2009, Save the Children conducted a poll of ten underaged children, and found that eight had exchanged sexual favors for food or housing with U.N. peacekeepers there.
Burundi: Two U.N. peacekeepers were repatriated after being accused of having sex with prostitutes, one of whom was a minor. U.N. regulations prohibit peacekeepers from patronizing sex workers.
Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone: Interviews with community members in these three neighboring countries revealed that peacekeepers had withheld medical supplies, food, and water from desperate civilians until they offered them sexual favors.
Cambodia: During a mission to Cambodia in 1992 and 1993, U.N. peacekeepers frequented brothels with such frequency that the number of prostitutes there increased from 6,000 to 25,000. This incident gained particular notoriety after a U.N. official defended the peacekeepers’ behavior, saying "boys will be boys."
East Timor: Human rights groups have documented cases of abuse of children and at least 20 babies left behind by peacekeepers who impregnated local women and then left them without financial support, often ostracized from their communities.
Central African Republic: Leaked U.N. documents show that French forces serving in a peacekeeping mission in Bangui — prior to the establishment of a U.N. peacekeeping force there — sexually exploited children living in the camps for orphans and displaced civilians. They offered food and small amounts of cash in return for sex, sometimes with children as young as nine.
Also Watch :
The Whistleblower is based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, an American police officer who in 1999 was assigned to serve as a peacekeeper with the United Nations in post-war Bosnia. While there, she reportedly discovered a sex-trafficking ring which served and was facilitated by other peacekeepers. Bolkovac was fired after trying to investigate the ring, but she later won a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten