Refugees International: Publications: publication

Home About Us Donate Where We Work Issues Blog

Must Boys Be Boys? Mainstreaming Gender

Peacekeeping & Sexual Exploitation Report

Mainstreaming Gender in UN Peacekeeping Operations

In the absence of equal numbers of female personnel, an awareness of gender perspectives must be incorporated into all aspects of UN peacekeeping missions to ensure equity in programming and to address the masculine culture that has developed.

At a UN meeting on peace operations in 2000, participants in Namibia declared that “in order to ensure the effectiveness of peace support operations, the principles of gender equality must permeate the entire [UN Peacekeeping] mission, at all levels, thus ensuring the participation of women and men as equal partners and beneficiaries in all aspects of the peace.”¹⁹ On October 31, 2000, the UN Security Council noted the declaration and unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security to mainstream a gender perspective into all of the actions of the United Nations.* Resolution 1325 can also be used as an important tool to combat the masculine culture within peacekeeping missions.

While Resolution 1325 was passed to ensure that gender dynamics were considered in all activities of UN peacekeeping missions, including the internal workings of the mission itself, the concept of mainstreaming gender has yet to truly take hold within them. As of September 2005, 10 of 17 UN peacekeeping operations had a dedicated full-time gender advisory position. The role of the Office of the Gender Advisor (OGA) is to promote, facilitate, support and monitor the incorporation of gender perspectives into peacekeeping operations.²⁰ By providing technical guidance to the heads of UN operations, the gender advisors are expected to mainstream a gender perspective into all functional areas of peacekeeping and to increase the participation of women leaders and organizations in the implementation of the mandate of the operation.²¹

Implementation problems persist, however. As documented in previous reports, the UN has had difficulty filling key positions in a timely manner.²² The delay in hiring has also negatively impacted the process of mainstreaming gender. Many gender advisors are not hired until well after many of the other positions in UN peacekeeping missions have been filled and key activities are underway. In the UN Mission in Liberia, UNMIL, the senior gender advisor who was charged with ensuring that the demobilization, disarmament, and reinsertion (DDR) process included female combatants did not begin work in Liberia until February 2004, three months after UNMIL’s first DDR attempt in December 2003.

One of the duties of the Office of Gender Advisor is to provide training on the concept of gender to all incoming personnel, including the 15,000 military troops who were being deployed in Liberia. The Office of the Gender Advisor was staffed by a UN volunteer at the time, who, while talented and hardworking, was too junior to have meaningful influence on the leaders of the mission. When the senior gender advisor was interviewed by Refugees International (RI), she told us that the budgeting process had been completed the week before she arrived. While she was confident she would have no problem raising funds to fulfill her duties, the Secretary-General in his 2002 report asked specifically that “the necessary financial and human resources for gender mainstreaming be a part of mission budgets.”²³ Obviously, this has yet to be implemented.

In Haiti, the gender advisor was a member of the peacekeeping assessment team and was therefore able to deploy earlier. This was useful as she was able to be involved in early discussions on structuring the mission and to ensure gender was factored into decisionmaking. However, at the time of RI’s mission to Haiti in February 2005, she was handicapped by a lack of budget and staff. She had but one person (out of a future team of six) to help her conduct all the induction trainings. Furthermore, in addition to her duties as the gender advisor, she was also appointed as a “Focal Point for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” while the mission tried to fill the position of the Code of Conduct officer.⁺

The position of gender advisor in UN peacekeeping missions is still quite new and has an ever changing mandate. Gender advisors interpret this mandate differently based on their personal expertise, the particular context that they are working in, and the support of their bosses, the Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs). RI attended a meeting of gender advisors from UN peacekeeping missions in West Africa held at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in December 2004, and found that the gender advisors had very different interpretations as to how much they should be involved in the problems of sexual exploitation and abuse. While the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) had a gender advisor who actively worked on sexual exploitation and abuse issues by necessity, the gender advisors of MONUC and UNMIL adamantly insisted that this should not be in their purview. “We are suffering from ‘mission creep,’” one gender advisor said, “We have to play the role of different UN agencies like UNIFEM when they are absent from a country. This focus on sexual exploitation and abuse within the mission is making us lose the bigger picture of pushing for women’s rights in the whole country.”

To its credit, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has actively addressed the issue of mainstreaming gender into peacekeeping missions and has supported the work of the gender advisors actively. In addition to recruiting and hiring gender advisors for 10 of 17 peacekeeping operations, DPKO has produced gender training materials and hired a permanent gender advisor to assist them with interpreting their mandate and to advocate for gender issues within DPKO.²⁴ This position is also relatively new. However, it is telling that all the senior gender advisors in UN peacekeeping missions are women, further associating the term “gender” with women’s issues in the minds of UN peacekeepers.^§ This conundrum is acknowledged by the gender departments in the field. The senior gender advisors have hired male staff members in the MONUC and MINUSTAH missions. “We would like to have more males in this office,” said a gender advisor, but no one qualified ever applies.”

According to a recent study, “For some [peacekeepers], gender is an emotionally loaded term closely allied, perhaps, to the terms ‘feminist’ or ‘feminism’. Use of the word evoked a defensive stance from [UN peacekeepers].”²⁵ Thus, placing the responsibility for addressing the sexual exploitation and abuse issue with the gender advisor will not enhance the overall implementation of the Code of Conduct and mandated policies for the mission.

In Haiti, as noted above, the gender advisor was also serving as the “Focal Point on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” during RI’s mission and was expected to assume the tasks of the Code of Conduct officer while the mission waited to finish hiring for the position.²⁶ In February 2005, while the UN faced media scrutiny on the scandal in MONUC, she was charged with training all incoming MINUSTAH staff on the Codes of Conduct with only one staff member to assist her. “I would like to begin a Training of Trainer program within the military and police side,” she explained. “The police and military rotate every six months. But I just don’t have the staff to be able to do all of this as well as I would like.” In Liberia, the gender advisor who had a slightly larger staff at the time was appointed to be the alternate sexual exploitation focal point.

Aside from the resource issues involved with having one person work on mainstreaming gender throughout the mission and address sexual exploitation, combining the two positions limits the effectiveness of both. Sexual exploitation is not strictly a gender issue but is a disciplinary offense akin to stealing or assault. Sexual exploitation is also a form of corruption. This corruption poisons the peacekeeping mission and prevents it from executing its mandate. While the gender advisor is well suited to do training, having her act as the person who investigates abuses does not reinforce the idea that it is a serious disciplinary offense. The Zeid Report applauded the development of the position of “Code of Conduct” officers in UN peacekeeping missions. In August 2005, the UN announced that eight of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations would be immediately establishing Conduct and Discipline Units that would be staffed by senior-level experts on personnel conduct issues and would replace mission focal points on sexual exploitation and abuse.²⁷ While the establishment of the new units is a positive step forward, RI remains skeptical that the new units will be deployed in a timely fashion or that they will be able to overcome many of the same obstacles that the Code of Conduct Officers and Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Focal Points have faced. Lack of adequate resources for training, prevention activities, and investigation has hampered past efforts to fight sexual exploitation and abuse and must be addressed to make these units effective.

*Gender mainstreaming is the process of systematically incorporating gender perspectives into all areas of work and assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs. Simply put, mainstreaming a gender perspective means realizing that policies and programs may impact men and women differently. No one department of an organization should be responsible for this incorporation of gender into programs but this perspective must be infused throughout the organization so that men and women benefit equally. The Office of the Gender Advisor is mandated with assisting in this mainstreaming.

⁺The Code of Conduct officer is a new position that was created by the UN Peacekeeping mission in Burundi to deal directly with violations of the UN’s Code of Conduct. It is unclear whether this position will be replaced by the new Conduct and Discipline Units that were created in August 2005.

^§The term “gender” is often misunderstood and used as a substitute for “women’s issues” in many UN missions that RI has visited. More often than not, managers send women to attend meetings about “gender issues”. At the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Center’s meeting on Gender and Peacekeeping in West Africa in December 2004, the meeting planners targeted the SRSGs, force commanders, and other high level males in order to grapple with the concept of gender in peacekeeping missions. However, the participants ended up being almost all female. In fact, a female military observer was sent in place of the gender focal point for the peacekeeping troops in UNMIL (a male) even though she stated that she did not work on gender issues and should not be at the meeting. This oversight did not prevent her from positive contribution to the meeting. Additionally compounding the problem is the fact that the term “gender” does not translate readily into some languages. Gender advocates working in Middle Eastern countries have noted that there is no Arabic word for gender.

Refugees International therefore recommends that:

DPKO move to hire more male gender advisors to counter-balance the idea that gender issues can only be addressed by women;
Donors and others interested in effective peacekeeping and UN reform continue to advocate for increased attention to mainstreaming of gender principles within all UN bodies;
UN peacekeeping missions separate the positions of Gender Advisor and Sexual Exploitation Focal Point or personnel involved in conduct and discipline units. If this is not possible, adequate resources, both financial and human, must be allocated to the position;
Member states provide more human resources within DPKO Headquarters for gender mainstreaming;
Member states actively put forward the names of qualified female candidates for senior management positions;
The UN Security Council encourage more female representation in troop-contributing countries;
Troop-contributing countries examine their policies for recruiting women in the military and police forces and sending them to peacekeeping missions and send numbers of females proportionate with the national average of women in their security forces;
US Department of State insist that the contractors it uses to recruit for civilian police officers provide women for UN peacekeeping missions and, if they fail to do so, discontinue their contracts;
The UN deploy key personnel such as Code of Conduct officers, Senior Gender Advisors and investigators of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in the early stages of peacekeeping missions.