From Haiti to Syria, Bosnia to Sierra Leone, sexual exploitation and abuse have occurred in the UN and broader aid sector. It’s been called “the last safe haven for perpetrators”.
As a result, there are countless children born from these encounters.
Now a team is using DNA technology to track down the perpetrators and send a warning to those in the field.
Andrew MacLeod is a former high-level UN official, a visiting professor at King’s College London and the co-founder of the anti-child abuse charity Hear Their Cries.
MacLeod cites a 2019 study, where researchers interviewed around 2,500 women in Haiti and identified 265 children born of UN peacekeepers – or around 10 per cent of the group.
“And that’s just the [UN’s] military side, not including the aid side.”
These stories are slowly being heard but advocates like MacLeod say this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Anywhere there’s an imbalance of power between men and women, men abuse women,” he says.
“And in the world today, there is no greater imbalance of power than that between aid worker and aid beneficiary. The aid worker will control food, water and shelter that the aid beneficiary needs that day to keep their family alive.”
MacLeod claims some people have been exploiting this imbalance.
“[For example], a small number of predators now target the aid industry to get employment with children’s charities to get access to children,” he says.
“And there is no effective mechanism that is put in place for prevention, detection and punishment of those predators. They get away with it. So they keep coming.”
MacLeod is part of a project using DNA to find the men that fathered these children, no matter where they have ended up in the world.
“If you isolate the paternal side of the DNA, and then compare that to commercial databases, like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, and law enforcement databases, you might not find the father, but you do find the extended family members,” he says.
“You can triangulate that backwards, until you find the father.”
n a pilot project, MacLeod and his team conducted six tests with children in the Philippines, whose fathers were sex tourists or aid workers.
“We found five fathers – two Australian, one Canadian, one British, one American. And we’re in various stages of law enforcement now against [some of] those fathers.”MacLeod stresses that his team’s work is only done with the “full, prior, informed consent” of the women and children, who play a big role.
MacLeod stresses that his team’s work is only done with the “full, prior, informed consent” of the women and children, who play a big role.
Source: These DNA detectives are hunting down abusers in the UN and aid sector – ABC News