Last month, I discovered a 72-page UN report released in April by the PSEA [Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse] Network called the "Risk mitigation assessment report to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank." It included this:
According to the SEARO 2022 Index, Palestine ranked in the 20th position among the context with higher risks of SEA. Yet, the onset of the war has challenged the resilience of the network and a completely different context is unfolding with important emergent risks of sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers and related personnel....Food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, and acute aid dependency are highly engendered matters that further expose women and children to SGBV [sexual gender-based violence] and VAC [violence against children], including by Aid Workers.[H]umanitarian actors must scale up their PSEA and Safeguarding capacity to prevent an epidemic of SEA abuses committed by personnel related to humanitarian operations. This should be also seconded by programmatic actions to protect the most vulnerable from sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers but also other actors.
Several times it warned that there was sexual abuse by aid workers in Gaza, and even warned of a potential "epidemic."
There were two different places on the Internet where this report could be found. One was on the UNICEF website, and the other was on the website of the PSEA Network.
If you go to the UNICEF link today, you get a login screen. Only authorized UN workers can access the report that used to be available to the world.
And the PSEA link? The report can be found at the moment from a Google search, but it appears to be "orphaned" - I cannot find any reference to it from the PSEA webpages. This strongly indicates that it used to be visible on their webpages (for Google to index it) but no longer is. A site search looking for that report title comes up empty.
Another interesting finding is that the PSEA country dashboard map allows you to click on any country to see statistics - but when you click on "OPT" in the map, meaning the Palestinian territories, you get another login page instead of the summary page. That might be a glitch - the login page does not appear when you click on "Palestine" in the menu, and that data is from 2022. Still, it msakes one wonder why the Palestinian link behaves differently from all others on the map.
Since I first discovered UN reports mentioning aid worker sexual abuse in Gaza, including forcing women into prostitution to get food aid, the only news site to pick up the story has been The Jerusalem Post.
And now it appears that UNICEF and the PSEA Network are both trying to make it difficult for anyone else to see their April report that describes this problem.
That report also indicates that it is likely that the aid workers they are talking about are UNRWA workers. "The vast majority of aid
workers currently in the Gaza strip are Palestinians, particularly from UNRWA who prior to the war counted with
a work force of 13,000 employees" it says. This is not conclusive, but shouldn't this be more transparent?
Or does the world really not care about terrible things happening in Gaza unless they can blame Jews?
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