Introduction

In 2015, Martina Brostrom, a former staffer with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS (UNAIDS), lodged a sexual harassment complaint against Luiz Loures, former Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS. The organization then began to restructure her out of her job, eventually firing her and alleging that she had herself committed sexual and financial misconduct. After Brostrom went public, a series of internal, independent and legal investigations lasting more than seven years revealed the hidden system of impunity within UNAIDS (Farge, 2021). At the same time, Dr Maurizio Barbeschi, a senior World Health Organization official, was finally fired in 2023 for sexual conduct (after initially only being suspended) when allegations were made against him – some stretching back 20 years came – out in the media. Former colleagues and World Health Organization consultants described the culture within Dr Barbeschi's team as a ‘misogynistic pissing circle’, with his inappropriate behaviour long being an open secret (Newey and Lovett, 2023).

These stories are, unfortunately, not rare or confined to the United Nations. Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) are not new in the humanitarian sector: while the 2018 Oxfam Haiti SEA scandal drew vast international attention, known incidents and scandals predate it. That same year, revelations of sexual harassment inside Save the Children sparked the #AidToo movement, highlighting the widespread problem of sexual harassment, abuse and violence perpetrated against aid workers by their own colleagues (Gayle, 2018). In response, donors increased their scrutiny and agencies implemented a suite of safeguarding measures (as discussed by Sarah Martin in Chapter 1 and Asmita Naik and Jasmine- Kim Westendorf in Chapter 5 of this volume). Despite this flurry of activity, the widespread and systematic SEA perpetrated by humanitarian personnel during the 2018–20 Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed that there is still a long way to go (Mukundi and Flummerfelt, 2023). In this chapter, we examine the issue of SEA by aid workers both ‘externally’ (for example, against members of the population they purport to serve) and ‘internally’ (against their colleagues), which tend to be understood as entirely separate concerns.