Major Western NGOs, including UNICEF and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), are blocking the public release of files sent to the EU Commission regarding an investigation into the abuse of women and children in the Congo in a sex-for-work scandal, EUobserver reports.
The agencies are being scrutinised for the actions of their employees, currently in the Congo responding to the 2018/2020 Ebola outbreak, and are preventing the release of files for fear of jeopardising their funding.
Aid workers are accused of a litany of sex crimes, including soliciting vulnerable women in exchange for temporary work contracts. Among the crimes being investigated is the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl who was subsequently forced to get an abortion, alongside twenty-six other women and children impregnated by aid workers in total.
The revelations surfaced in 2020 after fifty-one women came forward with stories of how women secured short-term contracts with NGOs based on sexual favours. At least 80 World Health Organisation (WHO) employees and affiliates are linked to the scandal, with Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres staff also implicated.
The Christian aid agency World Vision Network cited a risk to “commercial interests” as a reason to stonewall the release of information, with UNICEF invoking the organisation’s “privileges and immunities.” The pro-migration IOM also referenced funding concerns and added that releasing details could threaten victims and staff.
The EU Commission has 25 sensitive documents relating to the scandal and is a major financial contributor to many of the agencies involved.
This is the latest news in a long line of similar revelations involving aid workers leveraging their positions for sex. A similar scandal engulfed Oxfam in 2018 over the sexual misdeeds of its employees in Haiti.
The most heavily implicated NGO is the WHO which is still active in the Congo to implement COVID vaccination. The WHOhas responded to allegations with an action plan to formalise the code of conduct for staff.
A relative blindspot when it comes to media coverage, Western NGOs are long known to be involved in unethical behaviour under the guise of humanitarianism in the developing world.
Portrayed as morally upstanding and often playing salient roles in Europe’s COVID and asylum response, this latest attempt to frustrate the release of damning information about the abuse of women and children should dim the halos that some NGOs have placed on themselves.
