Medicines and food? Only against sex! Blue helmets exploit women
Their mission is honorable, but the reality is evidently different: according to a new UN study, UN peacekeepers are said to have sexually exploited more than 200 women in Haiti. The victims said they had agreed to get food, medicines, clothes or household goods in return. Around a third of suspected sexual assaults alleged to have occurred to minors.
This reports the Deutschlandfunk with reference to a present to the news agency AP interim report of the United Nations. It deals with the question of the extent to which peacekeepers deal with the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation. Currently, around 125,000 UN Blue Helmets are in use worldwide. The final version of the document will be published in June.
Support for victims is seriously inadequate.
Support for victims is "seriously inadequate," according to the report, which investigators interviewed 231 women in Haiti a year ago who said they had sexual relations with UN peacekeepers. "For rural women hunger, the lack of accommodation, baby care items, medicines and household items were regularly cited as triggering needs," quotes Deutschlandfunk from the report. In contrast, women in cities and suburbs would have received cell phones, laptops, perfumes and money, among other things.
In the event that the soldiers did not want to pay, the women would have kept the badges of the Blue Helmets and threatened to publish the sexual contact in social networks. How many soldiers were involved is not clear. Equally unclear in some cases, however, was whether it was consensual sex or exploitation.
According to the latest report by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the number of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation against members of all UN peacekeeping missions was 51 in 2014, bringing the total to 66 in 2013. The current report makes it clear again that the exploitation of women by blue helmet soldiers in the mission is still reported too infrequently, it was said.
