Classic Cassandra: A Personal Reflection on World Humanitarian Day 2016 and women’s safety

The author in happier times in South Sudan circa 2005/2006

 

Published in 2016, its time to reshare this Classic Cassandra post.

In 2012, I took a Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT) course before I went to Libya with the British government for the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. I was really nervous as in mid 2011, there had been an attack on the hotel where I had been working in Kabul, Afghanistan days after I left and I realized I had never felt safe in that country and didn’t trust UNDSS to ensure my safety. I was most nervous about how I would react to the “fake kidnapping” part of the training- and as it turns out – I was fine, but one of my colleagues was not. She was a survivor and experienced a flashback during this section of the training. Our mostly male trainers had no psychologist on standby and were not prepared to support her so I was called in to help despite not having the relevant training or credentials.

This all came rushing back to me a few days ago when the AP report about the attacks on the Terrain House in Juba, Sudan and the rape of expatriate aid workers hit the news. The rage and sadness I felt about the UN’s refusal to deploy peacekeepers to protect these civilians threw me into a sad dark place. I then learned that the US Embassy (MY EMBASSY!) had also failed to protect these American citizens and had “made some phone calls.” Eventually the Government of Sudan sent in someone to rescue the people but the local staff of the hotel and 3 women were left behind to be rescued the next day by a private security force.

What must it have felt like to be the women “left behind”? And I couldn’t stop myself from immediately imagining myself as one of the three expatriate women left overnight with the rapist soldiers waiting to be rescued the next morning. I had to stop myself to save my sanity.

The most frustrating part for me is the false sense of security that being nearby the peacekeepers provided these aid workers. I am furious at the security officers who re-assured the people in the house that they would be fine. From the article: “One of the women gang-raped said security advisers from an aid organization living in the compound told residents repeatedly that they were safe because foreigners would not be targeted. She said: “This sentence, ‘We are not targeted,’ I heard half an hour before they assaulted us.”

Too often, our “security professionals” ignore women’s needs or have REALLY outdated viewpoints on how women can protect themselves. In Bangkok, at the recent women’s day- UNDSS told women that they should “smile more” to protect themselves and in Jordan, the UNHCR security personnel who was giving me a brief there said I should “dress decently” (to which I responded, since I’m a decent person anything I wear is, by definition, decent). Aid workers everywhere are deeply shaken by this event and what it shows about the lack of effective safety and security systems in the field.

Our so-called safety systems are not always going to be there. It’s obvious that we, as women, are often alone out there, and as every woman in the world has learned, in a world where rape culture is the norm and women are devalued, you have to take responsibility for your own safety and security.

August 19 is World Humanitarian Day where we remember our colleagues who were killed in the line of duty. Today, and every day, we should be thinking about the particular vulnerability to rape that women aid workers face in the line of duty.  Female aid workers everywhere are particularly deeply shaken by this event. Some are privately expressing how afraid they feel but that they feel worse for abandoning South Sudanese women who bear the brunt of the sexual violence. Will it be worse for them if we leave?

I’m too angry and sad to write a more professional polished piece – so I give you instead, a piece that I wrote about this in 2012.

Gender-based Violence and Security

This blog post was published by USAID to coincide with the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence event, “Who Takes Care of the Caregivers?  Providing Care and Safety for Staff in Gender-based Violence Settings,” taking place on Thursday, Nov. 29th 2012 in Washington DC, hosted by the Inter-Agency Gender Working Group, funded by USAID. It is no longer available online but a copy of it can be found here. Tips for female travelers that I wrote can be found here.

Gender-based Violence (GBV) is an issue that impacts aid workers – not just beneficiaries and not just staff that works in GBV settings. This post examines agencies’ duty to care for their workers by preventing and responding to GBV.

“Keeping International Workers Safe:  Preventing and Responding to Gender-based Violence”

Sarah Martin, Consultant and Specialist on Prevention and Response to Gender-based Violence

The sexual assault of the journalists Lara Logan, Mona Eltahawy and two unnamed British and French journalists in Egypt shocked the world and brought the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) against Westerners working in conflict areas to the forefront. Clearly GBV does not only affect the “locals” in these areas. Not only are journalists at risk but also aid workers–and not just in conflict settings or in GBV program areas.

I recently interviewed a large cross section of women travelers who work in a number of fields (including international development, human rights, humanitarian action and international business) about their experiences as women while traveling and working overseas*.  Many of them brought up their frustration that sexual harassment and sexual assault were never raised in security trainings and that agencies refused to address this as a real security concern. Increasingly, aid agencies are providing more “realistic” security trainings that simulate “hostile environments to prepare their employees for gunfire, kidnappings and other events in the field.”  While some of these trainings talk about sexual assault, there are no discussions of how to prevent sexual assault or how to react or support colleagues if they are assaulted. Sexual harassment in the workplace as a security issue is often ignored. In addition, the purveyors of these trainings are mostly male and show little awareness to the issue of sexual assault or the gender concerns of female trainees. I recently attended one such training where one of the participants relived her own sexual assault from years ago while undergoing a simulated “kidnapping.” While they took her out of the simulation, there were no psychologists or female trainers available to talk to her.

Female development and aid workers have the same security concerns as their male counterparts: crime and landmine accidents and armed robberies do not discriminate. Security measures, trainings, and manuals are the same for men and women, and most agencies take a ‘gender-blind’ approach to security. Most security officers are men, and many of them come from a military background. This gender-blind approach to security, however, leaves out a major issue.  Women also face another security threat that most men do not encounter – gender-based violence, namely sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Rape myths promote the false idea that women are only sexually assaulted by strangers. While this can happen, women are much more likely to be attacked by someone familiar to them – a co-worker, a driver, or a friend. Most of the women I interviewed shared stories about fending off sexual harassment by colleagues or actual cases of sexual assault in the field.

Rarely is their organization prepared to handle these issues. While there has been some action taken on “building safe organizations” – the focus has been preventing sexual exploitation of our beneficiaries by our staff. But there is not sufficient attention paid to sexual harassment of our staff by our staff or adequate support for staff that have been sexually assaulted. There is little information in the security manuals that I have reviewed about what medical care a survivor may need or what rights a sexual assault survivor might have. Nor is there guidance on reporting to local authorities, human resources or guarantees of confidentiality. Responsible employers must be prepared to understand and deal with the fact that their employees might become victims of sexual assault [1] and should be prepared to support them. This means bringing the issue of sexual assault up in security trainings and sensitizing the trainers and security personnel on how to address the issue – but not by restricting women’s access to “dangerous areas” but by making sure female employees are informed of the dangers, provided with information on how to protect themselves, and given sensitive and adequate support by their organizations in case the worst happens.

[1] Global statistics show that 1 out of 3 women has experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault.

* From the chapter I wrote entitled “Sexual Assault: Preventing And Responding As An International Travelers in the book Personal Security: A Guide for International Travelers, by Tanya Spencer, ISBN: 9781466559448 commissioned and published by Taylor and Francis, LLC.

 

 

A Personal Reflection on World Humanitarian Day 2016 and women’s safety

The author in happier times in South Sudan circa 2005/2006

In 2012, I took a Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT) course before I went to Libya with the British government for the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. I was really nervous as in mid 2011, there had been an attack on the hotel where I had been working in Kabul, Afghanistan days after I left and I realized I had never felt safe in that country and didn’t trust UNDSS to ensure my safety. I was most nervous about how I would react to the “fake kidnapping” part of the training- and as it turns out – I was fine, but one of my colleagues was not. She was a survivor and experienced a flashback during this section of the training. Our mostly male trainers had no psychologist on standby and were not prepared to support her so I was called in to help despite not having the relevant training or credentials.

This all came rushing back to me a few days ago when the AP report about the attacks on the Terrain House in Juba, Sudan and the rape of expatriate aid workers hit the news. The rage and sadness I felt about the UN’s refusal to deploy peacekeepers to protect these civilians threw me into a sad dark place. I then learned that the US Embassy (MY EMBASSY!) had also failed to protect these American citizens and had “made some phone calls.” Eventually the Government of Sudan sent in someone to rescue the people but the local staff of the hotel and 3 women were left behind to be rescued the next day by a private security force.

What must it have felt like to be the women “left behind”? And I couldn’t stop myself from immediately imagining myself as one of the three expatriate women left overnight with the rapist soldiers waiting to be rescued the next morning. I had to stop myself to save my sanity.

The most frustrating part for me is the false sense of security that being nearby the peacekeepers provided these aid workers. I am furious at the security officers who re-assured the people in the house that they would be fine. From the article: “One of the women gang-raped said security advisers from an aid organization living in the compound told residents repeatedly that they were safe because foreigners would not be targeted. She said: “This sentence, ‘We are not targeted,’ I heard half an hour before they assaulted us.”

Too often, our “security professionals” ignore women’s needs or have REALLY outdated viewpoints on how women can protect themselves. In Bangkok, at the recent women’s day- UNDSS told women that they should “smile more” to protect themselves and in Jordan, the UNHCR security personnel who was giving me a brief there said I should “dress decently” (to which I responded, since I’m a decent person anything I wear is, by definition, decent). Aid workers everywhere are deeply shaken by this event and what it shows about the lack of effective safety and security systems in the field.

Our so-called safety systems are not always going to be there. It’s obvious that we, as women, are often alone out there, and as every woman in the world has learned, in a world where rape culture is the norm and women are devalued, you have to take responsibility for your own safety and security.

August 19 is World Humanitarian Day where we remember our colleagues who were killed in the line of duty. Today, and every day, we should be thinking about the particular vulnerability to rape that women aid workers face in the line of duty.  Female aid workers everywhere are particularly deeply shaken by this event. Some are privately expressing how afraid they feel but that they feel worse for abandoning South Sudanese women who bear the brunt of the sexual violence. Will it be worse for them if we leave?

I’m too angry and sad to write a more professional polished piece – so I give you instead, a piece that I wrote about this in 2012.

Gender-based Violence and Security

This blog post was published by USAID to coincide with the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence event, “Who Takes Care of the Caregivers?  Providing Care and Safety for Staff in Gender-based Violence Settings,” taking place on Thursday, Nov. 29th 2012 in Washington DC, hosted by the Inter-Agency Gender Working Group, funded by USAID. It is no longer available online but a copy of it can be found here. Tips for female travelers that I wrote can be found here.

Gender-based Violence (GBV) is an issue that impacts aid workers – not just beneficiaries and not just staff that works in GBV settings. This post examines agencies’ duty to care for their workers by preventing and responding to GBV.

“Keeping International Workers Safe:  Preventing and Responding to Gender-based Violence”

Sarah Martin, Consultant and Specialist on Prevention and Response to Gender-based Violence

The sexual assault of the journalists Lara Logan, Mona Eltahawy and two unnamed British and French journalists in Egypt shocked the world and brought the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) against Westerners working in conflict areas to the forefront. Clearly GBV does not only affect the “locals” in these areas. Not only are journalists at risk but also aid workers–and not just in conflict settings or in GBV program areas.

I recently interviewed a large cross section of women travelers who work in a number of fields (including international development, human rights, humanitarian action and international business) about their experiences as women while traveling and working overseas*.  Many of them brought up their frustration that sexual harassment and sexual assault were never raised in security trainings and that agencies refused to address this as a real security concern. Increasingly, aid agencies are providing more “realistic” security trainings that simulate “hostile environments to prepare their employees for gunfire, kidnappings and other events in the field.”  While some of these trainings talk about sexual assault, there are no discussions of how to prevent sexual assault or how to react or support colleagues if they are assaulted. Sexual harassment in the workplace as a security issue is often ignored. In addition, the purveyors of these trainings are mostly male and show little awareness to the issue of sexual assault or the gender concerns of female trainees. I recently attended one such training where one of the participants relived her own sexual assault from years ago while undergoing a simulated “kidnapping.” While they took her out of the simulation, there were no psychologists or female trainers available to talk to her.

Female development and aid workers have the same security concerns as their male counterparts: crime and landmine accidents and armed robberies do not discriminate. Security measures, trainings, and manuals are the same for men and women, and most agencies take a ‘gender-blind’ approach to security. Most security officers are men, and many of them come from a military background. This gender-blind approach to security, however, leaves out a major issue.  Women also face another security threat that most men do not encounter – gender-based violence, namely sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Rape myths promote the false idea that women are only sexually assaulted by strangers. While this can happen, women are much more likely to be attacked by someone familiar to them – a co-worker, a driver, or a friend. Most of the women I interviewed shared stories about fending off sexual harassment by colleagues or actual cases of sexual assault in the field.

Rarely is their organization prepared to handle these issues. While there has been some action taken on “building safe organizations” – the focus has been preventing sexual exploitation of our beneficiaries by our staff. But there is not sufficient attention paid to sexual harassment of our staff by our staff or adequate support for staff that have been sexually assaulted. There is little information in the security manuals that I have reviewed about what medical care a survivor may need or what rights a sexual assault survivor might have. Nor is there guidance on reporting to local authorities, human resources or guarantees of confidentiality. Responsible employers must be prepared to understand and deal with the fact that their employees might become victims of sexual assault [1] and should be prepared to support them. This means bringing the issue of sexual assault up in security trainings and sensitizing the trainers and security personnel on how to address the issue – but not by restricting women’s access to “dangerous areas” but by making sure female employees are informed of the dangers, provided with information on how to protect themselves, and given sensitive and adequate support by their organizations in case the worst happens.

[1] Global statistics show that 1 out of 3 women has experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault.

* From the chapter I wrote entitled “Sexual Assault: Preventing And Responding As An International Travelers in the book Personal Security: A Guide for International Travelers, by Tanya Spencer, ISBN: 9781466559448 commissioned and published by Taylor and Francis, LLC.

 

 

Spotlight: It’s time to change this “boys will be boys” culture

During the 16 Days of Action to End Gender-Based Violence in 2015, I was asked to conduct a session on gender-based violence for a group of UN humanitarian aid workers who had gathered for a week long training. I was given 90 minutes and was also asked to address Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by humanitarian aid workers. The session was nowhere near long enough to do either topic justice and as I only had about 20 minutes left in my time, I presented the Secretary General’s Bulletin on Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse and the 6 core commitments. After I finished my presentation, the room exploded on the point on mandatory reporting and the discussion around breaking the silence around this issue by reporting. REPORT? REPORT TO WHO?! WHAT WILL THEY DO? NOTHING!

The participants felt demoralized and angry about what they saw as the complete lack of accountability in the UN to address this issue. Forget trying to protect the most vulnerable in the world – the displaced and beneficiaries that we work for – what about having some prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse for ourselves? How can we do our job when we suffer from sexual abuse too?

A particularly outspoken participant challenged why we even report when we will most likely get fired for doing so and talked a lot about the lack of accountability of senior managers (she was speaking from personal experience – having been assaulted herself by her boss). She gave examples of people getting away with it in numerous stations she had been in and of whistleblowers being punished. Other workshop participants, both male and female, talked about how people get promoted or even moved on if the issue is brought up. Everyone had an example of sexual exploitation and abuse by an aid worker being ignored by their managers or even experiencing their manager doing the abuse. I myself have heard numerous stories throughout my career as an aid worker – in both NGOs and the UN*.

I offered up a spirited defense along the lines of “If you don’t break the silence and speak up on behalf of the vulnerable, the system will never change.” I tried to rally them that we must all advocate and act to change the system. I was able to give one example of places where people were fired. But in general, they are right. They don’t trust the system and they don’t even know what the reporting mechanisms are.

I reached out to a number of people I know who work on this issue to see what they thought. The general perspective was pretty bleak. The current system is so broken – so what is the point in even trying to report or set up systems?

With that attitude, its no wonder that we don’t see many systems in place and that no one reports. I asked for some positive examples of where reporting has worked so I  can try to encourage others to start taking this issue up and not feeling like they are alone and will lose their job if they report.

I got some very interesting responses:

“The lack of whistle blower protection is a major (and some may argue intentional) flaw in the Secretary General’s bulletin.”

“Unfortunately, no examples [of perpetrators being held accountable] come to mind.. I do recall that we did receive a similar training and had an explosion at the staff counselor over the same issue – this was about 5 years ago.. Nothing has changed – abusers are promoted to get ‘rid of the problem.'”

“The only time I reported something the Human Resources person informed me that the person I reported had many reports against him and that this had been recorded on his performance review with a recommendation to remove him but that the SG’s office (this was in Kofi Annan’s time) had over-ridden the recommendation and that the guy was promoted into the very senior position he was in when I reported him (for having a local girlfriend who was at most 16, using UN resources to shuttle her to/from school, harassing local female staff members among other things).”

“The lack of accountability starts from the performance appraisal system. Managers are so afraid of raising ‘behavioral issues’ because of the possibility of rebuttal and endless cases in internal tribunals that too often the method ‘out and up’ is applied. It has to be said also that SEA is difficult to prove, so most ‘cases’ will never reach the threshold to be accepted as such.”

What is going on? Why is it appropriate for male co-workers in the humanitarian aid sector -NGOs and the UN but it seems to be particularly egregious within the UN – to act like unenlightened stereotypes of men from half a century ago? People outside the industry are surprised when they hear that an organization that is affiliated with “do -gooders” actually struggles with sexual harassment inside.

The humanitarian aid world’s dirty little secret is getting less secret.

Sexual harassment in the humanitarian world is not a new issue. On the contrary, it is a problem that has been quietly discussed amongst the humanitarian community for years. If the UN and the rest of the humanitarian world cannot manage to deal with sexual harassment of employees, how can we possibly deal with the larger issue of sexual exploitation and abuse of our beneficiaries, the most vulnerable?

This is both a systematic and an individual agency problem. There have been a couple of events that lead me to believe that the time is right to push hard for reform.

• The Guardian’s “Secret Aid Worker” series and the “Fifty Shades of Aid” Facebook group (with over 4000 participants) have become places where aid workers and gender-based violence activists can publicly share some of the stories that are normally just passed along within missions after a few drinks. We’re turning a spotlight on the issue and finding that we’re not alone.
• Megan Nobert courageously came out and spoke about her sexual assault by a fellow aid worker and the UN’s refusal to do anything. This experience galvanized her to create a movement called Report the Abuse. While, there have been other campaigns and projects in the past that have addressed incidents of sexual violence in conflict zones (some of which have led to the development of sexual exploitation and abuse policies for humanitarian staff), these efforts have laid an essential foundation upon which this current campaign rests. This project is about also harassment, assault and other forms of gender-based violence, regardless of whether the incident is experienced by a local or expatriate employee, and regardless of the gender, class or position of the survivor. This project has launched a website, with a linked survey, which attempts to begin addressing these questions.
• The NGO Aids-Free World has revived attention on the horrific problem of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers*. Anders Kompass from OHCHR publicly fought being suspended for leaking a confidential report that documented the rape of young children by UN peacekeepers in Central African Republic. Aids-Free World is lead by Stephen Lewis, the former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, who is a very outspoken critic of the UN and they have a project called Code Blue that is focused on this.  They are calling for an independent body to investigate the UN since they can’t be trusted to do this themselves.

• On Saturday, December 5th, 2015, eighteen women working as humanitarian aid workers met together in Conakry, Guinea (one of my outspoken training participants was one of them). They called themselves “Women in Aid” and represent diverse nationalities, positions, fields, religions, ages. And, as they discovered during the course of their meeting, they all shared significant challenges as women in the humanitarian field. Everyone expressed having, at some moment in their career, been discriminated against, harassed, confronted with sexual violence in or around the workplace.  To find out whether or not these were 18 isolated cases and how many women in the humanitarian field have similar experiences and concerns – they launched a survey for women aid workers.
• Karin Landgren wrote a report called “The Lost Agenda: Gender Parity in Senior UN Appointments” that noted that the rhetoric of UN achievements has overshadowed the reality.  A list of senior officials indicates that the UN designates some 80-plus persons worldwide as undersecretaries-general  (USGs), and over 100 as assistant secretaries-general (ASGs).  Almost twenty years ago, the UN made a commitment to achieving gender parity in managerial and decision-making roles by the year 2000. This target was missed, so subsequent resolutions aimed for parity in “the very near future”, except for the category of Secretary-General’s Special Representatives and Special Envoys, which was to be gender-balanced by 2015. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that he has appointed more women to senior UN positions than ever. In 2011, he told a gathering that the UN’s top humanitarian official, high commissioner for human rights, head of management, top lawyer, and “even our top cop, are all women.”  Today in 2016, we’ve actually gone backwards. They are all men. Commitments to gender equality have become a joke.
• A group of senior gender advisors deployed within different agencies in the UN read Landgren’s article on the lack of gender parity in senior UN appointments and wrote a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki Moon asking him to act up on it.  There is a petition supporting this letter that you can also sign here.

So what are the linkages between all these things?

The lack of gender equality in the UN  including the lack of women in senior leadership positions is one factor that may be leading to sexual harassment of staff being ignored and swept under the carpet (although having women managers doesn’t guarantee action). This ‘boys club‘ allows a culture that ignores this issue to flourish. While reporting systems are set up in some places, very few people trust the system and are willing to report because there is very little action that actually takes place and the perpetrator is rarely punished. People are afraid that if they come forward they will be labeled ‘trouble maker’ and be fired.  The general perception is that the humanitarian aid world is a ‘boys club’ that protects the perpetrators. Victims and whistle blowers are pressured to drop their cases. Often the unbelievable lethargy of the bureaucracy stifles the investigation until it’s all been forgotten and the victim left to languish in a limbo. Sometimes the perpetrators are just transferred (remind you of the Catholic Church and the film Spotlight, anyone?

We must hold someone accountable – we cannot allow the system to sweep it under the carpet any longer. Changing the “boys must be boys” culture cannot be done by allowing the boys club to investigate themselves. There must be outside pressure and attention to force them to reform.  All of these issues are linked and we have to push for change now.

• Keep the spotlight on this issue. Start discussions! Ask your agency what the process is to address sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. Ask them to schedule a staff wide meeting to explain the procedures.
• Help document the scope of the problem. Participate in the surveys for “Women in Aid” (for women only) and “Report the Abuse” to document your experiences. Encourage others to do so as well.
• Call for the Secretary General to do something about changing this boys club culture. Sign the UN Gender Equality Petition and circulate it with others. Put this issue on the agenda for the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit.
• Financially support watchdog organizations who are keeping this issue on the agenda such as the Report the Abuse project (https://www.gofundme.com/c54tvwj8) and the Aids-Free World (http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Donate.aspx)
• Create a movement – Share your ideas to change this culture in the comments section.

Shine a spotlight on this dirty little secret and let’s change the culture together. In the words of Megan Nobert “Let’s create a humanitarian environment free from sexual harassment, discrimination, exploitation and abuse.” Break the silence and take action!

 

 

 

 

 

* In 2005, I wrote a report about sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers based on my travels through West Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti called “Must Boys be Boys: Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers“. It spoke about the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse by civilian personnel being harder to address and the culture of “hyper-masculinity” that encouraged these abuses.

 

Personal Thoughts on the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict (ESVC) Summit

Ministers “Upstairs”: Fringe Activists and Humanitarians “Downstairs”

This is a personal reflection by Sarah Martin about the ESVC Summit in June 2013. Thoughts expressed are only my own. 

While I have mostly worked on the “response” end of gender-based violence, first as an advocate with Refugees International, then as an advisor with MSF, and now as a consultant with NGOs and the UN, I have always been drawn to work on prevention and intrigued about working with militaries and police*. I joined the United Kingdom government’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative team after a call for “experts” in October 2012 and in March 2013, I was deployed as one of the first teams and joined five other “experts” to go to Libya to investigate sexual violence in the conflict. The trip itself was intense and very interesting as I was deployed with two lawyers, a policeman, and a psychologist and we met with a wide variety of government officials and civil society activists. Working with the legal and police side opened my eyes to their perspective on how they interact with survivors and documenting sexual violence as a crime.

When I deployed to Libya with PSVI, it seemed to me that DFiD and the Foreign Office weren’t really in step as we didn’t even meet with DFiD in London or Tripoli.  But since then, DFiD has been taking a keen interest in VAWG (rhymes with ‘fog’ according to them) and so, I was interested to go to this summit to see how the UK had integrated their preventing sexual violence work with their responding to survivors work. It still seems that we have a long way to go – Foreign Minister Hague’s zealous pursuit of an international law solution, while important, seems to be outweighing the very real needs of survivors who, in my experience, ask for income generation and livelihood programs as well as healthcare and psychosocial support. Generally, they have very little faith that their corrupt legal systems and police forces will ever protect them or serve up justice.

Beautiful marketing and logos all over the venue

On the first day, there was an undeniable buzz in the air – it felt like coming to a rock show or a “moment in history.” As I registered for the conference, I saw some familiar faces from the gender-based violence in emergencies work (including Jeanne Ward, Heidi Lehmann, Chen Reis, Erin Kenney, Mendy Marsh, Shanna Swiss, Claudia Garcia Moreno, Lizle Loots and others who have been fighting for this issue for years now) but mostly it was people and organizations I had never seen in my humanitarian work.

How many SV experts can you spot in this photo? I see 5!

On the panels listed in my agenda, there were very few people who actually do the work of talking to and supporting survivors. There were high level UN agency heads and big “names” and it was heavily heavily weighted to discussion on legal action (arguably the least effective and least in demand of our ‘multi-sectoral response’ for survivors).

Panel on Data Collection at ESVC Summit

I did attend one very good panel on data collection but the real issues that plague us in the field (how do you maintain neutrality and other humanitarian principles while working with survivors if you have mandatory reporting to governments or the security council or how do we deal with overzealous human rights data collection folks when trying to provide some physical and mental health support to traumatized survivors) were a drop in the bucket compared to the discussions that the human rights and service providers need to have with each other. It felt like a missed opportunity to bring the legal and medical sides together over the contentious issue of data collection.

Because many of the panels I wanted to see were held at the same time, I wasn’t able to make it down to the Fringe events. I have to admit, I also felt slightly put off by the name. To me – a “fringe” event means something alternative, not mainstream, something “avant-garde” or experimental and related closely to theatre and arts – The Edinburgh Fringe Festival springs to mind. It annoyed me that the NGOs and women’s activists were not at the main summit but relegated to the Fringe. There was a “marketplace” and theatre and photo exhibits – all things that I like but because they had been labeled “fringe” and were “open to the public” – they seemed to be not the point of the Summit. (This turned out to be a bad decision on my part that I regretted later.)

Nigerian Activists in awesome ESVC logo dresses on way to conference

I had scored a “Delegate” pass due to my work for PSVI and I wanted to be up with the “decision-makers” to see what was going on. The agenda for the delegates sessions was a closely guarded secret (or so it seemed seeing how many people I had to contact to get a version of it) and security was tight – many phalanxes of G4S security guards scanning our chests for the color coded ribbons that held my coveted “delegate” badge so I felt that I had better focus my time there.

FM Hague and “Dame” Angelina at the reception

That first night, I went to a private reception with the policemen, lawyers, and psychologists on the UK team of experts where we got to meet Angelina Jolie and William Hague in person. Drinks were plentiful, food was not, and some of our colleague’s work in Bosnia, Syria, and Mali was highlighted by name but our Libya team was sad to not be recognized – also none of these “team of experts” had been on any panels at all at this Expert summit.  Angelina was gracious and beautiful – we were all shy but interested in talking to her and she was surrounded by a group of admirers the whole time.

On Day 2, I noted in my facebook status update that I was

“starting to get disillusioned – If you are a person concerned about men and boys not being included in GBV work, it worked – I almost feel like we’re now more concerned about male survivors of violence than women nowadays – at least that’s what the rhetoric sounds like. But will these commitments mean much? We’ll see – can the UN and NGOs keep reminding them to make a strong commitment to funding survivors services and training police and judiciary? Not sure. Will it make a difference to CAP and Humanitarian funding? Or will everyone just publish more glossy books and force us to collect more data and keep hassling survivors to tell their story in a setting of no justice and retribution?”

A rather glum take on it.

Angelina looming over us as FM Hague looks on…

Perhaps it was influenced by the fact that I started the day off incredibly late for a meeting due to the security to get into the event and then sneaking into the VIP section of the summit sitting in the many empty seats reserved for UN and foreign dignitaries behind Angelina Jolie’s place. The paparazzi was ushered in to take photos of her and she was one of the few women sitting in the VIP section (besides me and my other “illegal colleagues”). I was blown away by Leymah Gbowee’s speech and she got more cheers than Angelina did. The speeches went downhill after the male ministers started coming up to stage to talk about this issue that they had just discovered. Maybe I’m being unfair to them but the only ministerial speech that resonated with me was when Jordan’s minister went off script and talked about religion. I’ve always admired Jordan’s commitment to peace and GBV since i worked with Queen Noor on the board with Refugees International and Prince Zeid on his comprehensive strategy to eliminate future sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping operations, known as the Zeid Report,

Lt Gnl Romeo Dallaire

I had an uptick in my positive energy when I spotted Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, a man I admire who once told me to “keep fighting – working on prevention of sexual violence by UN peacekeepers is really important!”*

The number of men tripled at the conference on the second day because this was the day for all the ministers. Why are all the GBV activists women and all the people in power men? Again on Facebook, I noted

“Maybe if we had a few more women in power, we wouldn’t need so many women activists.”

My low point came when I sat listening to the ministers from Afghanistan and South Sudan talk about the work their government was doing to protect GBV survivors – work that has been completely invisible to me when I visited their countries to work on gender-based violence response.

That day on twitter, I noted

“Its not helping on Twitter that some gun nuts have started tweeting under “#timetoact that what women need to protect themselves from rape in conflict is more guns and ammo.”

I was still reeling from the awful murders in Santa Barbara and the misogyny of the killer and the #notallmen and #yesallwomen debates. Soon the whole world will be shooting each other! Things were feeling rather desperate.

Art from the Fringe

So I decided to take a trip down to the Fringe. I immediately felt a bit better – down in NGO activism world again watching Womankind Worldwide,  Amnesty International and Oxfam and IRC telling us what the “women, peace, and security” agenda SHOULD mean. More lively – more doers, less talkers. That’s where I saw all my GBV colleagues that night as we gathered around a plate of leftover chocolate candies and discussed the summit. There were African women, Asian women, Latin American women and European and North American women of all ages and shapes and sizes down in the Fringe. There were men wearing buttons proclaiming themselves allies. There were earnest university students participating in a “hackathon” and young people job-hunting with idealistic excitement clinging to them. Protestors from Bangladesh posed for photos with tape across their mouth outside the Fringe opening – asylum seekers who were also rape survivors being forced out of the UK even though rape was rampant in the conflicts in their country were also present lobbying and talking about the problem in their country.  Angelina Jolie also seemed to be happier down in the Fringe and dragged Brad Pitt around to visit all the exhibits and buy a copy of the Vagina Monologues.

The Fringe!

So I sat in the final event of my summit listening to an activist from Nepal and an activist from Liberia talk. An amazing expert from IRC was talking about training and support. I felt overwhelmed with emotion. These were the women that inspire me and keep me going. They were tough talking, funny, and telling their truth. I mentioned my concerns about Legal-Medical issues. A Ph.D. student found me as I left the Fringe and we exchanged information as she wants to know more about the reality of offering medical certificates to rape survivors in places like Somalia, DRC, and Myanmar and how it impacts the service providers and what it does for women. I perked up. Maybe something solid was going to come out of this summit after all. And I left during the London sunset and headed off to my next gig – teaching 31 Saudi men and 2 women about gender and disaster response – feeling a bit better than I had the previous day.

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*In 2005, while at Refugees International, I wrote a report about sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers based on my travels through West Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti called “Must Boys be Boys: Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers“. I haven’t worked on that issue in almost 10 years but I still get emails from time to time about people interested in the issue. Right before the summit, I was contacted to see if I wanted to speak on the issue. I declined as I’m not current on these issues but I did decide to go to the sessions on peacekeeping at the Summit. I was sad to see that not much has changed in 10 years and no concrete solutions seem to be in place. Very very sad. 

GBV response in disasters makes the NY Times

 

There was an interesting article in the New York Times the other day that uncovers some of the major issues that those of us who work in GBV talk about frequently – how do you get GBV on the agenda in humanitarian response? Do you “mainstream it” or do you focus specifically on programs for girls and women? The article, Efforts to Help Filipino Women Falters, says U.N., outlined some of the problems that we face when we try to address GBV in emergencies. It’s a multi-sectoral problem and requires a multi-sectoral approach but is there any accountability when the issue is mainstreamed but the response of the various sectors is insufficient or non-existant? The article included a quote that identified the challenge of mainstreaming  –

” Some experts expressed skepticism about the agency’s approach, however. “When you talk about integrated protection, accountability to women and girls goes out the window,” said Heidi Lehmann, the director of the Women’s Protection and Empowerment unit of the International Rescue Committee. “That requires specialized, specific gender-based violence programming.” It is not realistic, she said, “to think that you can add a bullet point to the shelter guy’s job description.”

But does this mean you don’t add a bullet point to the shelter (or WASH) person’s job description?  Or what do you do when that bullet point is added but it doesn’t make a change on the ground? Speaking of shelter (and latrines- another favorite subject for GBV people), how is it that we are still building emergency evacuation shelters for disasters and conflict zones that don’t recognize the specific vulnerabilities of women and girls? Where is gender analysis in the Disaster Risk Reduction planning?

Please let The Cassandra Complexity know what you think. Any brief responses can be posted in the comments section but we also welcome longer responses which we may post on the blog in the next few weeks (see policies section for how to submit).

16 Days: Rogue Stats

by Chen Reis

As someone who works in the field of prevention of and response to sexual violence, I use data to advocate for more attention, more action, more resources and am always on the lookout for statistics that are both persuasive and based on sound methodology.  Every year, advocates and activists around the world time the release of fact sheets, infographics, and reports on violence against women to coincide with the 16 Days of Action. Unfortunately, every year, many of these repeat the following INCORRECT factoid about the impact of violence against women.  “Violence against women causes more death and disability among women aged 15-44 worldwide than cancer, war, malaria and traffic accidents combined.” This factioid, or some version of it, has been repeated in multiple reports including by  influential think-tanks,  in fact sheets and briefing papers produced for the UN  and popular campaigns  and even included in articles by magazines  notorious for rigorous fact checking.

This statement has often been wrongly attributed to the World Health Organization (WHO). When I worked for WHO, we would often send out corrections to those using this factoid, to indicate that it was wrong and that its source is not the WHO and yet the factoid persists. Is this a function of our Wikipedia world where we believe what we read without digging deeper to identify the primary source? Or is it simply that something repeated often enough as truth acquires that reputation?

More importantly, where did this factoid come from?  It likely first appeared in a March 1998 briefing by the Panos Institute. My WHO colleagues and I thought it was probably based on an inaccurate reading of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report published in 1996 or the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) in 1993, which includes the GBD data for 1990.  More recently I did a little more digging and I think it is based on a table (table 5) included in a discussion paper “Violence against Women: The Hidden Health Burden” authored by Lori Heise, Jaqueline Pitanguy, and Adrienne Germain for the World Bank in 1994. This paper extrapolates from and builds upon the analysis for the WDR 1993 and estimates that globally among women 15-44, 9.5 million Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) were lost to domestic violence & rape, as compared to 9.0 million for all cancers, 4.2 million for motor vehicle accidents, 2.7 million  for war, and 2.3 million for malaria.  The paper includes an appendix which clarifies the author’s approach to estimating the percentage of DALYs lost to women age 15 to 44 due to conditions that are attributable to domestic violence and rape. The exact methods for estimating these percentages are not specified in the paper but the authors indicate they are on file with World Bank staff.

20 years on, we now have a refined GBD methodology and more recent data from the GBD project, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the 2010 GBD data which are searchable online. In the 2010 report, intimate partner violence (IPV) is included as a risk factor (there are no specific data for rape). The current GBD estimates are that globally about 16.8 million lost DALYs are attributable to IPV as a risk factor for women for all ages.  For women of all ages, 37.8 million DALYs are attributable to Malaria, 80.6 million to cancer, and 20.9 million to transport injuries.

The 2010 GBD estimates are just one source of recent and reliable data on VAW. In 2013 there have been 2 major studies published on VAW. The first, a  report released earlier this year by WHO, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council ,found that  one out of every three women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual  violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence by a non-partner. Other key facts from the study: 30% of women worldwide experience violence perpetrated by husbands, boyfriends or other intimate partners and up to 38% of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners. A report released by Partners for Prevention earlier this year provided important multi-country comparative data for the Asia- Pacific region on men’s perpetration of violence against women.  We should be using these more recent data as the basis of our advocacy and awareness-raising.

Opponents of work on violence against women accuse anti-VAW activists of spreading misleading and exaggerated information. There are numerous websites aimed at challenging our work to prevent and respond to VAW. One of their key tactics is to highlight erroneous data used by anti-VAW advocates.  When we use data irresponsibly, we provide fodder for those seeking to undermine our work. As consumers and producers of information we have a duty to be responsible. We must examine the primary sources of the statistics we cite and make sure that we are using the most recent and accurate data available.

16 Days: Truth in a Time of Terror: Renewing our feminist resistance strategies

In  the first of a series of posts related to the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, Guest Blogger Dr. Vanessa Farr, Peace Activist and Feminist Freedom Fighter, reflects on the need to re-frame the debate and renew our efforts to end all forms of violence against women.

*note all page numbers following quotes in this post refer to  Judith Butler, 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York, Verso: pp. 1-18.

One of the most significant successes of the global feminist peace movement in the past twenty or so years has been to expose sexualized war violence and galvanise international actors, including the United Nations, to act decisively to prevent and respond to it. Inside the UN, the women, peace and security agenda (WPSA) kicked off by Security Council Resolution 1325 in October 2000 has set off the most sustained and productive site of analysis, policy-making, lobbying and resource-mobilisation on women’s issues since the preparation for and passage of CEDAW from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s. Under its purview, a steady number of SCRs has been passed whose intention is to safeguard women from the worst excess of contemporary warfare, in particular sexual torture and sexualised violence. The CEDAW Committee itself has just passed General Recommendation #30 to ensure that the two streams of the agenda – the full achievement of women’s human rights, by means of their protection and participation in all aspects of security decision-making – are fully aligned.

Yet feminist peace activists are claiming, as we go into this year’s 16 Days of Action, only the hollowest of victories: because in 2013 we seem to be just as far away from our goal of ‘ending war violence against women’ as we were in 1995 at the Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing which birthed the WPSA. Indeed, the third ‘P’ of our agenda, and the most important one of all, which is the goal to prevent women from suffering sexualised war violence at all, remains as elusive as ever. Women are not only still overwhelmingly unprotected from sexualised violence as a method of war, but the intensity and savagery of this violence seems to be increasing and may now even be seen by some armed groups as the most effective means to gain attention; its tenacity as the most egregious of crimes committed in war seems as strangling as ever; and efforts to end war violence against women through taking more punitive legal measures against any military actors who endorse it remain hopelessly ineffectual, slow, expensive and grueling for the survivors, while having no perceivable deterrent effect.

Are we at an impasse as a women’s movement? Can we engage differently with this apparently unyielding site of struggle and produce more effective results? And even more profoundly, what are our own self-limiting beliefs – what are we overlooking, or not properly articulating as we do our work?

In my efforts to think more deeply about these questions and to search out new frameworks for describing the problem that might allow us to move forward, I find myself looking anew at Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), a book that was written at around the same time as the WPSA was starting to take hold. In it, she articulates her response to the 9/11 attacks on New York City, questioning the endlessly aggressive US foreign policy that has been elaborated across the globe since that date, and calling for Americans to “take a different sort of responsibility for the global conditions of justice”, one not premised on a “cycle of revenge in the name of justice”, that moves beyond “seeking legal redress for wrongs done”. She suggests a stock-taking of how the world has become so cruelly mis-formed, “precisely in order to form it anew, and in the direction of non-violence” (17). Her questions are very much ours, as a feminist peace movement.

Butler’s central concern is to understand “accountability…apart from the claims of vengeance” (3). She challenges silences that seem impenetrable and carefully unveils the prejudicial, racist and orientalist/imperialist attitudes that enable the US to “position…[itself] exclusively as the sudden and indisputable victim of violence” to therefore authorise itself – unilaterally – “ to use limitless aggression against targets that may or not be related to the sources” of its suffering (4), and from this position, to ‘fight’ violence with even greater aggression. This response, she reveals, both springs from and entrenches non-egalitarian belief systems and reifies an essentially dehumanising perspective in which “those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife” can be brushed aside as irrelevant, while “those Americans who have been violently killed” are reframed “through nationalistic and familial framing devices” (12) as fully human, and thus fully able to be, and deserving of being, mourned either individually or collectively.

At the beginning of her book, Butler does not yet show how her thinking extends to an analysis of the gender dynamics of either the processes of dehumanising the ‘other’ or making them disappear. The story she starts off by interrogating is almost exclusively one of big men, whether they are Arabs or Americans, duking it out to decide who has a greater moral right to ‘claim grief’. In this regard, she offers a particularly striking analysis of exchanges between Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in which the former’s offer of relief assistance was rejected because he made it at the same time as he made a plea to the US to take “a more a balanced stand towards the Palestinian cause” and spoke what Butler observes as an “unutterable” (12-13) phrase about how the world continues to overlook the Israeli “slaughter” of Palestinians.

What struck me about Butler’s assessment is that it would be quite possible to substitute the analysis of ‘imperialism’ for one of ‘patriarchy’, the focus on ‘Arabs and Muslims’ (who also, of course, include women) for a concentration on ‘women’ alone, and the unsayable word ‘slaughter’ as it applies to the millions of women around the world who die through violence; and in so doing, to further expand the power of her analysis.

The ubiquity and apparent unassailability of the problem of ‘war rape’ and the ‘moral outrage’ that we can all feel about it happening has, it seems to me, actually had a de-politicising effect on our work as feminists opposing all forms of violence against women, wherever and whenever they happen. I’ve noticed how many officials in policy circles have begun to constitute what look like a valid set of reasons for never discussing the extraordinary levels of (often lethal) male violence against females around the world who are not in war zones. Thus it becomes possible for the UK government to launch a huge fund to ‘end war violence’ in foreign lands at exactly the same time as it dramatically reduces already poor funding for work with survivors of male violence at home and passes increasingly draconian anti-poor measures that expose already-struggling women to even more marginalisation and a higher than usual risk of violence, especially as their dependency on unreliable and aggressive partners deepens.

In some ways, then, the global high-level discourse against ‘war rape’ that has been brought about by the WPSA shares the same features of being based in prejudice and silencing as those mobilised in ‘fighting the war on terror’: only the suffering of some women matters, and then, only if it takes place in circumstances that the majority of (male-led) international observers decide constitutes a ‘war’. Within this logic, it becomes clearer that the international community continues to not successfully tackle sexual violations ‘in conflict’ because it refuses to try to eradicate the gruesome spectrum of violence on which all women everywhere, live – including in countries that can otherwise claim themselves to be living in something pretty close to ‘peace’. Why else has ‘ending war violence against women’ gained so much traction as a donor and policy focus when other public spending to support women fleeing domestic violence declines and violent public rhetoric and actions against outspoken women escalate, taking on frightening new shapes – such as the truly vicious forms of online trolling to which women leaders are routinely subject in ‘developed’ countries?

The answer, of course, is that it’s all happening because it is useful to the neo-liberal paradigm which argues that supplying ‘technocratic fixes’ to complex social problems is an effective way of solving them. War rape, then, has become yet another ‘logistical’ problem that ‘experts’ like me are called in to help ‘fix’ – as long as we focus only on the crime itself and not on the ‘unsayable’, the fact that men’s propensity to use gendered violence with impunity is the global injustice of our time. It’s possible because those in authority want us to see the violent ending of women’s lives in war time as somehow exceptional, whereas the terrorisation and slaughter of women by men at all other times is – well, it’s just an unfortunate by-product of men gaining access to guns and knives or using their fists to keep women in subordination. We do indeed live in a world in which some can, as Butler points out, come to a place where “radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only option for some” (16). But when it is men who, time and again, use the radical violence of intimate femicide as their ‘only’ option for dealing with interpersonal strife, their extremism is somehow, today in 2013, still unsayable; and in far too many circles, is still not seen as the worst form of terror happening in our world.

Butler very clearly warns us that the new wars of our time, whether they are ‘wars on terror’ or ‘wars on war rape’ do little to “offer another vision of the future than that which perpetuates violence in the name of denying it” (18). As we go into 2013’s Sixteen Days of Activism, let us indeed focus on militarisation and war rape:  but only in order to re-awaken our vision of a world that is safe for all women and girls, whatever the political conditions in which they may live.