Sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian operations: reinforcing prevention measures
Allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by humanitarian aid workers in Haiti have resurfaced in recent days. These follow other abuses reported recently from Ivory Coast and the Horn of Africa. In light of this recurring situation, the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) International would like to encourage humanitarian agencies to reinforce mechanisms of prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers, which represents one of the worst breaches of accountability.
Humanitarian agencies need to ensure that all staff and volunteers receive proper briefing about their Code of conduct. This is of utmost importance during large and complex humanitarian operations. It is also vital to ensure that people affected by humanitarian disasters have access to relevant information about their entitlements, that they participate in designing safer responses and that a complaints and response mechanism is in place to address problems that might arise during the humanitarian response.
Senior managers have a particular responsibility to create and maintain a safe environment for their staff and the people they aim to assist. The protection staff should also ensure that different groups of disaster-affected people are informed about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour from humanitarian aid workers. It is important that beneficiaries of aid assistance are consulted and help shape an effective, accessible, safe and confidential complaints system that can be implemented.
The Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) International encourages humanitarian agencies to apply the benchmarks of the 2010 HAP Standard in Accountability and Quality Management to ensure accountability to people they seek to assist.
HAP International would like to remind all agencies who have already committed to the 2006 Statement of Commitment on Eliminating Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN and non-UN Personnel and invites member and non-member agencies to sign and implement the Geneva Declaration on Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Humanitarian Action, which asks to:
re-affirm our commitment to achieving full implementation of the 10 action points pledged in 2006 and recommitted to in 2008 by developing an organisational implementation plan with time bound indicators;
take action to integrate safer programming and protection through organisational policies, Codes of conduct and procedures that enable mechanisms and resources to be in place across all our programmes that uphold the rights of people we seek assist;
report annually on our achievements against the implementation plan in our annual report, so that our progress can be monitored by our stakeholders, and to make the report publicly available so we can be held accountable for our commitments;
work with others to advocate for a zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse through implementing joint mechanisms to reinforce policies that prevent sexual exploitation and abuse and protect the people we seek to assist.