Various personnel of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force are accused of committing large-scale sexual abuse, frequently of children, and related crimes while on duty.
[1][2] An Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed in 2017 that "at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers" from the UN were involved in a child sex ring in Haiti over a 10-year period and that although 114 of them were sent home, none were charged for the crimes.
Few of the accusees in mass-scale events are ever charged with any crime, in significant part due to the large number of accused peacekeepers from countries lacking advanced legal systems or robust sexual abuse legislation.
[10][11] In addition to those countries mentioned in the previous section, reporters and internal observers witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia, Mozambique, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo after UN peacekeeping forces moved in.
[13] The legacy of UNTAC is still experienced within Cambodian society by many of the children born to abuse victims who feel like outsiders in their own country due to their frequently darker skin tone and obvious mixed-race parentage.
After an internal UN report incriminated the peacekeepers, some remained in the country while 114 were sent back to Sri Lanka, but none served any jail time, as it would've been the responsibility of their local judicial system to bring forth and prosecute any charges.
Amnesty International said that some victims of forced prostitution were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion" and kept in terrible conditions as slaves by their "owners", sometimes in darkened rooms from which they were unable to leave.
Internal Canadian government documents from 2016 suggest that the UN has "glaring gaps" in its procedures for tracking and prosecuting peacekeepers accused of exploitation and sexual abuse, and that only a small fraction of cases are likely to be reported.
The Toronto Star obtained the memo, which contains the claim that "Events in [the Central African Republic] and the data coming out of the [Secretary General's 2016] annual report point to a system that is lacking in efficiency, transparency and coherency."
In addition, as we continue to unpack how member states themselves can better approach this issue from pre-deployment training to punishing perpetrators to victims’ assistance, there must also be a greater willingness by individual countries to examine and address internal shortfalls.
[6][22][23] In 2010, a film, The Whistleblower, directed by Larysa Kondracki, aired on the affair, based on Nebraskan police officer Kathryn Bolkovac,[24] who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and outed the U.N. for covering up the sex scandal.