Don’t report
Back in headquarters, despite that the doctor I talked to considered I had escaped an attempt of rape, when filing the formal complaint I was informed I had to use the term “inappropriate behaviour”. I was told that, being an internal complaint, I couldn’t frame it as sexual violence.
Then, the director of Human Resources discouraged me of any further complaints against my colleague, insinuating that it would be detrimental for me given that this would imply a deeper investigation — “you would be exposed” — she stated. At the end, no consequences for him and no support for me, came out of my reporting effort.
I had previously reported every case of misconduct I observed when working as a humanitarian in remote war torn countries. I always thought that reporting would help to change things. However, every time I became the problem.
While working in Latin America I reported working place harassment from a male expatriate to a female local employee. She approached me very scared, she had reported the situation but it was getting out of hand. No measures to protect her were taken as our boss suffered from depression and wouldn’t deal with the matter. I addressed the deputy in the capital who judged me as unprofessional for not following the hierarchy, she wouldn’t hear that my boss (who eventually quit her position) wouldn’t take action. The situation ended when the harasser left the country suffering from burnout.
Later, working in Central Africa, I witnessed expatriates going to brothels — and with official cars although our contracts prohibited paying for sexual services — the sexual harassment of a friend and the severe alcoholism of a colleague. I reported to no avail. At one point we had a working-safety incident in which a local employee almost got injured while my expatriate colleague was dead drunk. When I addressed the issue with the deputy, she explained that nothing could be done as her boss was an alcoholic himself. When I arrived at headquarters, I reported to the Ombudsman. I was unimpressed by him, apart from clearly breaching confidentiality during our conversation he questioned me:
“Why do YOU see these things?”
In my last assignment, in Western Asia, I ended up in a small isolated office. My boss would leave the office every day in the afternoon to chew Qat (a stimulant plant based drug) and would not come back to the house until midnight. Meanwhile, I had to follow a 6 pm curfew due to the high risk security level linked to recent bombings and kidnappings — even one kidnapping affecting our organisation didn’t change his outings. When I was lucky other colleagues would be in the house, but more often than not it wasn’t the case. I would go for a walk as a menial distraction when there was still light and keeping in sight of our guards, until one day neighbors complained about my behaviour — a woman alone walking on the fields. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I requested to go back to the capital and I reported my superior’s behaviour. They changed my position to the capital for the remaining of my time in the country, my boss stayed put.
Eventually I learnt not to report officially, I learnt that humanitarian organisations are too busy with operational matters to fix internal issues. While navigating in a system that chose not to deal with internal sexual violence, my values and personality clashed with the institutional blindness, and finally it crashed me — I had better buried my head in the sand. My psychological burden got too heavy and I took a break from the humanitarian work.
