History of BSO

The scandal and the response

The West African ‘scandal’ and its aftermath

International efforts to respond to sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers began in 2002, after consultants to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Save the Children UK reported extensive sexual exploitation of refugee women and girls in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Agency workers were among the primary exploiters. It was alleged that the workers used the humanitarian assistance as a tool to exploit refugees and displaced people, extorting sex in return for money, food, plastic sheeting, etc.

When the consultants’ report became public in 2002, it led to an international outcry. The UN and humanitarian agencies appeared slow to respond and there were sizable gaps in the systems needed to protect women and children from abuse. It is perhaps indicative of this that the consultants found that no agency had actually received a complaint despite the large number of cases reported informally to them.

High-level action

Underlying structural issues were taken up by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Protection from Sexual Abuse and Exploitation in Humanitarian Crisis. Comprising UN agencies and NGOs, the Task Force found, amongst other things, an absence of common codes of conduct governing the behavior of individual humanitarian workers, and a lack of systems for ensuring accountability of organizations and individual workers to beneficiaries.

The Task Forfce outlined six ‘core principles’ of behavior for humanitarian staff and recommended that agencies establish mechanisms for reporting and investigating complaints, coordinate awareness-raising for beneficiary communities and enhance beneficiary participation in decision-making. These principles and recommendations were incorporated into Bulletin released by the Secretary General of the United Nations and have been the bedrock of international action on effective prevention and response systems ever since.

Read the Report of the IASC Task Force.

Read the Secretary General's Bulletin, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (ST/SGB/2003/13).

Access resources on preventing and responding to sexual exploitation and abuse by humanitarian workers.

NGOs initiatives - Building Safer Organisations

Such international high-level initiatives were successful, in so far as many agencies introduced codes of conduct based on the Secretary General’s Bulletin. However, relatively few NGOs (especially at the national and local level) had the capacity to implement procedures for seeking out or investigating complaints. BSO was launched in September 2004 as an inter-agency project to train staff of humanitarian organisations to investigate complaints and introduce safe and accessible mechanisms for complaining.

Initially housed with the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, BSO moved to HAP permanently in April 2007 and has since merged with HAP’s Complaints Handling Unit.