This was the scene in Haiti
after an earthquake leveled the city of Port-au-Prince in 2010.
More than 250,000 people died.
Countless others were injured or made homeless.
Bodies went uncollected on the streets
in one of the poorest countries on Earth.
Aid organizations from around the world poured in to help,
including the United Nations,
which already had a long-standing presence in the country.
Allegations of rape and sexual abuse
quickly surfaced against UN personnel.
I thought they were coming to provide security for real.
When they came, we now see that they came to rape people.
Any Haitian can tell you about
UN peacekeeper sexual exploitation of Haitian women and children
with almost no consequences.
Peacekeepers were abusing women and girls
and traded food or cash for sexual favors.
These allegations are not exclusive to Haiti.
From the Central African Republic to Bosnia,
United Nations staff and peacekeeping soldiers
have been accused of horrific acts of sexual exploitation on a mass scale,
and almost no one is ever held accountable.
They see a peacekeeper coming their way,
they think, “This is someone who’s going to help me.”
They don’t think, “I got to run. This is somebody who’s going to rape me.”
How did we get to a place where the people being sent to save lives
and rebuild societies
are committing the exact brutal acts that they are there to prevent?
Are you going to tell him who his father is?
I’ll tell him he’s a [UN peacekeeper]
but he won’t believe it.
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When the UN goes into conflict zones and disaster areas,
its staff operate with a different but similar legal immunity
to international diplomats.
This is meant to protect them from pressure
or threats of prosecution by local actors.
But it leads to an incredibly complex process
when trying to hold UN personnel to account for wrongdoing.
For 75 years,
the United Nations has had something called
the Convention on Privileges and Immunities.
And what that says is
when the UN personnel are accused of doing something even as egregious
as gang-raping the people they’re supposed to be protecting,
certainly before any trial can occur,
the UN itself has to give permission to that country
to proceed with normal legal processes.
Nearly 1,800 sexual abuse cases have been reported against UN staff
and peacekeepers over the last two decades,
yet only 67 Blue Helmets have officially been jailed.
And according to a PBS report, only one international civilian
has ever been sentenced to prison as of 2018,
with at least one other individual having been tried and convicted
for the rape of several women.
Didier Bourget was sentenced to nine years by a French judge in 2009.
By 2018, he was out and gave an interview to
about the ease with which UN staff can commit abuse.
How many children did you have sex with in Congo?
I would say about 20.
20, 25...
I didn’t count, but about that.
One basic problem is that few rich countries
contribute soldiers to UN forces.
Nowadays, they prefer sending money
and leave the peacekeeping to troops from developing nations,
some of whose militaries are actually under investigation
for human rights abuses themselves,
although western troops have also faced sexual abuse allegations
while on peacekeeping missions.
So an annual contract
from the United Nations to Burundi to provide peacekeepers
sustains this government’s military.
Burundi, which is a rogue country that has been accused of
all kinds of human rights abuses at home,
sends those same soldiers then
to the Central African Republic as peacekeepers
and expects them to behave.
They end up raping and sexually exploiting the local population,
and the government of Burundi does nothing.
It doesn't conduct investigations. It doesn't do its job.
This has become a way for developing nations
to help sustain their armed forces.
And because UN peacekeeping troops are only ever subject to
the courts-martial of their home countries,
crimes committed by these soldiers
are almost never adequately investigated,
let alone punished.
We have set a six-month timeframe.
If the allegations are extremely egregious,
then a three-month time frame has been put into place.
But again, we don’t hold all the cards.
So if a soldier from Country X is alleged to have committed a crime,
we as our own UN investigators
don’t always have access to that person
because that military may not want to give us that access.
It’s not just a case of the bad apple.
It’s actually a systemic issue.
The systemic conditions of the environments
into which peacekeepers are deployed,
the power dynamics between the United Nations
and humanitarian organizations
and the people they’ve been deployed to protect and serve.
But if anything, the issue of sexual abuse
seems to be even more widespread amongst the civilian personnel
who work for the UN.
In 2020, there were 165 allegations of exploitation and sexual abuse,
117 of which were committed by civilians.
The overwhelming majority of UN personnel
who commit what they call sexual exploitation and abuse
in countries around the world
are not soldiers, and they’re not police.
They are civilian personnel of the UN,
who are far more protected from any kind of police investigation
or court proceeding than any soldier is.
In 2017, Prashanti Tiwari was formerly employed by BVHA,
an organization contracted by a branch of the UN in India.
In an allegation resembling those made against Harvey Weinstein,
she reported having been groped
and offered career advancement in exchange for sexual favors
by a high-ranking UN official.
He openly offered me a permanent contract
to work with the UN if I gave in to his sexual demands.
In the elevator, he groped my breast.
Even today, it brings tremors to my entire body.
As soon as I launched this campaign with the Bihar police in India,
the entire UN system, I would call it,
came crashing down on me with all its might
to trivialize my entire allegation.
They were doing it to portray it as an employment issue
so that they could protect the perpetrator.
Sadly, the scourge of abuse of women and girls
and even boys and men
is a global one.
And the UN is no different.
It goes against everything we stand for.
The very small number of people
who’ve been engaging in this abhorrent behavior
tarnish the amazing work
that the hundreds of thousands of UN people do around the world.
The abuse reported can vary between outright violent rape
and so-called transactional sexual exploitation.
Transactional sex seems to be the most prevalent type of abuse
and exploitation perpetrated.
It’s cases where there is some negotiation
between victim, survivor, and perpetrator,
where there’s agency and consent.
The power imbalance between aid workers
and the desperately vulnerable people they are sent to help
creates the potential for the most brutal forms of exploitation.
They’re actually doing a whole range of non-security work,
like running refugee camps,
supporting distribution of food and humanitarian resources,
a particularly difficult and unregulated environment
which creates opportunities for people to abuse and exploit.
Often this involves UN staff trading
the very humanitarian supplies they have been sent to deliver
for sexual favors.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo,
a young girl, Phyla, 13-year-old,
had been raped by soldiers during the war
and, as a result, fell pregnant and was thrown out of her family
and walked to the refugee camp.
When she got there, she was alone.
She gave birth to a son.
She had no way to support herself at all.
And so every night, she climbed through the fence of
the United Nations peacekeepers’ base,
and she exchanged sex for a banana, a biscuit, sometimes a dollar.
And what she told the journalists was,
“What other option was there for me?
Who else would have looked after my son if that wasn’t what I did?”
Kathy Bolkovac is a former police officer
who joined a UN peacekeeping mission to post-war Bosnia in 1999.
She exposed a trafficking ring in which UN personnel were
transporting women and underage girls for sexual exploitation.
Then eventually saw a door at the top of the stairs.
We broke it in and found seven young women.
And at that time, I really connected and made the connection
that something very drastic and horrible was going on in Bosnia.
However, when she brought this information
to the UN contractors she was working for, they fired her.
No one was prosecuted,
but some of the UN contractors were forced to resign
and leave the country.
The story was eventually made into a Hollywood film.
I know what’s been happening to you.
Promise you can stop these men.
I promise.
Despite two decades, Hollywood attention,
and repeated promises from successive secretaries-general,
why hasn't this problem been fixed?
I pledge to work closely with member states
on structural, legal, and operational measures
to make zero tolerance a reality.
We are not going to tolerate that.
We’re not.
We're going to do everything we can to prevent this from happening.
Organizations often are afraid to be transparent and to be open
because they know that they will then come under scrutiny from the outside.
It’s not really about how others view them.
It’s about are they safeguarding beneficiaries from being abused
and exploited by members of their organization.
All too often,
it seems the internal procedures put in place to protect victims
and investigate crimes
are more designed to protect the UN’s reputation
than expose wrongdoing and punish perpetrators.
And when whistleblowers do come forward,
instead of being listened to and protected,
they can themselves be victimized and silenced.
This is what happened to Caroline Hunt-Matthes,
a former UN investigator who raised concerns over
a rape allegation of a Sri Lankan refugee against a UN aid worker
and was fired for it.
I was in litigation for 15 years in regards to this issue,
and I, in fact, won my case after ten years
and was happy to walk away.
It became actually the longest litigation in UN history.
There seems to be a perceived fear that exposing cases of abuse
will damage the UN’s reputation
and thus endanger the essential work that it does.
I think one of the risks when we’re talking about this
is that it can seem like we should just throw away peacekeeping
and humanitarian work because these abuses are perpetrated.
We need to use them as an opportunity to make the system stronger
so that that important work is done
because we can’t just leave some of the world’s most conflict-affected
and vulnerable populations to fend for themselves.
The organization is a security apparatus
designed to maintain the power of those that won the war.
And it simply did not think about the consequences of peacekeeping.
The UN is a vital force for good in the world.
It is the perception of cover-ups and systemic exploitation,
which, to be fair, is often justified,
that is doing the actual reputational damage.
I think that the world cannot live without it.
And it does indispensable and enormously important work
around the world,
just as Hollywood puts out great films,
despite the fact that it has a legacy of sexually abusing
and exploiting its mostly female actors.
The UN has to practice what it preaches,
and it will never achieve its goals, whether it’s world peace
or the end of discrimination against women.
It has to fix itself internally and move into the 21st century.
And there are some indications that the UN
may be taking steps towards reform.
In 2017,
Jane Connors became the first dedicated Victim’s Rights Advocate
within the organization.
You see women who’ve been exploited or abused
by personnel from the organization you work for.
You feel very, very upset.
You try to think of what can be done.
The Secretary-General finds this behavior repugnant.
I can do very little. We need to do much more.
And really to shift the balance
towards the rights and dignity of victims,
bearing in mind that the reputation of the organization
is often uppermost in people’s minds.
We ensure that the soldiers that come have been vetted,
which includes human rights violations, sexual abuse,
sexual exploitation.
We now publish in real time every allegation of sexual abuse.
It is a constant, constant work.
Constant focus on the victims,
constant focus on vetting, and constant focus on training.
But there are still desperately few examples of perpetrators
actually being prosecuted,
and only time will tell if this new initiative
is yet more reputation-shielding tokenism
or a real deal attempt at righting some of the horrific harms
that have been committed.