Reasons For Few Complaints
Two 2008 studies have pointed out that disaster survivors who have been sexually exploited (or abused) by aid workers often do not complain. Save the Children explains the lack of complaints thus:
- Children (and adults) are inadequately supported to speak out about abuse against them.
- The international community does not exercise strong-enough leadership or managerial courage on this issue.
- There is a lack of investment in child protection by governments and donors.
On 25 June 2008 the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International (HAP) released a report on sexual exploitation and abuse, "To complain or not to complain: still the question." This report includes details for three countries in which consultations were held. It concludes:
Sexual exploitation and abuse is a predictable result of a failure of accountability to beneficiaries of humanitarian aid. The single most important reason for this ‘humanitarian accountability deficit’ is the asymmetrical principal-agent relations that characterise most ‘humanitarian’ transactions, that puts the users of humanitarian assistance at a structural disadvantage in their relationship with humanitarian aid providers.
Read more about this topic: Sexual Exploitation And Abuse In Humanitarian Response
Famous quotes containing the words reasons for, reasons and/or complaints:
“Happy the man who has been able to know the reasons for things.”
—Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro] (70–19 B.C.)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man’s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)