Aid predators: What ex-UN worker’s sentencing means for international NGOs
TRT World
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Washington, DC, USA
$500 - $1000 / Day
Request QuoteMost recently based in Afghanistan, I've been a humanitarian and academic for nearly thirty years serving as a gender and humanitarian expert for UNDP, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNV, UN Women and OCHA. I was UNHCR’s first GBV Advisor in Chad/Darfur, UNHCR’s Regional GBV Advisor in the Balkans and lead evaluator for UN Women peacebuilding program in Kyrgyzstan. I conducted OCHA’s agency-wide gender evaluation and lead GBV evaluator for UNFPA in Uganda. I’m a member of UN’s new Anti-Trafficking in Humanitarian Settings Taskforce, the UN’s Protection from Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (PSEA) Task Team, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (ISAC) Gender Based Violence (GBV) Area of Responsibility (AoR) under the Protection Cluster and IASC’s Sub-Working Group on Gender and Humanitarian Action. My Ph.D. is from London School of Economics’ Gender Institute and my dissertation was published by Routledge - Gendering Ethnicity: Implications for Democracy Assistance. Other publications include Conflict, Gender, Ethnicity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Hunting for Women: Bride-Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and recently published Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape. Additional publications are on my website www.LoriHandrahan.com.
TRT World
It's a perennial problem. War occurs. Women are raped. Reporters flood the war zone looking for raped women. War subsides. The international community and the journalists lose interest in women's issues. Women continue to be raped. No one cares.
Sexual abuse in the humanitarian sector has become widespread and systemic with little recognition of the problem. It's time to lift the lid. It has been a year of one crisis after another for humanitarian agencies as reports have cascaded into the media detailing sexual abuse and exploitation by employees from Oxfam to UN Women.
Six respected organizations have documented evidence of Section (e) committed by Assad’s state military against its own child-civilian population. Syria qualifying as genocide under Section (e) distinguishes Assad’s regime from other modern mass atrocities, such as Bosnia or Rwanda. Children are often collateral damage but Assad’s deliberately targeting children makes Syria “disturbingly unique.”
In 1995 an estimated 20,000 unarmed children, babies and adults were brutally tortured and shot by the Serbian military into mass graves in, and around, the UN promised “safe area” of Srebrenica and Zepa. One-hundred and seventeen unarmed UN Peacekeepers were also murdered by the Serbian military.
President Obama honed an image as a “foreign policy president.” He has been adored abroad. At home, he championed human rights and humanitarian responsibility. With a genocide under way in Syria, that the president has refused to prevent, his foreign policy is exposed as a dangerous hypocrisy; one damaging America’s domestic security and global leadership. Here’s why.
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