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During the last decade reports of international personnel perpetrating acts of sexual exploitation and abuse against the very population in which they are mandated to protect are a disturbing outcome of some peace operations provided by the United Nations. Sexual exploitation and abuse have been a problem since the first peacekeeping operations in the beginning of 1990’s, however it was not until 2004 when the media reported disturbing acts of sexual abuse of children by French peacekeepers that the whole worlds eyes turned to these claims. This thesis will deal with a sensitive and relevant topic, sexual exploitation and abuse by United Nations peacekeepers. The purpose of this research is to understand and explain why United Nations peacekeepers are involved in the horrors which they seek to address.

Abuses and sexual misconduct have been present in the aid sector for decades. In 2013, a UN investigation declared sexual exploitation and abuse the most significant risk to UN peacekeeping missions. Nevertheless, the culture of impunity and hypocrisy still prevails in the aid sector. A recent report supports that one in three UN workers has been sexually harassed over the last two years. In the momentum of the #MeToo movement and of timely disclosures of various cases of sexual abuses and harassment in the international aid sector, people soon started to use the hashtag #AidToo on social media to highlight the prevalence of sexual harassment and misconduct within the industry. This study examines the major trends and the findings of an analysis conducted on the use of the hashtag #AidToo on Twitter over a ten-month period. As of the creation of the hashtag at the end of November 2017 and until the end of September 2018, over 13,000 tweets have used #AidToo in their content. Aid workers, journalists, NGOs, as well as news media compose the primary contributors of #AidToo tweets. Although limited to the political sphere and of limited reach, the movement has been sustainable and constant over its first year. Survivors and whistleblowers are the first to acknowledge that #AidToo has created a new safe space for discussion and has incited additional victims to speak up and share their experience. Aid organisations are now under constant scrunity, along with their values, integrity, and funding. However, the online campaign has mainly been a Northern conversation, and one can wonder if the use of the hashtag on Twitter failed to include the Global South and to give a voice to the actual victims of sexual exploitation and abuse. The #AidToo campaign represents a real and welcomed opportunity as a wake-up call for the aid sector, although it is too soon to observe the long-lasting impacts.

Throughout the past few decades, accusations of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers have emerged against the United Nations, ultimately proving to be true. This thesis investigates the UN’s own narrative surrounding sexual misconduct of its peacekeeping personnel, identifying the dominant frames present within UN response to these events. Investigating these frames is a vital contribution to research within SEA, as understanding every angle of an issue can lead to a more competent approach to eventual solutions. Press releases, reports, transcribed interviews, and policy documents are analyzed using framing analysis to do so. Three frames are suggested as reference points, with opportunity for new frames to present themselves during analysis of the material. Ultimately, the study proposes that four multiple frames are present within the UN discourse, however three are of distinct influence, and two are clearly dominant. Finally, the study comes to the conclusion that the UN frames sexual violence perpetrated by peacekeeper as a primarily systemic issue, with individual peacekeepers responsibility playing a secondary role. Further research is encouraged within the field of study, specifically in regards to the ways other actors within the peacekeeping context frame SEA.

Following paper examines how conflicting interests inside the UN organisation can be identified in the UN:s policy output regarding conflict-related violence (CRSV) and sexual exploitation and abuse by UN-personnel (SEA). The study applies former criticism against SEA, regarding nuance and an individualistic approach, on UN resolutions from both policy areas in a structured, focused comparisons. The purpose is to analyse if there are any differences regarding the framing of violence, its causes and where responsibility can be placed. Furthermore, the differences that are detected are then analysed and explained through a theoretical framework consisting of theories regarding framing and legitimating strategies. The analysis shows that resolutions regarding CRSV are more nuanced and connected to broader structures such as gender discrimination. Resolutions regarding SEA are more focused on the individual perpetrator. The differences identified in the comparison is then understood through the organisational interest of preserving legitimacy, where “means-end-decoupling” can be detected as a strategy used in SEA resolutions to legitimate the UN organisation.

In 2003 a proclamation of Zero Tolerance towards sexual exploitation and abuse was made by Secretary General of United Nations Kofi Annan. The policy have been around for 20 years and so has the scandals how come? To find out Bacchis (2009) What’s the problem represented to be? approach to policy analysis was chosen to find out what strategies was applied to manage zero tolerance. The identified strategies are a systemwide implementation of the principles of conduct, a victim centred approach including procedures for reporting, and finally an accountability framework. Identified silences are how to change an organisational culture of tolerance, how to restore confidence and how to manage mixed messages.

The purpose of the United Nations (UN) peace operations is to help states navigate a path towards stability and sustainable peace, yet sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by the peacekeepers and other personnel is often an unintended consequence of the missions. Though the UN has employed several victim-centred measures to address the issue, peacebuilding practices often employ a simplistic discourse about the victims that recognizes only certain type of ‘ideal’ victims. It risks disregarding the different conceptualisations of justice that victims have, along with their individual wants and needs. Leaning on van Dijk’s view on social power that deems institutions as locations producing dominant discourses and influencing people’s minds, it is crucial to study which discourses the UN engages with. Thus, through a methodological combination of critical discourse analysis and policy analysis, this study scrutinizes the discourses about the victims present in the resolutions and training materials that specifically apply a victim-centred approach. The findings indicate that the discourses entail characteristics of both ideal and complex political victim discourses, and that above all, the UN positions itself as the saviour of the victims. As this discourse is likely to continue reproducing power imbalances that place victims into a dependant position, this study emphasises a serious need for re-evaluation of the UN’s own discursive positioning.

This thesis explores the impact of Western military interventions on the occurrence and motivations of female suicide bombers in Iraq, by utilizing a single case study method combined with Structured, Focused Comparison. The thesis examined the period before-and-after the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq. The reserach identifies a significant increase in the use of female suicide bombers post-intervention, correlating this rise with intensified grievances, personal loss, and cases of sexual exploitation and abuse. The research analyzes the strategic, social and individual logics influencing these motivations. Findings suggest that Western military interventions exacerbate conditions leading to the radicalization and mobilization of women as suicide bombers, driven by a combination of personal trauma, societal pressure, and strategic aims to coerce foreign powers.

This paper investigates the relationship between gender equality and SEA allegations in peacekeeping missions with the help of structural focused questions aiming to answer; How does UN troop-contributing countries' gender equality affect their SEA allegations during peacekeeping missions? The paper focuses on the troop-contributing countries, selected through Mill’s Method of Difference, Morocco and Bangladesh in the missions MONUSCO and MINUSCA. The results indicate a significance with the hypothesis as the empirical information shows fewer SEA allegations in both missions by Bangladesh, who also appear to have made more domestic attempts to create structural changes for gender equal standards.

Protecting human rights is the core mission of the UN, yet peacekeepers commit human rights violations, including sexual violence, during missions. While the literature has focused on qualitative research to assess the factors that make sexual exploitation and abuse occur, few studies have looked at it from a quantitative approach, and none have looked at the effect of the mission mandate. Doing so allows me to gain a more rigorous and evidence-based understanding of the relationship between the variables. The data comes from the Conduct of UN Field Missions from 2010 until 2019, focusing only on UN peace missions. Using this dataset, this study will be the first statistical study to explore the effects of a specific mission mandate, peace enforcement, on the occurrence of sexual violence committed by peacekeepers. The logistic regression finds support that the number of military troops deployed increases the odds of observing SEA reports. With the ZINB model, I find marginal evidence that missions with peace enforcement mandates are associated with increased SEA reports. Both predictor variables are significant when including a lead variable for the number of reports. While these results show some patterns in the data, further research is needed to investigate the relationships deeper.