The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Monday issued a report on its effort to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against its staffers around the world.
The report grimly acknowledged that the number of allegations is still increasing, although W.H.O. officials were cautiously optimistic that the numbers are going up because victims feel more comfortable with reporting abuses.
“For the past two years, W.H.O. has intensified our work to prevent and respond to any form of sexual misconduct, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment,” said the organization’s director of Prevention and Response to Sexual misconduct (PRS), Gaya Gamhewage.
“However, the numbers are still going up for the simple reason, I believe, that all the cases have not surfaced yet,” she continued. “So, the numbers will keep going up for some time. But this does not mean that what we are doing is not having any effect. In fact, what we are doing is surfacing this issue, as well.”
“W.H.O. is working on preventing and responding to sexual misconduct related to its own workforce — our staff, our contractors, our implementing partners,” she added.
The crackdown on abuse Gamhewage described was launched in May 2021, when W.H.O. was rocked by allegations of widespread sexual abuse by the personnel it deployed to combat the 2018-2020 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
A number of high-ranking W.H.O. officials were caught lying to conceal the extent of the abuse, much of which was perpetrated by doctors who told Congolese women they could only get desperately needed jobs with W.H.O. if they offered sexual favors in return. A shocking number of women came forward to say they had become pregnant after being forced to have sex with W.H.O. employees.
Similar abuses were reported at other United Nations agencies, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNICEF, the U.N. health charity for children.
Whistleblowers were told to keep quiet because top management felt containing the Ebola outbreak was more important than investigating sexual abuse claims and firing abusive doctors. When the story finally broke, horrified W.H.O. donors demanded a more aggressive system for investigating and prosecuting complaints, including better protection for accusers and whistleblowers. W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded by promising a “profound transformation” of his organization’s “structures and culture.”
The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (IOS) reported investigating 287 allegations of sexual abuse by W.H.O. personnel worldwide over the past year. Some of the new complaints concerned behavior that occurred during the 2018-2020 Ebola mission to the DRC. Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean were the regions with the highest number of complaints filed.
The IOS said “several” of the perpetrators have already been dismissed, and 25 alleged sex offenders have been loaded into the U.N. “Clear Check” database, which would nominally prevent them from ever being hired by a U.N. agency again.
Gamhewage optimistically suggested the rising number of sexual abuse reports means her special investigative unit, which was established after the 2021 scandal, is doing its job.
“With the work we are doing, we are getting complaints and concerns raised. So, I think we should not expect numbers to go down any time soon. What we want is to surface all of the numbers, so Lisa and her team can assess which ones need to be investigated,” she said, referring to IOS Director Lisa McClennon.
“What we are looking for is zero tolerance, not for zero cases,” Gamhewage said.
Critics say W.H.O. remains more interested in covering up the extent of abuses and protecting top officials than making the big changes promised by Director-General Tedros.
In February, two of the experts appointed to a W.H.O. panel on sexual abuse said the “restrictive approach” employed by the organization to investigate misconduct was an “absurdity.” Some of the victims said they have heard nothing from W.H.O. more than four years after filing their complaints.
“We are not satisfied. The ‘zero tolerance policy’ does not mean engaging in subterfuge to make sure no one is responsible for sexual abuse and exploitation,” said panel member Aichatou Mindaoudou, a former Nigerian government minister and human rights activist.
Gamhewage on Monday said that under the reforms implemented by her unit, “everyone who works with or for WHO, including senior leadership all the way up to the Director General, now has very distinct accountabilities for both preventing and responding to sexual misconduct.”
Gamhewage said her PRS division plans to host a worldwide “stakeholder review” in late November to “further calibrate the actions we need to take, going into year two” of the crusade against sexual abuse.
“The global event will focus on acknowledging and identifying best practices for addressing sexual misconduct across the system and looking at the joint challenges that we all continue to face,” she said.
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