Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and now current UN Secretary General António Guterres have both recognized that cases of sexual exploitation and abuse are 'the most significant risk to peacekeeping mission' by putting both the credibility and legitimacy of the mission at risk. The United Nations has recently adopted a victim-centered approach for preventing and responding to SEA, but gaps remain in achieving a comprehensive approach.
As institutions begin to adopt new and more adept policies for the prevention of SEA by international interveners, it is critical that the scholarship on conflict-affected sexual violence be translated and integrated into SEA prevention efforts so that these fields can help find common ground. Among other items, participants will explore differences between the two fields' motivations, stakeholders, impacts of the abuse, and existing structures to better understand how prevention efforts can and should be linked. By the end, the group will answer how previous research on conflict-related sexual violence can aid current efforts to prevent SEA.
The Missing Peace Young Scholars Network is a collaborative initiative between USIP (United States Institute of Peace), WIIS (Women in Insternational Security), the Human Rights Centre at the UC Berkeley School of Law and PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo).