Our State / Ourselves: Discourses on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Police Peacekeeping

ABSTRACT

This paper presents findings from interview research with Canadian police officers deployed to the UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti between 2004 and 2017. Focusing on the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), we present three discourses that emerge from this research and their reasoning about the problem of SEA. These discourses suggest that (1) other contributing countries are responsible for the problem of SEA; (2) the UN fails to sanction SEA in practice, while Canada does sanction SEA; and (3) Haitians and Haitian culture undermines efforts to reduce SEA. Using tools of critical discourse analysis, we show how discourses on SEA reinforce a mentality of self-exemption that treats sexual misconduct as a problem in which Canada and Canadians are largely innocent, while the UN, other contributing countries, and Haitians themselves, bear much more fault. We argue that these discourses reproduce a narrative of innocence and contribute to Canada’s national mythology as a do-gooder nation that is largely exempt from perpetrating SEA, despite evidence to the contrary.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacekeeping
• sexual exploitation and abuse
• United Nations
• international policing
• Canada

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Access to Information and Privacy document, 2019. Others have documented that police officers have avoided hearings on allegations of SEA by retiring (Shingler 2016).

2 Canada is party to the G7 Whistler Declaration (2018).

3 United Nations Secretary-General Report. A Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations [Zeid Report].

4 Interview research was conducted with the approval of the Behavioural Research Ethics Board at the University of Saskatchewan, Application ID: 2194.

5 There were 700 reports of sexual exploitation and abuse received by the UN between January 2015 and February 2024. 134 allegations (or 19.14%) were against police officers. Police here include members of formed police units, United Nations police officers, and other government-provided personnel, such as justice and corrections personnel (United Nations 2024).

6 Pascutto notes that although it is believed that SEA is significantly underreported, the UN’s conduct and Discipline Unit reported that there were, there are 1759 allegations of SEA in UN peacekeeping missions between 2003 and 2017 with the majority of these allegations coming from Haiti and the DRC.

7 Greenburg builds on Doreen Massey’s argument that describes the ways in which ‘different places [are] … interpreted as different stages in a single temporal development’ (Massey 2005, 68). As Greenburg points out, the ‘temporal convening of space’ by peacekeepers ‘dismissed Haitian’s own history and contributes to their infantalization’ (Greenburg 2013, 97) laying the familiar groundwork for interventions to be civilizational in essence, focused on the education and reform of host societies, or claims that these efforts are practically impossible.

8 van Hauwermeiren resigned from his position following these revelations. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/13/oxfam-disgraced-haiti-official-liberia-post-roland-van-hauwermeiren.

9 Meanwhile, local men are constructed as ignorant, highly sexed, unable to care for their women; macho yet incapable (Jennings 2019, 33). As a group, locals are regarded as untrustworthy, opportunistic, and duplicitous. All of these have misogynistic components.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Colleen Bell

Colleen Bell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.

Nikaela Lange

Nikaela Lange is an MA Candidate in the Department of Political Science at McGill University.

Christina McRorie

Christina McRorie holds a BA, Hon in International Studies from the University of Saskatchewan.