"What's So Terrible about Rape?" and Other Attitudes at the United Nations

If anyone cares to remember what attitudes toward women were like a quarter of a century ago, take a consulting job with the United Nations (UN). It is like going back twenty-five years in time. Indeed, I was not prepared for the time warp I would enter when in 1993 a United Nations humanitarian agency asked me to review how policies and programs for refugee women were being carried out in the field. I had been briefed about the harmful "cultural" practices of refugee women (feeding their daughters less and keeping them out of school, for example) but not about the out-of-date attitudes of male members of the agency's staff, which made implementation of the policies on equitable treatment of women at times impossible.

It should be underscored that refugee and internally displaced women are among the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in the world. Having been forced from their homes by armed conflict and serious human rights abuses, and in some cases with nothing but the clothes on their back, they turn to the United Nations for support. How the staff responds to their needs for protection and assistance in large measure determines their well-being and sometimes even their survival.

I saw this first hand at the Kenya-Somali border, where scores of Somali refugee women were being raped in camps run by United Nations agencies. When night fell, Somali bandits with knives and spears would come over the border to raid the camps, targeting particular women--because they were from a certain clan, were known to have money or possessions, or simply because they had no one to protect them. Other women were raped while they searched for firewood outside the camp. While the high number of rapes was well known (the agency responsible had even appointed a rape counselor), the attitudes of international staff toward rape itself created a problem.

"What's so terrible about rape?" someone asked me, "you don't die from it." Another considered rape to be a "regular" part of refugee life. It was that acceptance of rape as a regrettable but unavoidable part of refugee life that explained to me why so little was being done by the staff to prevent the rapes. Although the situation dramatically changed once the case gained publicity, when I visited the camp there were no thorn branches around the camp to deter the bandits, no alternatives to women going to collect firewood alone, no refugee committee focused on safety for the women. Further reflecting this general indifference was the unwarranted delay in authorizing transfer out of the camp of thirty targeted women whom the rape counselor considered at risk. The authorization sat on a desk for ten days before being signed even though the women lay awake each night in fear. Nor did one of the field workers see why he should replace the cooking pot and blanket stolen from one of the raped women during the attack. Doing so, he said, would encourage other women to "pretend" to be raped in order to get new materials. We had to appeal to him to help restore some semblance of dignity to this woman who had been attacked, beaten, and robbed in front of her children.

Insensitivity and in some instances outright blindness to women's needs were also quite glaring in the health field. Clinics run by the United Nations often had only male doctors and male community health workers on hand, even though the refugee women clearly did not feel comfortable with, and in some cases would not permit examinations by, the male personnel. The "hand behind the screen" was how some of the Afghan refugee women described the Pakistani male doctor sent to examine them--he could neither directly look at them nor touch much of their bodies. In Ethiopia, two Somali refugee women ran...