UN peacekeepers buy sex with goods: Report
A draft report by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has found that UN peacekeepers commonly pay for sex with everything from dresses, jewelry, perfume, cellphones, televisions and other items in countries where they are deployed.
The report, dated May 15, says interviews done with hundreds of women in Haiti and Liberia found that the victims cited "hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items" as reasons for transactional sex.
A survey of 489 women aged 18 to 30 in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, showed that over a quarter of the city's women had engaged in transactional sex with UN peacekeepers, usually for money. When the peacekeepers refused to pay, some women in Haiti "withheld the badges of peacekeepers and threatened to reveal their infidelity via social media."
The OIOS draft report further noted that 480 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse were made between 2008 and 2013, and one-third of the cases targeting UN personnel involve children and teenagers.
It said missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Haiti, Sudan and South Sudan registered the highest numbers of sexual abuse cases.
"Evidence from two peacekeeping missions demonstrates that transactional sex is quite common but underreported in peacekeeping missions," the OIOS noted, adding that a drop in cases of sexual abuse from 127 in 2007 to 51 last year "is partly explained by underreporting."
The draft UN report comes in the wake of a recent report that troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea serving as UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly engaged in the sexual abuse of hungry refugee children at a center for internally-displaced people in the African country’s capital, Bangui, between December 2013 and June 2014.
The UN currently has more than 125,000 troops, police and civilians deployed in 16 missions around the world.
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