Sexual Harassment in Humanitarian Agencies, Part 2

A continuing series of rants about sexual exploitation and abuse of power in the humanitarian world, submitted by a friend working at a large NGO - a friend who has requested anonymity, and asked to go by the nom de guerre 'Relief from Relief'.

To read the first part of the post on sexual harassment, see here.

Sure there’s lots of consensual sex. And there are plenty of humanitarian workers wondering what strings they need to pull to get into that setting because they haven’t seen anyone but an old German WatSan engineer for the past 9 months. (Nothing personal, old German WatSan engineers.)

Its not just lecherous men abusing helpless innocent girls on their first mission either. In headquarters, the rhetoric seems to be around training our national staff not to take girlfriends in the field with the racist overtones that African (and Asian and Latino) men can’t seem to keep it in their pants and must find wives while they are away from home.

Drivers in NGOs will tell you stories of both male and female Western (i.e. white) aid workers running around outside of bars with prostitutes and various unsavory types. Drivers see it all. At a gender-based violence training, I heard about all the male program managers running off to have sex with the prostitutes at the bars. Another friend told me about a guy who she had to share a house with bringing home different 15 year old girls every night and not knowing what or how to talk about it with him.

One coworker of mine was despairing because she had to deal with a female expatriate who was keen to have a mixed race baby so was sleeping with the drivers in Haiti. Another seemed to be trying to sleep her way through all the male national staff.

Women are also just as happy to solicit prostitutes as the men. Read Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures for a refreshingly candid look at this phenomenon. So everyone is sleeping with everyone else. And somewhere in there, people are being abused, pressured, and even raped.

Don’t rape your co-workers. It’s a pretty simple rule. None of us were drafted against our will into these organizations. Don’t want to deal with rules about your personal behavior? Don’t go to work there. Most corporations in the US have laws and policies designed to protect the secretary from the boss chasing her around the copy machine at the office Xmas party.

Yet working in a humanitarian agency is sometimes like joining the world’s biggest dating service. People hook up and break up at a breakneck speed in the field. At a work gathering one night, someone told an amusing story about a beloved coworker who when he was asked to implement the new code of conduct rules, he adamantly refused. “This is my sex!” he roared, “you can’t take away my sex from me!” Everyone laughed.