Combatting Sexual Harassment At The United Nations

News broke on Tuesday 15th January 2019 that one third of UN staff and contractors have experienced sexual harassment in the past two years. While this finding itself is saddening, we at WhistleB find another statistic equally disappointing. Just 17 per cent of those eligible to respond to the survey on sexual harassment did so.

Important work to be done in order to combat harassment at the UN

In a letter to staff, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres remarked the following on the response rate:

"This tells me two things: first - that we still have a long way to go before we are able to fully and openly discuss sexual harassment; and second - that there may also be an ongoing sense of mistrust, perceptions of inaction and lack of accountability."

In this one statement, Antonio Guterres hits on three poisonous factors that allow a culture of harassment to prevail: mistrust, inaction and unaccountability. It is our strong belief that a secure whistleblowing system has a central role to play in engendering the opposing values: Trust, action and accountability!

How can a whistleblowing system help combat organisational sexual harassment?

Whistleblowing is the term used when a person passes on information concerning wrongdoing, such as harassment. A secure whistleblowing system communicates to employees and other stakeholders... "We have a Code of Conduct which states that we expect those associated with us to behave ethically, and we are serious about following this up." We'll highlight this through the three core values that appear to be somewhat lacking within the UN's culture of harassment.

A whistleblowing system should allow anonymous reporting for whistleblower protection. As we know from experience and as the UN case illustrates, nobody wants to raise the alarm on any kind of harassment or other misconduct if they don't trust they can do it confidentially, without retaliation. For people to blow the whistle, they also need to trust that they can remain anonymous both in the initial dialogue and throughout any investigation. A secure whistleblowing system enables this.

Metoo illustrated how sexual harassment has been able to prevail for so long; those women who had been brave enough to blow the whistle were all too often...