It Isn't Just Haiti

UN Peacekeepers Leave a Trail of Abandoned Babies Across the World

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The explosive study by Sabine Lee and Susan Bartels on peacekeeper-fathered children in Haiti was broken this week by The Times of London and quickly garnered headlines across the world. The study focused on girls and women who were impregnated by soldiers serving with the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which operated from 2004 to 2017.

Unresolved paternity claims stemming from sexual exploitation and abuse committed by UN peacekeepers are an endemic problem. Despite the UN’s claim that the situation is improving, its own statistics belie that assertion. The UN Conduct and Discipline website, which contains public information on sexual exploitation and abuse allegations against peacekeepers, just posted new information about 13 cases. Ten featured paternity claims. A Gabonese, a Congolese, and eight Cameroonian peacekeepers, all serving in the UN mission in the Central African Republic, were accused of having transactional sex with local adults who reported that they were impregnated.

Those ten cases are merely the ones that the UN has most recently posted. The website also shows that none of the countries involved have fulfilled the terms of their UN contracts by holding their own troops to account. Noncompliance doesn’t deter the United Nations from signing new, lucrative peacekeeping contracts with Cameroon and other deadbeat countries, though.

As Lee and Bartels note in their study, women and girls who agreed to "transactional sex" with peacekeepers typically received a small amount of money or food, highlighting the extreme poverty that leads to these sexual encounters. "They had sex with the girls not even for money, it's just for food, for one meal," said a male community member in Port Salut who was interviewed for the study.

The UN’s statement in this week’s story in The New York Times—the now-rote claim that combating sexual exploitation and abuse committed by peacekeepers is a “top priority” of Secretary General António Guterres—will do nothing to feed, clothe, or shelter the peacekeepers’ children.

Haiti is just one small part of a much, much larger problem.

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