Sexual Violence

The scale of human trafficking around the world is staggering, affecting populations across regional, ethnic, and religious lines. Trafficking is not simply a gross violation of dignity and human rights—it is also a security challenge. Trafficking is exacerbated by armed conflict and helps bankroll operations for transnational crime syndicates and violent extremist organizations. James Cockayne and Sarah E. Mendelson join us to discuss the intersection of human trafficking and conflict, and the potential to address human trafficking through national security efforts. Transcript BIGIO: Good afternoon. Thank you all so much for joining us today for today’s discussion. We’re thrilled that you could be there. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Jamille Bigio. I’m a senior fellow with the Council’s Women in Foreign Policy Program. Our program has worked for over fifteen years now to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives, including prosperity and stability. I want to take a moment before we begin to thank our advisory council members as well as Humanity United for its generous support for today’s discussion. I also do want to remind everyone that the presentation, discussion, and the question and answer period will be on the record. We’ll be posting a transcript of the discussion to our website to help share the insights that we cover today with a broader audience interested in this issue. Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that occurs in almost every country in the world. But it takes on particularly abhorrent dimensions during and after conflict. That’s what we’ll focus on today. Some forms of trafficking that are particularly prevalent in the context of armed conflict are sexual exploitation, enslavement, and forced marriage. It takes on different forms in conflict. Forced labor to support military operations as one example. We’ll talk about other forms. Recruitment and exploitation of child soldiers, and the removal organs to treat harmed fighters or to finance operations. We also see traffickers targeting forcibly displaced populations. So at a moment where migration is at higher levels today than ever before, and when we know that an estimated 40 percent of all newly internally displaced people are precipitated by conflict and violence, then this becomes an ever-more critical area to look at how human traffickers use migration routes to deceive people into fraudulent travel arrangements and job opportunities. And in this context, we also see some specific vulnerabilities of refugee women and girls to sex trafficking and forced marriage. Yet, as we look across the policy and program response, we see that few efforts have addressed the specific intersection of trafficking, and national security, and conflict, or have sufficiently addressed the compounding effect of conflict and migration on trafficking patterns. So that’s what we’re going to be looking at today with our esteemed guests. I am thrilled to be joined by James Cockayne, the director of the Center for Policy Research at United Nations University and Sarah Mendelson, who’s the distinguished service professor of public policy and head of Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. She also held senior positions at the U.S. mission to the U.N. and at USAID, where she advanced trafficking priorities. So let’s start first with understanding the issue. So we know that human trafficking is an affront to human rights and dignity, but it also has criminal and security concerns associated with it. So if I could turn to James and Sarah to help us unpack what those concerns are. Do you want to go first? MENDELSON: First of all, thank you so much, Jamille, for having us, and the Council on Foreign Relations. So, yes. Before we get started, can I just see a show of hands of people who are deeply ensconced in combatting human trafficking, consider themselves experts, just to have a sense of where we are? OK. OK. [A few hands go up.] So part of what I’m going to talk about briefly is related to a report I wrote almost fifteen years ago at CSIS called Barracks and Brothels that looks at human trafficking in and around the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. And I was rereading it on the train this morning. And I have to say, I’m very upset that a lot of what I wrote is still true. I mean, it’s incredibly relevant still.  To directly respond to your question, the overlapping networks of people who traffic in guns, narcotics, and people present a source of money, organized criminal networks in and around conflict zones. So, number one, it is an issue of fast cash that is then flowing into the zone, the theater that you’re working in, and it undermines the very thing that you’re doing in terms of peacekeeping. To the extent that the U.N., NATO, DOD, contractors, or uniformed service members are involved, it is misconduct. And misconduct is always a threat to security. But having people understand that connection at senior levels at the U.N., at NATO, and at DOD is an ongoing battle. The topic is under-resourced, it’s under-focused. There are no senior folks working on it, as far as I can tell. So just to open it up there.  COCKAYNE: Great. Again, thank you so much to the Council on Foreign Relations, and it’s really a pleasure to be here with you, Sarah. Sarah was a really instrumental part of the discussion at the United Nations, which is where I hang out a lot of the time, on the other side of the island. But it’s a pleasure to come a little further west and uptown to share some ideas with you. I thought I’d start maybe, Jamille, by sharing a few numbers to give us a sense of scale, and scope, and geography, and how the general problem of modern slavery and human trafficking interrelates with the specific problem of conflict. And you’re going to probably hear me slide between those two terms—modern slavery and human trafficking—today. Generally, modern slavery doesn’t have an international legal definition, but it is increasingly the umbrella political term used to cover a range of forms of exploitation that do have very specific legal definitions, including human trafficking, forced labor, forced servitude, forced marriage, and so on.  By the best estimates from the International Labor Organization, there are currently roughly forty million people in modern slavery around the world—forty million. I’ll give you another number, 192. Roughly one in every 192 people alive today are in that kind of exploitation. It’s a pretty astonishing number when you think about it. Now, if you think about 192 people that you know, probably none of them are in that situation. Which means that somebody else knows two people in 192 to get to that average.  So obviously this is a problem that is not evenly distributed around the world. But also the best estimates are now telling us that it is in just about every country in the world, in one form or another. That 192 leads to another number, which is nine thousand. If we wanted to bring that number to close to zero by 2030, which is one the Sustainable Development Goal targets—this is the U.N.’s agenda for sustainable development by 2030—then we would have to reduce the number by nine thousand every day to get close to zero by the end of 2030.  How are we doing? Short answer, we have no idea. We’re working on getting a better idea, but to give you a sense, the country that is thought to have the best track record of identifying and removing people from that status is Brazil. And Brazil has fifty thousand cases of documented removal, successfully, over the medium term, in twenty years. Fifty thousand in twenty years. We need nine thousand per day globally. So there’s every reason to think that we are a long way from addressing this problem. Now, of the forty million, twenty-five million are thought to be in forced labor and fifteen million of those in Asia. Seventy percent of all victims in the whole forty million are women or girls—70 percent. More of them in commercial sexual exploitation than in non-sexual labor trafficking, if I can call it that. So, again, there are differences in geographies, and the types of exploitation, and the way that people find themselves in this status. What has all of that got to do with conflict? Well, essentially, we’re talking about forms of extreme exploitation, which are obviously the result of major power differentials. So people find themselves in these situations because they don’t have access to a reliable income or a livelihood, or they’re physically isolated. They’re in some way at a massive power differential from a potential employer or exploiter—whether that’s in a sweatshop or in an IDP or refugee camp. Now you think about what conflict does. Conflict massively disrupts the social system, the legal system, the political system, and puts lots of people in highly vulnerable situations, especially women and girls. So what we’re seeing with conflict, and we have increasingly good science to back this up, is that it’s a driver of trafficking in the kinds of ways that Jamille described so nicely at the beginning there, but also that trafficking is, in turn, fueling conflict, because it’s a source of cash for the groups that can harness it. And increasingly we see it’s also an ideological tool for enforcing that power differential, that political domination over groups. And maybe I’ll stop there for now. BIGIO: As we look at why this issue is of concern, the next question is what now are we doing to address it? You talked about the need to reach the broader SDG goals. What do we see happening within the narrower space of the security implications of human trafficking and its linkages to conflict, instability, terrorism, peacebuilding? Policymakers are certainly beginning to recognize that it’s an area that they need to do more in, and we see some progress by member states, by the United Nations, civil society. What are some promising steps being taken in this area? MENDELSON: This is a story that really goes back to 1999. When you look at human trafficking and modern slavery in the modern era, a lot of the leadership actually came from the United States as the First Lady Hillary Clinton was very involved in getting the Trafficking Victims Protection Act written in Congress. It was bipartisan. It is still very much bipartisan. And the story from sort of ’99 to 2000, when it’s adopted, through to 2019 is one of a number countries, dozens around the world, putting in place laws that conform with an international protocol, which was also adopted in 2000. So there is a legal definition of what human trafficking is. We don’t have to argue about it. It’s been agreed to. Nearly 170 countries have signed onto this definition. So there’s this—countries that care about their international reputation align with this definition. They start training. They have laws in place. The problem is there is a sort of bottom third of countries. And not surprisingly, on that bottom third list, or tier three as the State Department would say, are countries like Syria, Iran, Russia, Sudan. So you see the places where there is conflict or countries that are fueling conflict, not only do they not care about their international reputation, this tier-ranking system isn’t helping. Let me just say that there’s also what came from the sort of 2000 wave is a paradigm that focuses on prevention, prosecution, protection, and then as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also put it, partnership. I’ve noticed that J/TIP has recently taken out that fourth P. But both for this work and certainly the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal 17 is about partnership, partnership is critical. But if you have those four Ps, there’s been a lot of focus on prosecution, for reasons that make lots of sense. But the truth is, we still have a culture of impunity. I would quibble a  bit with the number that James threw out of forty million. The truth is, for many years, the U.S. government was comfortable with the number twenty-point-one, I think it was—twenty million. Regardless if it’s ten million or five million, we do know the number of prosecutions globally. And that was less than twenty thousand last year. So good news in terms of laws in place, good news in terms of a whole sort of counter-trafficking movement erupting. And the SDGs give us enormous opportunity, which we’ll talk about in a second. On the security side, in a very short span of time—I was doing interviews in 2000 with the military saying to me, this is ridiculous. Why would we need a policy? And by 2004, we had policies at DOD, U.N.—actually, I think the order is U.N., DOD, and then NATO. So everybody’s got policies in place on combatting human trafficking. But these zero tolerance policies have, by and large, yielded zero prosecutions. They have zero resources. There’s zero leadership. So we have a lot of work to do.  Now, when we were in the Obama administration, there was a moment where we got the interagency together, and we had the intel folks in the room, and we got them to be thinking about, OK, this is a critical part of their mission as well, particularly in areas that are difficult to track, conflict zones. So there was some progress. But if you don’t have leadership inside the White House asking, what have you done for me lately, it’s not as if either the intelligence or the DOD folks are going to turn on a dime and focus on this. So it’s just this ongoing process of we’ve got a tool, how do we use that tool, and how do we make sure that the resources are there? We’ve lost some leadership in Congress on this, certainly on the Senate side. Senator Corker was a very strong advocate on these issues.  COCKAYNE: Can I pick up from there? BIGIO: Please. COCKAYNE: Because I broadly subscribe to Sarah’s analysis, but I’m maybe a little more optimistic in my outlook. To give you the headline first, what I mean by that is I think there is a growing recognition that the criminal justice tool, while central and important, has natural limitations, especially in conflict contexts, and we have to embed a criminal justice-based approach in a broader, more holistic, and increasingly what people talk about is a more systemic approach. Using not just penal levers but financial leverage, political leverage, yes, also security leverage. Let me just tease that out a little bit. If we think about the places where human trafficking and conflict intersect directly at the moment, they’re quite specific places. We’re talking about, for example, Myanmar and Cox’s Bazaar, the largest refugee camp in human history. We’re talking about the Sahel, and certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa. We’re obviously talking about Iraq-Syria, where it has been a major factor. We’re talking about Libya, where it is also a major factor but takes quite a different form. Libya is increasingly a slavery-driven political economy, with militias fueled by control of rents over both an internal market for forced labor and export market for forced labor. And we’re talking about Central America, and the Northern Triangle, where it’s not necessarily armed conflict but there’s no question that organized human trafficking and other forms of organized crime that are linked with it are driving mass displacement with all sorts of implications for this country. Now, what’s common to those areas, although they all look quite different, is no effective criminal justice system. Just from a strategic level, it’s evident that relying on criminal justice approach, which is what the PalermoProtocol does with its criminal justice paradigm, is going to come up against natural barriers in armed conflict and structural violence contexts. Hugely important when we’re talking about sweatshops or about forced labor in nail salons on Manhattan, or about the use of trafficked labor to manicure lawns in Southwest United States, but maybe not such an effective tool in these places. So what other tools do we have available? Well, I think increasingly policymakers are reaching for those tools, and recognizing that there are other tools connected to the penal system, the criminal justice system, that may provide other kinds of leverage. The security tools that Sarah pointed to, political leverage in certain contexts. Think about Libya. There is political leverage in the way that the negotiations around the future of Libya are going on that may be relevant to thinking about how those militias intersect with that slavery-driven economy. And increasingly the financial sector as well.  Here I want to pay tribute to the Mission of Liechtenstein, which has been at the center of an initiative with the governments of Australia, of the Netherlands, and also with the support of Muhammad Yunus, who is a Nobel laureate and microfinance pioneer. The Liechtenstein initiative for a financial sector commission on modern slavery and human trafficking is all about working with the financial sector to figure out where is that leverage to influence the way that systems work. And you might say, well, what does Park Avenue have to do with this problem? Well, the reality is that it’s embedded in investments, and anti-money laundering systems that are central to identifying that leverage. A hundred and fifty billion (dollars) a year is the best estimate of the money coming from these forms of exploitation. That’s flowing into and through the financial system somewhere. And some of it is tied to conflict. Think about how the minerals are mined in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in order for us all to be able to whip out our little magic gadgets that we all walk around with. In every one of these smartphones there are minerals, many of which come from conflict-affected communities. And in many of those contexts, forced labor is at play in mining those minerals. This is huge industry that we’re talking about, with a big financial footprint. And investors, banks, commodity traders, hedge funds, a whole range of different financial sector actors do have leverage over these businesses. So the commission is looking at what that looks and developing a roadmap that will be published in September to help the financial sector lean in in playing a bigger role to address this problem. I think one of the key messages you’re likely to see come out of that work is this idea that modern slavery isn’t a bug in the way our current global economy works. The fact that there’s forty million people and that the number just keeps replenishing itself suggests it’s actually a feature of the operating system. So if you want to change that outcome you have to change the system, and not just marginally, you have to do some deep surgery into the system to make this kind of risk unacceptable in the financial system, in the global economy as a whole. So I’m quite optimistic that there are these creative ideas bubbling to the surface. But I fully agree with Sarah, if that number of prosecutions remains at twenty thousand, then all the conversations you’d like with Park Avenue and Wall Street will ultimately be ineffective. There has to be enforcement of the law. This kind of exploitation is illegal under international law in every situation. There is absolutely no exception. It’s one of the three or four things in the world, along with genocide, where that’s the case. And yet, we just don’t enforce the law. And we have to. MENDELSON: So I want to go back to this issue of the Sustainable Development Goals. Now, if we don’t have a lot of human trafficking experts in the room, I’m guessing that there’s probably not a lot of awareness of this framework that we agreed to, 193 member states, in 2015 that runs through 2030. It’s universal. It applies to all of us. And in several pieces, in several elements, rights are woven through. And there’s specific commitments around human trafficking. In the goal around gender, 5.2, in the goal around decent work, 8.7, and in the goal—or, the cluster of goals around peace, just and inclusive society, 16-plus, again commitments to eradicate human trafficking. This collective framework, for me, it’s the opportunity to greatly expand awareness of this issue. And I’m working with colleagues from the International Youth Foundation with some  support from The Rockefeller Foundation, to grow the next generation of leaders on this issue, what we call “Cohort 2030.” People who were born after 1980, who have the most to lose or gain by how much we implement the Sustainable Development Goals. This project has elements working with mayors. I work at a university, so universities are a piece of it. But we’re interested in finding youth around the world, getting them to know about this agenda, and going way beyond the clutch of human trafficking experts that are either around Turtle Bay or near the White House in Washington, D.C. Those are important nodes, but we need to have your families, your neighbors, your kids saying: I want slave-free chocolate! I want to know where my clothes come from! And I want to know that my clothes are slave free! I want to make sure my banks are not supporting it, or my investments are not supporting it! And I think if we get to that point where there is this collective—truly a movement. Because I don’t think we’re there yet. I think there are a lot of positive things that have happened in the last two decades, but we haven’t broken through yet. And if we can figure out how to harness Cohort 2030, I think there is the opportunity. I think young people are very interested in ethically produced goods, when they can afford them. We recently had a pro-bono survey by Kantar in Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon is, where we asked young people about a variety of issues. And the number-one issue they were very interested in being involved in was combatting human trafficking. So we think there’s untapped potential there. BIGIO: I think it is incredibly important to identify where there is untapped potential at different levels. Whether it is among the general public, or in the private sector and financial institutions, or among governments and at the United Nations. It’s interesting to see the Security Council in the last few years take this issue on and talk about trafficking for the first time ever. And then for the first time, use sanctions tools against human traffickers. James, could you talk about what’s happened at the Security Council? COCKAYNE: Sure. I’m a little hesitant to, because you probably have the world expert in the room, and it’s not me. But maybe actually me giving you an outline of what has happened, and then turning to Sarah, means she doesn’t have to humble-brag. I can just brag on her account. Because what Sarah managed to achieve while she was an ambassador at the United States mission to the U.N. was pretty remarkable on this file. The Security Council has changed. You might not have noticed, but over the last twenty years—there was a period when big thematic ideas could be brought into the council and you could do quite creative things, pulling levers in quite creative ways here. And I think a good comparison for us here is children in armed conflict. So there’s quite a complicated set of mechanisms within the Security Council that allows the council in a variety of ways to look at whether armed forces not only nonstate armed groups but also state armed forces are using children in different ways. And it doesn’t just have to be those in situations that are already formally on the agenda of the council. This mechanism can actually look beyond that. Well, that era is over, because the great power politics has shifted and there is not that much space now. So instead, we see issues like this being brought in less through big thematic resolutions and more through attachment to specific cases where it might be arising. But just as this window was closing, Sarah managed to drive a giant truck into the council and force a debate on human trafficking itself and the adoption of a presidential statement, which is really crucial on these issues. And that then set the scene, forced open the space for other actors coming after to get more practical and use the leverage that she had generated. Specifically, as Jamille mentions, the council, really as a result of Dutch leadership, in, I think it was, October of last year adopted specific targeted sanctions against six individuals in Libya under the standing Libya sanctions regime. They put these six people on the list precisely because of their involvement in human trafficking. Now, there are arguments that you can do something similar elsewhere, because human trafficking actually already meets the threshold required for listing under a whole range of other different sanctions regimes. For example, in—most obviously in Syria or Iraq, or also potentially in sub-Saharan African countries that are already on the council’s agenda. But how far we get with that, how far the council goes with that, I think depends heavily on what comes of these first six listings in Libya. And what is interesting is that states are finding it quite difficult to implement those sanctions because it’s not clear where the assets of these individuals are, whether they are part of the formal financial system or whether they are off book. We need to think collectively how we develop that financial intelligence to allow the bankers and the anti-money laundering regulators to effectively identify and go after those assets. So still a lot of proof in the pudding, I would say. MENDELSON: Those of you who serve or have served in government know it’s a team sport. So Ambassador Rice and Ambassador Power also had something to say about this. But it’s the case that when I showed up at USUN in October 2015 we were just beginning to plan what we would do with the presidency of the Security Council in December 2015. And like good team sports, we had different teams competing within the team on different topics. And as the ambassador to ECOSOC, I was not formally accredited to the Security Council. But Ambassador Power wanted to open it up. All good ideas. And so, of course, having worked on human trafficking in peacekeeping operations, I wanted to have the possibility of addressing trafficking and conflict for the Security Council. And finally, the decision was made that that’s what we would do. But then came the really powerful part, which is Nadia Murad was the person that we had speak to the Security Council. And her presence and her power were such that I think the Security Council—this was the first time in seventy years the Security Council addressed this issue. And the power of this person, and the youth of this person, and the vulnerability of her, was such that people were just left speechless. And there became this sort of movement—the Spanish wanted to hold their presidency on trafficking, and then the British wanted to do it. And, thankfully, it sounds like the Dutch have used their chair to good measure. And of course, Nadia was made a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It was an unusual moment. But, you know, also, from her perspective, at that time there were still thousands of Yazidi women and girls being held in captivity. So a win in the U.N. context doesn’t necessarily translate to a real change outside. We’re forever grateful to Nadia for being willing to come and speak with us and open that door, but there’s a lot of work yet to do on this. BIGIO: As we think about what are the avenues to actually see some real change, we’d love to open it up to questions from you. Please. Q: I’m just wondering if you, James, or any of those involved with the Liechtenstein initiative might give us a little bit more background, are there champions within the financial sector for this? Exactly what is the roadmap for leverage, because on the ground you see a lot of worthy NGOs working kind of systemically to provide protection, you know, in-situ, in a situation that is so fundamentally stacked against the recipients of the programming, has to be kind of demoralizing. COCKAYNE: Well, I’ll try to be brief, but you might have to force me, Jamille, because I get a bit excited about this, because there is an amazing coalition coming together to do this work. The commission itself is about twenty-five members. Everything from two survivors of modern slavery who, amazingly, each have previously done work in or with the financial sector—one after surviving child slavery in Ghana became a bank manager and the other was trafficked to Canada and did amazing work after she escaped exploitation with the financial sector on these issues. From the financial sector, we have organizations like Barclays, ABN AMRO, the chief investment officer of the largest hedge fund in the world, the British development finance institution, several large pension funds, a sovereign wealth fund. Myriam, chime in if I’m forgetting key actors. But also numerous actors from the anti-slavery movement as well. Dr. Jean Baderschneider who is the director of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery and was previously the head of procurement for Exxon globally. We have Humanity United. Ed Marcum is represented there. Freedom Fund, and so on. So it’s a pretty amazing coalition. They’ll publish their roadmap at the General Assembly on the 27th of September. And the roadmap will basically look at how all the different parts of the sector have roles in identifying and tackling modern slavery.  I can’t say too much more, because the commission is meeting for its final meeting in The Hague in three weeks, and we’ll be working on the draft then. But it’s quite a broad front of—broad waterfront. Everything from remedy to the use of financial technology in this field. They’re also very focused on practical tools. And one of the most exciting initiatives coming out of their work looks like it will be a project focused on smoothing the path of survivors back into the financial system.  So many survivors, to their great misfortune, find that even once they’ve escaped exploitation they have a really difficult time getting back into the formal financial system because their financial identity has been hijacked by their exploiter. So they may be lucky enough to win a job, and then they go to bank that first paycheck and they just can’t open a bank account because there are all sorts of red flags around their name, because it did pop up in a conviction, or because it’s in some way associated with fraudulent activity on a bank account. So we’re working with banks, with regulators, with credit bureau agencies to explore a path back into the system in several different jurisdictions. So very exciting. I’ll try to stop there. (Laughter.) BIGIO: Please. Q: Thank you.  BIGIO: And if you could introduce yourself.  Q: I’m Judith Bruce. I’m Population Council. And the areas we work in I would call trafficking reservoirs, basically. And so I appreciate trying to deal at the backend, but it seems to me—or, and it seems to me; it’s not a but—that if there’s a possibility of raising awareness. The data exists obviously to identify products which—whose value-added is more likely to be slave-produced, right? That’s one group. But there are also places from which they are going to come, right? So you have—the demographic and health surveys have information that can tell you—I’ll give you an example from Sierra Leone—of a portion of girls ten to fourteen living apart from parents and not in school—unambiguously a problem. At one point in Sierra Leone, the district in the south, Pujehun, 37 percent of the ten- to fourteen-year-old girls living apart from parents and not in school—of those girls who are in that category. And so you can map the world right now, I think, probably, and say: Here are potential reservoirs. And the proactive measures that could be taken to both see those girls quantitatively and organize them, give them save and supportive spaces, protective assets and so forth, because obviously you want to stop it. And it’s a job market area, scarcity and sexual exploit—these are all one great bundle. So I don’t know if anything’s being done on that front, but the data certain exist to presumptively put that forward and identify—and, of the countries you listed, I’ve worked in six of them. And I just take the map and say: There, there, there, there, and there. And those girls—it’s—not all of them will be trafficked but, you know, they have a much higher proportion than girls in another locale. MENDELSON: So can I say a world about collaboration and research? I spent about a decade at a think tank in Washington, CSIS, where one is responsible for raising money to be able to do work. I did a lot of work on Russia. I did work on trying to close Guantanamo. I did work on human trafficking. Raising money to do research on human trafficking is among the most difficult things. The—first of all, there are very few funders. By and large organizations have not wanted to fund research—if you work on human rights, but maybe you don’t work on human trafficking. If you work on human trafficking, but you’re working with these NGOs on the ground. When I got to USAID and I was on the other side of the table, I went to my colleagues at Humanity United and said: Let’s have a donor dialogue. Let’s bring some folks together and see if we can encourage, nudge along some bilateral donors, some private donors. So that was on the margins of UNGA in 2013. And I don’t think—by the next year I had gone back to CSIS—I don’t think it’s ever happened again. There’s just this strategic lack of collaboration. And I thought the SDGs being adopted was going to change that, and I haven’t seen it yet. I think you’re right. There is tons of data out there. But supporting a team, whether it’s in bilateral donors or whether it’s in universities or think tanks, to map that has been a real challenge. I hope it changes. COCKAYNE: I want to follow the same pattern as earlier, and entirely agree but be a little bit more optimistic about where we are. It’s precisely because people like Sarah have been ringing the bell on issues like this that I think we’re beginning to see some movement. And it comes back to your point, that in a sense this is really a development issue. If we are arguing that trafficking is one way that massive power differentials get turned—get exploited, literally, then we have to think about how we address those power differentials. And as Sarah says, we have this incredible mobilizing framework now in the Sustainable Development Goals broadly, and specifically in the various targets on trafficking and modern slavery that could offer a framework for developing a shared strategy for resource mobilization, prioritization, and allocation. I believe that is feasible. I agree, it’s not happening right now. What we do see is something called Alliance 8.7, which is an initiative of the International Labor Organization. Many countries, many civil society actors, researchers, and so on. But that has not yet generated this kind of sense of shared framework. There are actors, we are amongst them at U.N. University, that are trying to bring the development community in, because we won’t get there with the current levels of funding. We have to mainstream this issue into the heart of the development community’s thinking. So if you asked the development community at the moment—and I’m talking here about the World Bank, the Regional Development Banks and so on—if you asked them human trafficking, question mark, they’ll say, oh, yeah, I think there’s somebody, you know, Wing E, third office on the right, maybe spends 10 percent of their time on it. MENDELSON: Probably the youngest female. (Laughs.) COCKAYNE: It’s a marginal issue. If you go to the economists at the World Bank and say: What does forced labor and human trafficking have to do with costs of capital, market access, productivity gains, you’ll get a shrug. So these are the kinds of areas where researchers are now thinking about how do we make that change, how do we articulate this in a way that these actors have no choice but to address these questions, and mobilize much bigger pools of money? BIGIO: You mentioned the economists and the development actors. And it’s true too of the security actors, and those working in peacebuilding and conflict prevention, that despite the face human trafficking fuels conflict, drives displacement, undermines international institutions when it’s committed by security forces and by peacekeepers, the conflict prevention/peacebuilding security community also doesn’t think about trafficking. And some of this points to a little bit of what Judith is mentioning, that there’s—there are—these data points are out there, but there are also silos where the trafficking community works separately from the—even in the conflict space—sexual violence community, the child soldiers community. These are all connected issues, but even there, there isn’t a connected conversation that helps kind of lift up all of those issues. We have another question, please. You could introduce yourself. Q: Hi. I’m Yasmeen Hassan. I’m from Equality Now. And we are a global organization working on women and girls, right? And sex trafficking is one of our program areas. I was very interested, you said in the beginning that 70 percent of the victims of trafficking are women, and overwhelmingly into the commercial sex trade, or for commercial sexual exploitation. Yet, in the presentation, we haven’t heard much about that. We’ve talked about forced labor. We’ve talked about in conflict situations. And so to me that’s the crux of the issue. And, you know, when you—and also to Judith’s work, enough work isn’t being done on prevention and that around decreasing vulnerabilities to women—of women who get entered into the sex trade. To your point donors are very wary, and I can be testament to that, about funding this work, because there’s not agreement among the women’s rights community as to what the best approach is.  There’s one view that the commercial sex trade is the things that people are trafficked into, so we have to address the commercial sex trade. The other view is that we have to make the commercial sex trade safer for women, because it’s a form of work. And as long as there’s disagreement there, I mean, I feel we cannot move forward in addressing this issue. I was wondering if one of you can talk about that, because I think that’s the big elephant in the room.  MENDELSON Yeah. Yeah. Let me say one comment on the previous and then go to the elephant in the room. Or, maybe this is another elephant in the room, which is the lack of—or the decline of U.S. global leadership on a variety of issues—reproductive rights, but also multilateralism. And at USAID, you can’t talk about the Sustainable Development Goals. So how, if you’re the largest bilateral agency in the world, the one doing the most on democracy and human rights, the one that has led on combatting human trafficking, do you lead but you can’t then tie to this agenda?  And it’s not that colleagues in the field or out in the world don’t want to, but leadership is very resistant. We have a situation where we’re told that the White House has said: Don’t use that frame. Don’t speak of it. We had leadership in the U.K. a couple years ago. The prime minister made this a big issue. Prime Minister May convened a head of state meeting that she wanted on the margins of UNGA on this issue. [But now] she’s obviously entangled with lots of other issues. So we’re kind of waiting for others to lean in, and we haven’t seen this yet. On this issue—you’re absolutely right. There are arguments inside communities. There’s also a big component of culture. When I would go and interview the military on this issue they would say, oh, well, this is prostitution. They have a view or a schema of prostitution. And it’s, like, well, but actually, prostitution is illegal in the conflict zone that you are working in. Oh, I didn’t know that. Well, so therefore how does that change what we’re talking about? It changed somewhat, because it meant that it was an illegal activity, and there were criminals involved.  There are a lot of bruises and infighting that has disabled the community from walking in the same direction. I found, though, in the work that I was doing, certainly in the Balkans, back over a decade ago, we figured out a way to get through that. We didn’t have those debates. It was really about trying to get the policy enacted. And obviously there’s still much more to be done in terms of all the things that you said. But you’re right, it’s a huge huge issue. And it has turned a lot of people off. They sort of walk away and they say: You know what? I’ve got other things that I want to work on that I find are more fruitful, or less fraught. COCKAYNE: Just two quick comments, if I may. The first is just to come back to that 70 percent. Look, I think it’s important to recognize that that’s not completely or even majority women in commercial sexual exploitation. It includes also women in other forms of exploitation, domestic servitude in particular, agriculture, other things. The forms of exploitation are, perhaps unsurprisingly, gendered. So if you look at the construction industry it’s overwhelmingly, but not entirely, male. If you look at domestic servitude, it’s generally a feminized workspace. It’s mainly women who are exploited in that context. And so it’s true more women are exploited in commercial sexual exploitation than men. But that 70 percent, there’s nuances within that. Just to make that clear. Otherwise, I think you’re absolutely right that there are some very difficult, long-standing, frankly at times dogmatically held positions. We at U.N. University are unusual, in that we’re a U.N. actor but we’re a university. So we believe our role in this space is very much about protecting space for science to influence policy. And whenever we’re confronted with this kind of bipolar position in policymaking—and it happens a lot in this space, and not only around this differential—we really believe heavily in investing in science and understanding what works.  So what we need to see here is investment in longitudinal analysis with sufficient scientific rigor to be able to say reliably to policymakers: In your context this policy approach is going to have these results. This policy approach is going to have these results. And probably, in each case, it’ll be a mixture of pluses in some—something in the plus column, something in the minus column. And then it’s the role of the policymaker to have an engagement with their stakeholders and constituents and come to a reasoned, informed decision.  But what we see going on a lot in this space, and it’s not hard to figure out why, sex and politics mix quite effectively if you’re a politician. These positions are not necessarily well-informed by science. They’re about pressing buttons, appealing to people’s emotions, and ideological positions, and drumming up the base into a bit of a lather to bring them out to vote or to be passionate in their campaign for you. So it’s very important to just keep hammering away at not only investing in science but protecting that space for science and for facts in the policymaking process. And that’s got to be from the local level, from the municipal level, right up to the Security Council.  BIGIO: Any other questions? Please. If you could introduce yourself. Q: Howard Stoffer, U.N. and University of New Haven. Your last comment provokes me to say one more giant gorilla in the room. One is, of course, the fact that United States is no longer a leader across the board anywhere in the world. But the second is that there’s an attack around the world now on science. You know, just yesterday stem cell research was just set back twenty years. The president denied that there’s climate change, or global warming. And in other countries, there is a real reaction against scientific method, scientific achievement, and scientific data. And I agree with you 100 percent, I really do. But I’m concerned that if we rely on scientific data alone, that won’t win the day with the kind of environment we have that’s both this right-wing political environment emerging in the world, both in Europe and the United States and perhaps in Australia as well, and this emerging sense that fantasy is more important than science. I worked on these issues for many years. But I do feel that we have to identify that the anti-science and the lack of American leadership in the world is really bringing all these issues into a dead end, to some respects.  MENDELSON: Well, let me just say something that is cautiously optimistic, which is that actually in this work that I’m doing on youth and the SDGs, what is true is that at the federal level you don’t see the Trump administration talking about this. But honestly, it was difficult when we were in the Obama administration to do a lot of work on it, because it really happens at the local level. And what we see happening now is that actually cities, together with universities, are stepping up. I just hosted the mayor of Pittsburgh, a private sector partner, at Carnegie Mellon for a standing room only, packed discussion about how Pittsburgh is aligning with the SDGs. And it’s not just climate. It’s understanding this importance of a peaceful, just, inclusive society. And I think you’re going to see more from Carnegie Mellon in general on this issue. COCKAYNE: Yeah. I think I would just say things can change. You know, you probably all know yesterday was the 75th anniversary of D-Day. What you may not be aware is five years to the day before D-Day, this country chose to turn away a ship full of refugees trying to escape persecution in Europe. So only five years between that policy stance and the investment of lives, blood and treasure, that really led to the post-war world. Things can change. I’m very optimistic about the future. I’m absolutely amazed, as maybe some of you are, by the—I can’t say it in Swedish—climate strike Fridays that Greta Thunberg has been leading. That’s based on a belief in science. You need the science. It doesn’t speak for itself. You need the advocacy and advocates. But young people are recognizing that there is strong scientific evidence of threats to their world at the climate level, at the labor level. They are extremely effective advocates. I think those of us who are getting a bit gray probably just need to get out of the way and let them take control of their own future. (Laughter.) But what we can do for them is equip them with that evidence and that information, and with the access to leverage and power, and the support and guidance. They do need guidance. Greta’s, what, sixteen? She’s a sixteen-year-old girl. She needs support and help. That’s what we can offer them. BIGIO: Well, we are thrilled that both Sarah and James are sitting on an advisory committee for a report that we are writing right now, along with Cindy McCain, Nadia Murad, a member of the Liechtenstein initiative, are all advising us on a report on the security implications of human trafficking. So stay tuned. We’ll be publishing that in the fall, helping us understand human trafficking in conflict, and laying out a very specific policy agenda of what more can be done in this space to help move the needle. So with that, please join me in thanking Sarah and James for joining us today. (Applause.) (END)

Sexual exploitation and abuse has tarnished the operations of peacekeepers charged with protecting civilians, thereby undermining the integrity and effectiveness of international peacekeeping institutions across the globe. It puts at risk the international aid community’s ability to deliver life-saving help to the people they are tasked to serve. Despite the policies, procedures, and practices in place to address sexual exploitation and abuse, cultures of impunity persist across the United Nations and the aid sector. Karen Pierce and Paula Donovan discuss innovative ideas to prevent the continued perpetration of—and lack of accountability for—sexual exploitation and abuse.  Transcript BIGIO: Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone, to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Jamille Bigio, and I’m a senior fellow with the Council’s Women and Foreign Policy Program. For those who aren’t familiar with our program, it was established over fifteen years now. We’ve been working to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives, including prosperity and stability. I do want to take a moment before we begin to thank our Advisory Council members who are with us today, as well as the Compton Foundation for its generous support for today’s discussion. I also want to remind everyone that the event is on the record, including the presentation, discussion, and question-and-answer period. In the wake of the global #MeToo movement, the United Nations has faced mounting scrutiny over its handling of sexual exploitation and abuse cases. For decades now, allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse have been raised against U.N. personnel, against peacekeepers charged with protecting civilians against aid workers tasked with delivering lifesaving goods. Sexual abuse has violated the lives of countless women and girls, men and boys, while also undermining the integrity and the effectiveness of international peacekeeping institutions, the aid sector, and the United Nations more broadly around the world. The U.N. has a zero-tolerance policy in place. It has appointed new leadership to institute reforms, including a special coordinator on improving the United Nations’ response to sexual exploitation and abuse, and the U.N. rights advocate for victims of sexual exploitation. So why does impunity persist? What can the U.N. do about it? And how can member states and civil society help to address this issue? We’re thrilled today to be joined by two perspectives to reflect on this issue at the U.N. and among peacekeepers and across the broader aid sector. Shortly, we’ll be joined by Ambassador Karen Pierce, the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations. And we’re thrilled to be joined as well by Paula Donovan, who’s co-director of AIDS-Free World. And they have led the Code Blue Campaign that is driving attention to ending impunity for sexual abuse by U.N. personnel. I want to start first by identifying just what the problem is before turning to new ideas of how to tackle it. Paula, if you could start us off in sharing, why does the problem of impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse persist? DONOVAN: OK, thank you. Thank you very much, Jamille. And it’s a pleasure to be here with everyone, many faces I recognize, but many I don’t. The problem is, I think, most succinctly described as one of the misapplication of United Nations immunity. That sounds like a bit of a bureaucratic mouthful. But, of course, we all know that sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, sexual offenses of all kinds persist throughout the world. And we know what the derivation is. And we know about the—about the inane and inadequate attempts to prevent and address these offenses that have gone on for generations, centuries. What’s unique about the United Nations is that the United Nations is covered by a Convention on Privileges and Immunities. This is absolutely essential to the functioning of the United Nations. It couldn’t do its work throughout the world if there weren’t the protection provided by the convention to ensure that one individual government can’t retaliate against the United Nations for something that they’re angry about or can’t bribe the United Nations, can’t simply interfere with the work of the world body by taking it out essentially on an individual staff member. So if you don’t like a resolution that’s just been passed and you did everything in your power as a member state to prevent its passage, and it went ahead anyway, then your proclivity might be to pick up all the people who work for the United Nations in your country and arrest them for missing headlights or on fraudulent charges, on fraudulent bases. And you could detain them for quite some time and send a message to the U.N. To prevent that from happening, in 1946 the founders of the United Nations decided to pass their very first convention ever. It was a treaty to ensure the free movement of diplomats and others who work for the United Nations between and among countries. And this now is a very different world. We’re in 2018; peacekeeping wasn’t even envisioned back when the Convention on Privileges and Immunities was put in—was passed. The United Nations has grown exponentially. And what we’re faced with now is an aberration. It’s the United Nations is still protected from scrutiny—and that’s for all legal process—it’s protected from scrutiny by individual governments, by jurisdictions, and so forth. What happens within the United Nations stays in the United Nations. And that means that you cannot be arrested and detained without the prior permission of the secretary-general. That means that, even if you are accused of a crime, which is not covered by functional immunity, the type of immunity that protects the vast majority of international civil servants from spurious claims, even if you are accused of a crime and you have only functional immunity—in other words, your words and deeds as an employee of the United Nations are covered by immunity, but not your private life—then still, the United Nations has the right, before you can be detained on any charge, to first determine for themselves whether or not immunity does or doesn’t apply. And that can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to fifteen months to fifteen years because these processes are all internal and they’re secretive. It is impossible, as the reporters in the room know, to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the United Nations because everything that the U.N. does is held in secrecy. And this is—I’m not saying “secrecy” in a pejorative way. So what it boils down to is, when an allegation of sexual exploitation or abuse, even at the most serious, grave levels, even felony crimes, is lodged against someone who works for the United Nations, personnel of the United Nations, then that becomes an internal matter to be dealt with, in an ideal world, first and foremost, by the United Nations, but in the real world it’s simply handled as an administrative matter. And this creates such a culture of impunity throughout the United Nations that, in particular, the civilian personnel—and that’s to exclude the military personnel who are contracted by the United Nations to become their peacekeeping forces—but the civilian personnel and everyone who works for the United Nations understand that they can essentially do what they want to do just so long as they’re able to persuade, cajole, or pull the wool over the eyes of the bureaucracy that is in charge of their fate. This leaves us with rafts and rafts of allegations, the nature of which and the handling of which none of us have any clue as to the—none of us know exactly how—or not even exactly, but in broad details, no one knows the names of the people who have been accused, and no one knows the processing of the people who have been accused and the processes that are followed. And as a result, we have—we have impunity. BIGIO: Ambassador Pierce, thank you so much for joining us. PIERCE: Pleasure. BIGIO: We had just begun. And Paula had laid out what the challenges are when we look at sexual exploitation and abuse across the U.N. system, the challenges how she framed it as a misapplication of U.N. immunity and the challenges when instances occur, when even at the gravest degree of a felony crime, that they’re handled as administrative matters. Now as we look at what are the gaps, why has impunity persisted as it has for sexual exploitation and abuse across the U.N. system? And Paula has, I think, so helpfully laid out how the system is put in place to encourage and permit this degree of impunity. We welcome if you have additional reflections on what challenges you see for ending impunity in the U.N. system for sexual exploitation and abuse. And then the question from there is, how do we tackle this, and what’s the role of member states, of civil society? How can both ensure that the U.N. system addresses this issue in a new and different way to end the impunity that we see has persisted? PIERCE: Well, good afternoon, everybody. And many thanks to Jamille and to Paula. Apologies for being late, but we had an emergency Security Council session on Iran, and then the normal New York traffic kind of got in the way. So I’m very sorry to have kept everybody waiting. And sorry, in particular, not to have seen Paula. Just on the specific question you mentioned—and I’ll get to that just in a minute if I—if I may—but I think what happened in Haiti with U.K. charities really shocked the system. And it was a huge shock to us as well. And it was—it kind of, although a truly terrible set of occurrences, it perhaps did us all favor by throwing the spotlight onto this issue in a way that we might not have been able to get the spotlight thrown onto it. And we had a safeguarding summit in London earlier this year. And we like to think of this in terms of four strategic shifts. One is around ensuring support for survivors, but also for victims and whistleblowers, enhancing accountability and transparency, and strengthening reporting, as well as tackling impunity. I think the second is around incentivizing behavioral change, both on the part of individuals, but also on the part of institutions. That’s not just the U.N., but obviously the U.N. is front and center of that. And once again, those sets of issues come down to things like strong leadership, organizational accountability, and human resources processes. So in that sense, although those things are obvious, in U.N. terms, they go to the heart of how the U.N. is run. And that’s an issue that goes more wider—more widely than SEA and is something that we grapple with with the secretary-general all the time. In particular, being able to sack people in the U.N. is incredibly difficult. And I’ll come on to that in a minute. There’s something—the third strand, I would say, is around agreeing the minimum standards, which we would obviously say ought to be quite a high threshold, but also really ensuring that once those standards are agreed that they’re implemented and that they’re met. And as the United Kingdom, we definitely want to do that for ourselves. And then there’s something about being able to strengthen organizational capacity and capability so that they can do all those—all those things. I think, as you’ve probably been talking about, the real difficulty with SEA outside the U.N. secretariat funds and programs themselves—I’ll come on to those in a minute—the fundamental legal construct is that individual countries remain responsible for their personnel, their military personnel on peacekeeping missions. And there isn’t a straightforward way of being able to exercise legal authority over those personnel deployed on peacekeeping missions. One can do things short of legal authority, like setting up registers to make sure that people don’t inadvertently get offered a job having once been found convicted of SEA. But in terms of actually taking them to a court and prosecuting them, that does, very unfortunately, remain a huge—a huge difficulty. If they were themselves active on the ground in conflict, actually fighting as a party, such that international humanitarian law applied, then it might be possible to have them prosecuted under ordinary measures for IHL and the Geneva Conventions, particularly since sexual violence and conflict now counts as a grave crime under the Geneva Conventions. But I think we all know that it’s terribly difficult, even now, to bring actual prosecutions. It’s not impossible, but it remains fantastically difficult. So this is one—but most of the time, I think peacekeepers are not involved as a party to a conflict. So there’s a question mark as to whether the Geneva Conventions would be applicable in every case. In fact, they wouldn’t be applicable in every case. I think there would be a question mark as to in how many cases were they applicable. So that leaves you fundamentally with the secretary-general or DPKO having to go to the country concerned to say you need to prosecute these people. And that is a very difficult—it’s not a difficult thing for the secretary-general to do. It’s a very difficult thing or it is proving to be a very difficult thing for the country itself to do. Sometimes they will claim that they can’t identify the individuals concerned, they couldn’t tell you which unit, or the victims can’t identify the individuals. The secretary-general has the option of asking the country concerned to withdraw their entire peacekeeping unit. It’s an option, it may not work in every case, depending on who would backfill and what the exact situation on the ground is. But there is no mechanism at the moment for compelling a country to take those people to court. And we can talk about that, and we can talk about what sorts of issues might be able to ameliorate that situation. For example—and I’m not a lawyer, someone like Larry will know better, many of you will know better. Even when that if the state of New York could play a de facto role in prosecutions on behalf of the United Nations—I haven’t got very far with that idea—(laughter)—but, you know, if the countries themselves can’t do it, who is going to do it? And how are you going to get the evidence needed to stand up in a Western court of law? So I’m very happy to discuss that. If you come on to the U.N. itself, as I say, it’s very difficult to sack somebody in the U.N. And I’m sorry to say that that issue tends to come down to the human rights tribunals. And some very eminent lawyers, including some British lawyers, sit on those tribunals, and they are quite proud of the fact that they hardly ever uphold the U.N.’s case against a staff member. So clearly, something needs to change there. But that goes to the fundamental heart of the secretary-general’s power over the whole organization, which we need to address. So those two things make it actually a much trickier question than it inherently ought to be, given the enormity of what’s going on. BIGIO: You’ve put on the table some really crucial questions on this issue. And there’s one in particular, the question of, how do you actually pursue justice against peacekeepers that have perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse, that Code Blue and Paula have put some innovative ideas on the table of how to move that effort forward. Paula, I wonder if you could share what you think could help solve the challenge of holding peacekeepers accountable for sexual exploitation and abuse. DONOVAN: Sure, thanks. So we were shocked in 2015 when we—when we first launched the Code Blue Campaign to find from our research that the vast majority of perpetrators of alleged sexual exploitation and abuse were not military, but civilian personnel of the United Nations. Even within peacekeeping, the division between the military perpetrators and the nonmilitary perpetrators is quite stark. And the civilians outnumber the military. When António Guterres took over as secretary-general in 2017, the first thing that he stated publicly about this phenomenon of sexual exploitation and abuse and impunity was the fact that he said, essentially, don’t focus just on the peacekeepers, meaning the military, this is a problem throughout the U.N. system. And as someone who had headed the High Commission for Refugees, which is the civilian arm of the United Nations that has more allegations made against its civilian U.N. staff than any other entity within the United Nations, he knew from whence he spoke. So I absolutely understand what you—what you’re saying, Ambassador, about the military needing to be pressed harder. The troop-contributing countries need to be pressed harder by the United Nations, which is their contractor, their employer, essentially, to ensure that they do uphold the discipline that they have been entitled to hold sway over. They say that they cannot discipline their troops if the troops report to two masters. And the Security Council and the member states in their wisdom have said, yes, that’s the case, so if the military mess up when they’re on assignment as peacekeepers, then you, the troop-contributing country, are responsible for their discipline and you’ve got to do your job. And the U.N., as the contractor of these troop-contributing countries must enforce that and they have to put their money where their mouth is or remove their money when the military don’t do what they need to do. The civilian personnel are the people that the Code Blue Campaign is focusing on primarily because there is no route to justice. And this is what I was talking about before. The immunity—the military are not covered by immunity. They are immune from prosecution in the country where they’re working, but not immune from prosecution writ large. They are subject to the jurisdiction of their country. Not so the civilian personnel. I worked for UNICEF. When I lived in Nairobi, had I committed a crime, the government of Kenya could not have picked me up without prior permission from the United Nations without an assurance from the United Nations that what I had done and who I was was not covered under the shield of immunity. So there’s no route to justice. This is compounded now by the fact that civilian personnel in countries where the U.N.—and I’m talking now not about the member states and not about the Security Council, but simply the appointees, the people who have jobs at the U.N.—have determined that the system of justice, that it’s essentially a failed state. So you’re in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Haiti at times, in various countries where the—where the bureaucrats who work for the United Nations feel as though the state is just not up to—up to its job. It doesn’t have the police power, it doesn’t have the judicial power to do a job well. And they feel—and I’ve heard this directly from the most senior people in the U.N.—we can’t throw our guys to the wolves. So if you’re a civilian person who’s working in the Central African Republic for the United Nations and you are accused of a vicious crime, that will be treated internally by the United Nations as though you had broken the rules, not broken the law, because the United Nations does not want to betray its personnel and have some its civilian personnel ending up in what the general counsel described to me as a dank hole in the—in the Central African Republic or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They simply don’t want to have their personnel arrested by, questioned by, possibly prosecuted by, and imprisoned by the country over whom—the country that has jurisdiction over any crime that’s committed by anybody but military U.N. peacekeeping personnel. And so, to avoid that problem, they simply say we’re going to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and we’re going to keep quiet about the name of this person who’s been accused of this grievous crime and we’re going to send our own internal investigators who have no jurisdiction to act like regular police officers do. They can’t issue a search warrant. They can’t—they can’t demand that people come in for questioning, and they can’t hold the staff members, they can’t detain them in a jail cell somewhere. They can’t even—if they come across evidence, there’s no chain of evidence they can’t ensure that a courtroom ultimately will accept this evidence and say I know exactly where it’s been from the moment you picked up this bloodied clothing until today it’s shown up in a courtroom. So they have none of that power or authority. But they do have the power and authority to basically decide, as the ambassador said, whether or not this guy should be sacked. He almost never is. So what happens with these people who have been accused of grievous crimes? They are hidden under the system and they never face justice. And the U.N. explains that as we don’t want to violate the human rights of our staff who might be subjected to substandard beliefs and law enforcement and judicial systems, to which the Code Blue Campaign responds, who are you to decide which is a failed state? You’re not the Security Council, you’re not the General Assembly, you’re simply individuals who have jobs at the U.N. You can’t declare a state a failed state and say we are going to circumvent the law in this particular country. So we’re saying, if we’re at an impasse here, if you’re saying I won’t throw these people to the wolves, my people to the wolves, and I will not allow the government, this peacekeeping country, to prosecute this, to investigate and prosecute our people because they’re so substandard, then what we’re saying is the U.N., the member states must create a special court mechanism for these particular countries. Make a list of all the countries whose systems you do not trust, whose law enforcement and judicial systems you have no faith in, and create a special court mechanism that’s independent from, unbiased, and not reporting to the secretary-general or any part of the—of the U.N., the bureaucracy—and I’m not saying that as a pejorative term—reporting directly to the member states. And this special court mechanism would have its own intake officers. It would have its own lawyers. It would have its own police detectives and law enforcement function and would have its own judiciary so that people in the country of Central African Republic could know that if they wanted to—if they had been raped by a civilian person working under the aegis of the United Nations, they could go to an independent office, report the crime, make sure that it was investigated thoroughly and fully by people who really have the jurisdiction to do so vested in them by the United Nations member states, and then they could be brought to trial, prosecuted, and imprisoned if necessary. And yes, they might also be fired at that point by the United Nations, maybe that would be enough to get the guy fired, but at least there would be a path to justice. But before we can even—we can even lobby successfully for such a—for such a solution, which is only, of course, a path to justice for a small percentage of the people who are committing these crimes, because if you commit a crime in, you know, a refugee camp in Tanzania or something, then maybe the United Nations bureaucrats will decide that that country does have a standard-level jurisdiction and they do trust certain countries. When I asked, so is it all peacekeeping countries that you distrust, I was told by the under-secretary-general for improving the United Nation’s response, Jane Holl Lute, she said pretty much. And I said, but, you know, can you give us a list, these are the ones that we don’t trust and, therefore, we’re going to circumvent them, these are the ones we do trust? And she said I know it when I see it. And I said, Cyprus? She said no, Cyprus is fine, which she’s now, coincidentally, the special envoy for Cyprus at the same time as she is this under-secretary-general for improving United Nation’s response to sexual exploitation and abuse, which says something troubling to me about the importance that the secretary-general attaches to this issue, that his most senior-level person now has only a part-time job to focus on this. And clearly, it’s not improved yet. But in order to give the evidence to the United Nations member states that they need about how pervasive and deep and hidden and dreadful this problem is—and all those adjectives apply as well to the way they’re handled in an ad hoc and its sort of make-it-up-as-you-go-along way by the various—by the dozens of different entities within the United Nations—and things just—these horrible allegations that drastically change people’s lives for the worse are simply swept under the rug, and they go on and on and on for years. In order for the member states to know what we know as the Code Blue Campaign by virtue of leaked documents and people coming to us with information and doing extensive research, the member states need to know what’s happening in real time. You need to be able to see what we see, just snapshots of when someone, who’s desperate, who’s been through the system, comes to us and says I reported this crime and here’s what happened, you can’t imagine how poorly this was handled. And then we start to look into it, we get leaked copies of documents that are protected by immunity, and we see just how bad it is. We’re also suggesting a temporary independent oversight panel created by member states so that you can have experts who are available, you know, to dip in at any moment, who get a copy of every single report that’s made of any sexual offense at all throughout the system. And like the—for those of us who are American, like the Internal Revenue Service, although they’re not going to follow every single tax return and make sure that every line is correct, they have the authority to do that. So at any moment, someone from the temporary independent oversight panel gets a copy of an allegation that is made and then has the authority, without the hindrance of immunity, because they’re empowered by the U.K. and the other member states, to be part of the bubble, so immunity doesn’t apply to them, they can say I want to sit in on the interview, I want to see every single email and document that is exchanged about this allegation, I want to know what you’re doing with this person right now, I want to know whether or not that person is still in your employ and whether or not his passport has been held. I want to sit in. As you’re collecting the evidence, I want to look at the evidence, I want to know where you’re keeping the evidence, and follow this case from beginning to end, see the standard of proof that’s applied by UNHCR versus UNICEF versus the World Food Programme versus the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, get a bird’s eye view in real time, go back to the member states and say this is just a snapshot, but it’s this bad, the problem is this pervasive and this deep, and this is how poorly the bureaucracy is dealing with it. BIGIO: OK. So we’ll open it up now for questions and answers. So if you could please raise your placard if you have a question, we’ll try to get to as many as we can. So if you could keep your questions as concise as you can, that would be helpful. Q: Hi. Howard Stoffer. I’m now a professor at the University of New Haven, but still an advisor to the previous office, I was the head of the Counterterrorism Executive Directorate at the Security Council. I agree with everything you’re saying, Ms. Donovan. It is—it’s pervasive. But, you know, first of all, the P’s and I’s that U.N. personnel have are not the same as the P’s and I’s that diplomats have under the—(off mic)—convention. They’re more abridged. The problem that I think Jane Lute was reluctant to talk about is the fact that, you know, if you’re working for the member states, you can’t declare that one member state has an inadequate, you know, system for adjudication of justice. And for the U.N. to declare that would be—would be very problematic. How do you decide what standards are going to be used, et cetera? And I’m not trying to criticize the steps you’ve been describing. And, you know, if somebody were to be adjudicated by this other body that you’ve created, where would they be imprisoned? It’s one of the big problems that, you know, they’ve had with, you know, in the African missions and in the—and in Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia state. You know, where to you—fortunately, the Netherlands has agreed to take a lot of these people. But I don’t really see U.N. personnel being imprisoned in the Netherlands or anywhere else. It’s a much more—it’s much more a political issue about, how do you go about doing this? I remember when I was—when I had a staff member who came in drunk every day for six months and eventually was found in hospitals around New York City. I terminated her contract. She went to the tribunals and it took two years with hard evidence to be able to get her fired. It just—it just—it takes that kind of effort. You’re absolutely right, I think there needs to be some kind of—and every year when I used to be a Fifth Committee member for the U.S. missions for the U.N., which is torture—(laughter)—because they’re all going down to the Christmas deadline—system of justice, how do you fund it, how do you expand it, how do you improve it is always an issue. I think maybe the first step could be that—and I’m sorry this is not a question, but I just—I couldn’t resist. I normally don’t raise my placard first. But have a commission of the Security Council look into what recommendations could be made for a swifter system of adjudication of these kind of charges. And you may remember that the head of procurement at one point had his immunity lifted and he’s now serving time in a New York prison. So it is possible to prosecute U.N. personnel. And one thought that came to me when I was working there for many years was, if somebody is charged with a crime in another country and since the headquarters is here in the United States, they’ll force them to come back to the United—come back to headquarters, and then they get charged. The secretary-general lifts their immunity and then they get charged with these crimes in an American court. And that might be the path to trying to get this done. I’m not sure how the Americans might feel about that. And that’s a very tough road to go, but I think it’s more realistic even than some of the outline you have for something that might be much further in the future. So my apologies for talking so long. But thank you. BIGIO: All right. Do you want to reflect on that? PIERCE: I’m very happy to respond quickly. BIGIO: Sure, yeah. PIERCE: Or you can take a number of questions if you’d prefer. BIGIO: We’ll take them one at a time. PIERCE: Oh, OK. PIERCE: I think, you know, you’re right. There’s something about waiving immunity that all diplomatic services, including the U.N., practice or don’t practice, depending on their assessment of local justice. And the U.N. is no different about that. I haven’t studied the notion that you might come to a U.S. Court. But as I mentioned at the start, when I look at this, I find myself inexorably drawn to the conclusion that there should be—it should be part of the headquarters agreement with the United States of America, possibly with the Swiss in respect of Geneva as well, given how many agencies are headquartered in Geneva, because I don’t think there’s a perfect model, but I think that might actually get around some of the intractable problems. I suppose the other thing you could do is just have it agreed with each member state that they would always prosecute their own nationals, even if not seconded personnel, but U.N. staff. But then I think you get into Paula’s issue that the documents and the evidence itself from the location of the crime would then be subject to all sorts of complicated immunities. But we ought to be able to sit down and discuss all this rationally and see if we can find a way through. DONOVAN: Just quickly to the point of where do the people get—where are they imprisoned. We had a Chatham House meeting that Jessica and Larry—and I think that’s it from this room—attended, and for a couple of days we banged out the details of the special court mechanism and looked at all the legal hurdles. And basically, I think everyone in the room concluded that, yes, there are things that are fascinating to lawyers and need to be worked out, such as, should they be—should people be imprisoned in the Netherlands? Is that more or less a violation of their rights? But the reality is those are things that the U.N. is very good at. So I’m here criticizing the U.N. for things that they’re not good at. But what they are good at is basically working out the details. And there are a zillion committees that can do that sort of thing. This is not rocket science. So questions like—while it’s a—it’s a vexing one, where should people be detained, to say, because we have questions like that, people should be able to get—people who work for the United Nations, who are civilian personnel in countries X, Y, and Zed should all—I can’t believe I just said “zed,” I’m American—(laughter)— PIERCE: Come to the other side. (Laughter.) DONOVAN: —should get away with these crimes because it’s going to be so difficult to work out where they should be imprisoned that we should just basically fire them and let them be on their way. BIGIO: We’ve got—Evelyn did you want to— Q: Hi. Evelyn Leopold, correspondent at the U.N. Ambassador, for the last year, we have been hearing about UNAIDS, and the allegations are either that the top management is involved in sexual abuse or they’re covering up for people who are involved. How long does it take to resolve this? Cannot the secretary-general say you guys are gone? PIERCE: I can’t remember, I’m afraid, what the secretary-general’s authority is in respect to UNAIDS because each agency has a slightly different charter and governance. But I do know that the report is due to be published soon. And I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t think it’s going to be helpful for me to comment until I’ve seen that report. But, you know, it’s a serious issue, obviously, and it needs dealing with. But I think better to talk about it once we have the report. DONOVAN: Sure, can I just help with the—with the jurisdiction of UNAIDS? The secretary-general appoints both the under-secretary-general, Michel Sidibé, and the assistant-secretaries-general, including Luiz Loures. So Luiz Loures was the man who was accused of sexual assault of a colleague, and Michel Sidibé is the person who is accused of covering up the investigation. And they are directly appointed by and extended by or fired by the secretary-general, who professed his loyalty to Michel Sidibé and said that he was completely supportive of him and allowed Luiz Loures to retire after a botched investigation exonerated him. And then the secretary-general, under public pressure by AIDS-Free World and others, felt compelled to say that he was reopening the investigation of Luiz Loures, given new information that had come to the fore. The man is how retired, there’s not a thing that the secretary-general can hold over his head. He’s now retired, living off of his pension in Geneva. And Michel Sidibé remains as the under-secretary-general for UNAIDS. And this independent expert panel, which was sort of a halfway point, let’s not go over the details of who’s guilty of dreadful leadership and abuse of power and that sort of thing, let’s not go into the details of people, let’s just talk about policies and procedures, this independent expert panel worked for six months and it was actually—the U.K., as you know, is the chair of the governing body of UNAIDS. So under the auspices of the U.K. this independent expert panel was struck. It worked for six months, it interviewed many people, including me, for hours and hours. And apparently, they came up with such dreadful results that they couldn’t keep it specifically on policies and procedures, they had to get into the details of leadership. I have heard that the recommendation of this independent expert panel, among the recommendations, is to dismiss the senior leaders, Michel Sidibé and others. But yesterday, the report had been announced by the U.K.’s chairperson Danny Graymore. It had been announced that this report would be published online and made public yesterday by close of business. And at the eleventh hour after the UNAIDS management saw the contents of the report, including, coincidentally, let’s get rid of the under-secretary-general, they moved heaven and earth to suppress the report. And it’s now, you know, stuck in debate whether or not the initial declaration by Danny Graymore of the U.K., the chair of the committee, that this report would see—would be public yesterday. You know, how long is it going to take and will it ever see the light of day? BIGIO: Got late-breaking news and much to follow as this case and circumstance continue to unfold. Jessica? Q: Thank you. I wish that late-breaking news was surprising in some way, but, of course, we’ve seen that so many times. Many decades ago, I work in the U.N. Administrative Tribunal. And we handled a lot of these cases, so I saw it from the inside. And I know that structures have changed a lot in the administrative system of justice, but it doesn’t seem like much else has really changed. You know, there’s a culture. And it’s not just a U.N. culture as we’re seeing, it’s, you know, I don’t know who the wolves are. It’s pretty much every government in the world now that’s facing a #MeToo kind of expose of how imperfect the judicial system is. But it does seem like there’s a jurisdictional gap. There’s not a criminal jurisdiction for these people. And I think the New York court idea is very interesting. But, of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is, you know, all the witnesses and all the evidence are not in New York, so that makes it very difficult to do justice. And the idea of some more-mobile type of court structure is appealing. I’m not sure that it matters that much whether it’s controlled by governments or the U.N. because, in the end, I’m not sure who I would trust more, if any of them, to do justice, because it’s really almost kind of the same set of issues. And that really leads me to my question, which is, we do have these administrative procedures in the U.N. They’re not working well, which leads me to believe that no criminal—firstly, I guess a question on the criminal jurisdiction is, no matter what court you set up, you would probably have to change the agreements with the troop-contributing country agreements. How realistic is that, because somehow they would have to, I guess, allow for that jurisdiction wherever it is? And then, really, I guess my question is, isn’t this really a problem of political will? I mean, even the procedures that we have, people started getting fired in a regular way, which is completely possible within the scope of the rules. Wouldn’t that change the culture more dramatically than creating a new structure with the same people running it who can’t even use the structures they have in place? BIGIO: Paula, do you want to reflect? Is this a question of political will? PIERCE: Do you want to go first? DONOVAN: I think we probably agree. (Laughter.) Yes, they said in unison. BIGIO: Well, in the interest of bringing more questions in, I think we can bring more in and then reflect as well on the point that you’ve put on the table, Jessica. Simon? Q: Well, thank you. Thanks to both presenters, I think, for very interesting presentations. First, I would say no organization has done more than Code Blue in the last three years to push this issue forward. Seriously, we would not be having these discussions if it weren’t for you, so thank you for doing that. And also, thank you for the U.K. for pushing on this issue in a humanitarian context, but also here at the U.N. We appreciate your leadership on that. I think, as Jessica mentioned before, there are really three gaps here. There’s the jurisdictional gaps, informational gaps in terms of reporting, disclosing, referrals, and political will in terms of shifting the culture. But the jurisdictional gap is fundamentally the one that I think Paula focused on, rightly so. And I just have some questions, I guess, about the special courts because I don’t think we can gloss over the technicalities of how these are run. Yes, the U.N. is good at forming committees; no, they’re not good at agreeing to things. So I guess a few questions. First of all, would it only deal with SEA? Second, who would decide which states are the ones that don’t have judicial systems that be appropriate? Third, what laws would be defined? How would they be defined? And who would agree to them? Fourth, if not all states agree to it, would this be able to take off? Because management and reform issues in the Fifth Committee, that our colleague mentioned, the reason why they go until December is because they decide by consensus. So if we don’t have consensus, how do we have that? And related to that, how do you ensure the U.N.’s cooperation if you don’t have consensus within the U.N.? And then beyond that, how do you actually preserve the independence of those courts, because it’s not clear to me that member states will be interested in preserving the independence? And if the decision-making structures are so that they allow one country to veto or to stop or to block consensus, we might end up in a very—a position that’s worse than what we have now. BIGIO: We’re going to take one last question and then we’ll have final thoughts from our speakers. Q: Thank you so much. Just building on the points already raised by Jessica and Simon. Sarah Taylor, IPI. I run our Women, Peace, and Security Program there. Simon covered a couple of my questions, including what crimes this court would deal with. I think that raises questions around sort of segmenting off a particular type of felony or a particular type of grave crime, particularly when people in these contexts are often subjected to and victims of multiple different types of assaults and crimes. But I want to actually pull on that point a little bit and ask both the ambassador and Paula the extent to which these solutions are, as much as possible, survivor and victim driven, and the consultations around and with people who have been subjected to these—to these crimes, you know, clearly, that was a point that was raised in 2272, but it remains a sort of often missing piece of the puzzle. BIGIO: Ambassador? PIERCE: Well, thank you. I mean, I also struggle a little bit with how a special court would get around some of the jurisdictional issues because I would worry in particular that if rape were not a crime in country X, where would that then leave you? And sad to say, there are some countries where it isn’t a crime. So if you start from the premise that you have to look for something special vis-à-vis the United Nations, and I think you go down lots of other avenues, and I think we should definitely have a policy conversation about that at some point. Our parliament is also very interested and they came out, our development committee came out, talked to the U.N., talked to others about this. So rather than me rehearse those policy questions, I think it’s something we should make a determined effort to think through before we take it to any particular part of the U.N. But I think it is just worth emphasizing what Simon said about the way U.N. takes decisions. It does take them in this sort of area by consensus. And if we call for votes, the more progressive point of view is likely to lose. So it’s not as—it ought to be straightforward and everybody ought to be absolutely horrified by these crimes, but very unfortunately, in the world of the U.N., they are not. And therefore, we need to give some thought to how we would actually take things forward. I’m wondering, though it doesn’t meet the real test, but I’m wondering, in response to Sarah’s question, whether a part of the answer, possibly as an interim answer, is to focus much more on survivors and victims and compensation and something around the way one would deal with person-to-person complaints. As I said, it’s inadequate for dealing with serious crimes, but it may be more achievable in the short term than some of the harder matters that we’re all interested in. And I wouldn’t see them as exclusive anyway, but I think we could start doing much more on that level than on some of the others. But I’m quite interested in what would happen if a U.N. staff member murdered another member in a foreign posting. And let’s say it was a crime over which there was some doubt. Let’s take crime of passion for want of a better one. You know, not everyone sees crime of passion as outright murder. I mean, I’m not a lawyer, so forgive the amateurish way I’m describing this, but you get—you get my point. The U.N. would surely have a way of reacting if one staff member killed another. So how do we—how do we get at that? And how do we build on that to do something about this issue? And I don’t have an answer to that, but it strikes me we should look into that at a policy level as well. BIGIO: Paula? DONOVAN: Peacekeeping countries that require the help of the international community appeal to the United Nations to become peacekeeping countries. And it’s part of a bargain. So if you have a substandard judicial and law enforcement system and you want to be a peacekeeping country, then you agree to a special court mechanism, so it’s as easy as that, which answers the question of which states. There would have to be an international statute against—precedents for this. The International Criminal Court is probably the most problematic, but there are precedents for international statutes and that would be applied in these special court mechanisms. How to ensure the U.N.’s independence? I’m rarely the only person—the biggest defender of the United Nations sitting in a room, but I sense that that might be—that might be the case here. If you believe in multilateralism, you must suspend your disbelief that the United Nations is capable of doing anything. We either take the U.N. as it is with all its flaws and its cumbersomeness and we try to work out a way that 193 member states can be entrusted to do certain work, or we say forget it, let’s disband it and start from scratch, and let Donald Trump emerge as the—as the—as the world leader. So I think we simply have to accept the foibles of the United Nations if we believe in multilateralism. Whether or not it should be survivor and victim driven, I think that, as you were saying, Ambassador, if there—if there were murders that were happening in the U.N. at the rate that there are cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, even let’s just take the most grievous ones, let’s just take violent rape, if we had as many murders in the U.N. as we have violent rapes in the U.N. that are reported, then absolutely we would need a special court mechanism for the murderers in the U.N. who are getting away with it. But this has been described by Ban Ki-moon as a cancer on the system, by Antonio Guterres and the other candidates for secretary-general as something—it was one of the few questions they needed to address when they were applying for the job. This has been isolated as a serious problem for which impunity reigns. The victims and the—and the survivors of these crimes, like any victims and survivors, should certainly have their voices heard and should have their opinions heard, and they should be part of the solutions. That’s why, if you go onto our website, you’ll see that we’re—that we are undertaking community consultations with former and current and future—former and current peacekeeping countries, the communities within them, and talking to individual community members, and asking them for their expertise, not just their sad stories, but their expertise. But you can’t have crimes driven, the punishment for crimes and the adjudication of crimes, driven by the victims. They simply are—that’s not the way—the way we protect ourselves as a human community by having the people who are unlucky enough to have been subjected to this particular crime drive the response and whether or not—whether or not those criminals should continue to be at large or whether they should be apprehended and punished and in what way. BIGIO: Well, there’s much more to cover in this discussion. But please join me in thanking the ambassador and Paula. (Applause.) (END)

Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year, but governments have struggled to address it. Though Latin America has made significant progress in empowering women, gender-based violence remains widespread throughout the region. From the classroom to the workforce, gender-based violence stymies opportunity and undermines development. Rosa Celorio and Julie T. Katzman discussed what governments in Latin America are doing to reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms, as well as through shifts in cultural norms.     BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Good afternoon, everybody. I think we’re going to get started. So my name is Carrie Bettinger-Lόpez. It’s wonderful to see so many folks in the room, many old friends and colleagues and new faces as well. So it’s wonderful to be hosting this today. I am an adjunct senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I also teach at University of Miami Law School where I direct the Human Rights Clinic. And here at the Women in Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, we’re very focused on analyzing how we can elevate the status of women and girls around the world to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. A reminder that today’s program is on the record. So I’d like to just start giving a little bit of an overview on the theme of today, which is the economic cost of gender-based violence in Latin America. Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year but governments around the world have struggled to address it with thinking about strategies, and we don’t oftentimes think about that economic cost factor when we, and I count myself amongst this, when we as advocates or we as policymakers are thinking about approaches to gender-based violence. Oftentimes, the economic cost is either separated or not considered when we’re focused on policy approaches, and today’s roundtable and much of the work of the folks in this room is committed to thinking about a more integrated approach there. Throughout Latin America, we’ve made significant progress in empowering women and gender-based violence, however, remains a widespread problem and a public health concern and a criminal justice problem. The Pan-American Health Organization reports that two out of three women killed in Central America are killed for reasons related to their gender, and a 2018 survey by Oxfam reported that most fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in eight Latin American countries believe that women are to blame for violence, including sexual assaults, because of the way they dress. And so our roundtable today focuses on how governments in Latin America can reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms as well as shifts in cultural norms, and we’re going to be taking a hard look at the numbers and at some innovative strategies from a financial perspective as well. I’m thrilled to introduce our two speakers today, both friends and colleagues that I cherish and who are just doing really innovative and path-breaking work. To my immediate left is Rosa Celorio, and Rosa is the associate dean for international and comparative legal studies and the Burnett Family professorial lecturer in international law and comparative law and policy at George Washington University Law School. Previously, she served as a senior attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and she has a deep professional background in human rights, discrimination, and gender. Rosa, thank you for being with us today. We are also privileged to welcome Julie Katzman, who is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Inter-American Development Bank. Previously, Julie served as the general manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund, which provides grants that support private sector-led development benefiting the poor. Julie is a long-time investment banker and throughout her career she has been a champion of women’s economic empowerment. So please join me in welcoming Julie and Rosa. (Applause.) So our format for today is that—and those of you who have attended CFR roundtables know this format well—I’ll pose a series of questions to Julie and Rosa and we’ll engage in a dialogue, and that’ll happen for the first half of the program and then for the second half we’ll open it up to questions and when we do so if you could just take your name placard and place it vertically and then we will get to as many questions as we can. We’re looking forward to a robust dialogue. So, first, we want to lay the groundwork for the nature of the problem, right. I always tell my students that if we don’t understand the nature and prevalence we can’t think about solutions. So according to the United Nations, Rosa, Latin America and the Caribbean is considered the most violent region in the world for women. Femicide occurs on a, quote, “devastating scale,” according to the U.N., in Central America, where two out of three women who are murdered die because of their gender—a statistic that I just mentioned. What factors contribute to such high rates of violence against women and can you talk about some of the consequences, whether they’d be about migration or access to education, employment, political participation, or likewise? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie, and good afternoon. It’s really an honor to be here to be able to spend this time with you, to be joined by such a distinguished group of panelists and to really be discussing such a timely issue in Latin America. I really like the way Carrie started this panel talking about the nature of the issue because at the end of the day, when we’re thinking of strategies governments can employ, part of the challenge that we have in Latin America is that we’re still learning not only about the widespread nature of gender-based violence but also its features, its components—who are the women affected and how to engage the different levels of a specific state or country in addressing this issue. So in terms of the nature of the issue, I think it’s important to highlight, again, that gender-based violence in Latin America is still a very widespread issue. It’s a major human rights issue. The numbers speak for themselves. When you study the numbers of international organizations, most of them really highlight one in three women and girls that are affected by different forms of violence, and Latin America is not an exception in that trend. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about the Latin America context is that there are certain forms of gender-based violence that have had a significant amount of documentation, like, for example, gender-motivated killings, forms of sexual violence and torture, and domestic violence. But every day there are other, I would say, forms of gender-based violence that have been there historically but now they’re really coming more to the forefront or at least they’re starting to be more documented or at least more understood, even though maybe the international community hasn’t necessarily caught up entirely to where these forms should be in terms of how to address them or even governments themselves. Like, for example, sexual harassment, I would say, is one of the forms. Online violence against women is one of the forms as well. Economic violence and the way access and control of economic resources can be used not only in the home but outside of the home to actually produce violence against women. These are all concepts that we’re starting to understand better now and you see a lot of governments starting to pay attention to them but not necessarily with all the guidelines necessary. So this is why the work of so many organizations is important here. And I think if we’re talking about the factors and the consequences, I think another very important feature of gender-based violence is the amount of settings where it occurs, right. It occurs in the family. It occurs in schools and employment places, in health institutions, in entertainment and press outlets, in political venues, in prisons, and many other settings. It really occurs everywhere and we’re starting to understand or at least grasp what that means in terms of a notion and in terms of a problem to address, and we have a range of actors involved. We have government actors that can be perpetrators. We have private actors that can be perpetrators as well. So that adds to the complexity of the problem. In terms of factors, it’s very difficult to understand or deconstruct why gender-based violence is in Latin America or anywhere, really, without understanding discrimination and without understanding stereotypes and they need to really address this historical discrimination, how it’s ingrained in social norms, and also the conceptualization of stereotypes and how they affect the actions of all levels at the state level in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and I would say this is a global problem as well. I think we still have a problem of social tolerance of violence and the view that this is normal, that this is just part of our day-to-day lives. High levels of poverty are not very helpful to reducing levels of gender-based violence. In Latin America, you see something really interesting, too. You see a lot of women now assuming very important economic positions in their families and you see this evolution of the conceptualization of the family in Latin America, and it’s interesting how now we’re starting to understand how that can fuel domestic violence, how that can produce more gender-based violence, and you see also women every day occupying more public roles as human rights defenders, as women that are on the streets protesting not only gender-based violence but other gender issues and other social issues—women opposing extractive and investment projects, and all of this is producing also gender-based violence that we’re starting to understand and grasp, right, especially women that are working to defend sexual and reproductive rights for LGBTI issues or that are opposing extractive industries, right. And in terms of consequences—and there’s a lot that we can discuss here—one of them that’s very important, especially because this is a panel about economic cost, is the impact on women’s access to the labor market, and not only to access the labor market but to stay in the labor market, to be promoted in the labor market, and to really have a substantial control over economic resources, right. I think that’s a big consequence. Also, obstacles to really have that participation in public life or in political life or have decision-making positions in that regard I would say affects also under psychological and physical integrity including reproductive health consequences and forced migration, and there’s a lot of issues there. I mean, that’s a very complex issue that requires its own study in itself, and we’ll pause here because we have other—many other issues to discuss. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you, Rosa. Well, I’d like to pick up a little bit more on something you mentioned in terms of the actors who are responsible for the violence. And so you mentioned, you know, state actors and private actors—of course, also institutional actors. Could you talk a little bit more about the evolution in terms of international law and domestic law in terms of accountability and attribution of responsibility for the violence? Of course, kind of historically violence against women was—and gender-based violence were considered private matters, that individuals should, you know, resolve amongst themselves or that happened behind closed doors. And so could you talk about whether that—whether perceptions in Latin America are changing that kind of track these changes that we’re seeing in international law? CELORIO: I think that’s a wonderful question and I do think that you see some progress, and I think where the progress is is in discourse. I think what international law has given us and what the human rights framework in particular has given us, and this conceptualization of gender-based violence as a human rights violation, as a woman’s rights violation, is this understanding of gender-based violence as a public problem—as a problem the states need to tackle because it has social, economic, political consequences and many other consequences. And you see this in the discourse. When you talk to governments in Latin American countries, it’s very difficult right now to find a government that can deny publicly that they don’t have a major gender-based violence issue or that they don’t have major legislation on gender-based violence or a major national plan to address gender-based violence. It’s in the public discourse and it’s in the public mindset, right. But the problem is we have a huge distance between that public discourse and what happens on the ground. The problem is still endemic. Women are still victimized on a daily basis. So I think that what international law has been good about in Latin America particularly is piercing the family, right. It has entered the family. Like, at this stage, gender-based violence is not necessarily only a private issue anymore, at least in the public perception, right. But I think we still have a long way to go in terms of how do we translate that into an actual implementation of policies, of legislation, of programs, of services, that really help women and the prevention aspect. I think the prevention aspect we really have a lot to work on and there’s actually a lot of strategies there that you can think of that, in my view, are connected with international law but that really go beyond the realm of international law because, I mean, there are things like the economic empowerment of women, for example, the education of women, for example, fostering the leadership of women, for example—that that’s part international law but that’s part of a multidisciplinary strategy also at the national level. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. You’re getting me very excited about possibilities here. Great. Well, and I’d like to return in a little while to the question of some promising practices and examples that we might look to for future directions. Before we do that, in terms of continuing to lay the groundwork and to think about the nature of the problem, I’d like to turn to Julie now to talk about data and the importance of data. Could you tell us about what data we have on this issue? What do we have on gender-based violence, what are we missing, and why is data important? KATZMAN: OK. So I’ll put that in the context of you can tell I’m Inter-American Development Bank—the bank part versus the academic part. So I’ll be a little bit more transactional, shall we say— BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. KATZMAN: —because, in fact, all of this we’ve known for a long time and yet did we move the needle in the region in terms of what was happening. And we go to countries and sit with women’s ministries—called lots of different things but, generally, that—and along with the environment ministries, sadly, generally the weakest ministries in government. And so getting things done, getting resources, really hard, right. So I promise I’ll get to the answer on statistics. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: That’s OK. No. KATZMAN: But so we decided to take actually a page out of the climate change folks’ book where our climate change people said, OK, where’s the power, where’s the money—finance ministries. So we developed a type of loan product that is budget support and it requires governments to take on a set of policy reforms in order to get that kind of loan, and that worked in the climate space and we got countries energized around making major changes in climate environments. So we’ve taken that and applied it to gender and, actually, to disabilities. Why were we able to do it? Why were we able to get finance ministers to decide that this was a smart way—reason to borrow money? That goes to the data. So we know, thanks to GiZ that violence against women costs small and medium-size enterprises 6½ percent of GDP per year in Paraguay—Bolivia. Sorry—Bolivia. We know that it costs 2.4 percent of GDP in Paraguay and 3.6 percent of GDP in Peru. Those numbers are stunning, and when you say to a finance minister whose economy is growing 1, 2, 3 percent a year, look, this is the cost of gender-based violence in your country and if you can get your arms around that you can actually change your growth trajectory. That’s compelling. And so when the previous finance minister in Argentina where we did the first of these policy-based loans said to me, has the violence against women thing always been this bad or is it that we just, right—or it’s only now that we understand it. I said, right, so we can’t answer that question because we don’t know. We can imagine we know but we don’t know, and that’s why this loan is so important because a component of that loan is actually creating a national registry with a national standard around reports of gender-based violence. So, you know, those kinds of statistics that make this not just the right thing to do but the smart thing to do, the necessary thing to do, are what I think open the conversation in a very different way with very different actors to create different vectors to create change. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit more, Julie, about the economic aspects of violence against women? You already spoke about that, of course, and specifically, how is gender-based violence connected to access and control of economic resources? KATZMAN: Yeah. So let’s take another example. We created something called the Gender Transport Lab. It’s a collection of seven cities in the region who are part of the Gender Transport Lab that are looking at the criticality of transportation and the role it plays in economic empowerment, and violence in the transport system is actually a really important thing. So and it goes beyond violence, right. It’s, like, how do you include women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in the procurement value chain in transportation. It’s how do you think about equity in terms of pricing in transportation, because if you look at how a man uses transportation and how a woman uses transportation, when the majority of primary care givers are women you find that a woman will get onto a form of transport and drop off, say, a child at school, get back on transport, drop off another child at school, get back on transport, go to work. If that woman is charged three fares and a man just gets on transport and gets off at work, there’s an inequity problem there, right. So this covers a broad range of issues around transport. But on violence, you know, there’s a lot of experimentation going on because transport’s connection to economic empowerment is really huge. So some countries are experimenting with single-sex cars—metro subway cars or buses. You know, the vote is out because if you look at those single-sex cars in São Paulo on an average evening you will not find that there are only women in those cars. But there are other experiments going on as well. For example, in Quito they put a—let’s call it a panic button—on the bus and what that does is it notifies the driver that there’s a problem, and at the next stop the police are there and they address the person who’s the perpetrator. And about six months ago, the first case was fully adjudicated and this guy, who was groping a woman, went to jail for thirteen months. I mean, I think that that is the kind of intervention that you need to see if you’re going to interrupt those kinds of blockages in front of women in terms of economic empowerment. If the culture of impunity—if people see that someone goes to jail and they go to jail for a serious period of time, then I think we can begin to change behavior and remove some of those impediments. You know, there’s the other piece of this, which is less directly about violence. We have launched something called the Gender Parity Task Forces in Chile, Panama, soon to be in Argentina, and one or two other countries, and those task forces look at the economic gender gap—the gap in wages, labor force participation, and the seniority of women—and it’s a public-private initiative where public sector and private sector companies join the initiative and agree to move the needle on two of those three gaps over a three-year period of time. Well, if there is more equity in the workplace, this also goes to the overall view of how women are seeing what kind of gender parity exists in the dialogue of the country and we see that as playing a less direct but an important role. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. Thank you. So we’ve now kind of bridged into thinking about programs and solutions, and I’d like to move back to Rosa to talk a little bit about legislative and policy reforms at the governmental level. So the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law report has noted that all the countries in Latin America have legislation that protect women from domestic violence and most of the countries have legislation addressing sexual harassment in employment, though not all, as you noted. So could you talk about—a little bit more, as you alluded to earlier, about the next steps in legislation and policy to address violence against women in these various places and sectors? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think Latin America has been—it’s a fascinating place to study when it comes to legislation because, I mean, it has— KATZMAN: Lots of it. CELORIO: It has tons of it. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: (Inaudible.) CELORIO: Tons of it in on gender-based violence, right? I mean, it has been amazing all the legislation that we’ve had on different forms of gender-based violence, and I come from the human rights world, right. I mean, I worked thirteen years at Inter-American System of Human Rights and every time we had a hearing with a government on gender-based violence, the governments would come in and they would be, like, look at all of my legislation. Look at all of my policies. Look at all of my programs, and they were impressive. So I have to say that my read is that those are steps that we have to recognize from governments. The problem is that usually those formal steps are not consonant with what’s happening on the ground. I mean, at the end of the day, you can have the most beautiful piece of legislation but if you don’t have adequate funding or training of public officials of how to implement it or basically a set of regulations to make sure that this is properly applied by different officials in the government system, if you have different languages in a country—I’ve worked extensively with indigenous peoples, for example, and women of African descent and a lot of women that speak different languages in different countries and they weren’t familiar with the legislation on gender-based violence. They didn’t have sufficient information or they didn’t have any participation in this legislation. Because that’s part of the problem also. We have this beautiful legislation but it’s legislation that has been adopted maybe by a very small group that doesn’t really represent, you know, the diversity in women—the different ethnicities, the different races, the different economic decisions. So there are a lot of problems in the text of legislation but also in the way that the legislation is implemented as well. I think legislation is not enough and I think we’ve learned that and we’ve known this for a really long time as well. Legislation is just one step forward. I mean, there’s a lot of strategies and, I would say, a multilayer set of strategies that involve many different sectors that you really need to be able to address a problem as vast as gender-based violence, right. and I really think that we have to go beyond the legal strategies. Even though I’m a lawyer by training, at the end of the day, one thing that I’ve learned working with gender issues is that you need to go beyond the law, right. You need to work with the health sector. You need to work with the education sector. You need to work with the economic sector. You need to work with both public and private entities. You need to work with corporations, with individuals. You really have to work with a range of persons in sectors to be able to address this problem, and we really have to start studying—and I think this needs more studying—how to adequately prevent. In international human rights law we’re very good at saying prevention, prevention, prevention is so important. Prevention. You know, it’s our—it’s our main line, right. But what is prevention? How do you really prevent, right? And I think it’s something that we really have to examine and also what does it mean to have the adequate availability of legal avenues and reporting conditions. One thing that we have learned with the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we have all these women voicing their experiences and voicing things that should have been voiced for a really long time but now we have more conditions to be able to do so. But what happens next, right? Where are the reporting mechanisms? Where are the legal avenues? What kind of reform are we going to see after this? What is our response to the #MeToo movement? You know, and that’s really where we are and we have to figure out what is an adequate response there. I think also the tools to economically empower women are very important. One thing that we have learned is the more economically empowered a woman, is the least likely or at least maybe a little bit less exposure, maybe—or at least more control in how to respond to that exposure. But the exposure is still there because all women experience gender-based violence in some way or the other. But at least economic empowerment could give you more tools to respond, to report, to defend yourself, right. So we have to think about how to economically empower women, how to expose them more to education, how to expose them more to access, to quality and decent employment, opportunities to access public domains. I mean, I think the more we see women in public office, for me, it’s a fascinating process that we’re seeing in countries like the United States where you have more women entering public life. What does that mean? You know, where are the conditions, you know? How do you facilitate or motivate that women actually enter public office? I think that’s very important to address problems like gender-based violence, right. I think one big challenge that we have is intersectionality and how to address the diversity of experiences that women have. And I can tell you this. Coming from a regional human rights protection system, we talk so much about intersectionality and the need to incorporate the different experiences and races and ethnicities and economic positions and conditions that women may have and how all these factors can combine to expose a woman more to violence. But there was really little understanding of what that meant in terms of a legislation or a program or a service or how do you properly include these women in the development of laws and public policies and reforms. We talk so much about intersectionality but I think we’re still at a point where we really have to start adding more practical components to what that means in practice, right. And I think also we have these amazing international platforms like the Sustainable Development Goals, for example. International development efforts. I’m sitting next to, you know, a very important representative from the Inter-American Development Bank. I used to work at the OAS and the Human Rights Commission. How do you combine the human rights framework with international development efforts? I mean, I think there’s a lot there to be said in terms of also combining strategies because at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s only a legal problem. But one thing that we do know is that when we’re talking about one in three women around the world, this is a problem that needs more resources, needs more thinking, needs more strategizing. But I think we have to start thinking outside of a box. I think we’re at a moment where we have a lot of tools there. We have a lot of legislation. We have a lot of formal steps. But we’re not necessarily at a point where we can really say this is what we should be doing, you know, to really address this or to change women’s lives and that’s really what we need to do. I mean, that’s really the next step in many ways. KATZMAN: Can I jump in? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Please. KATZMAN: So the tools beyond laws, right. So first I’ll tell a story of a law, which is as a result of the Gender Parity Task Force in Argentina. We found a law from the 1920s that prohibited women from operating heavy machinery. It’s still on the books. So really high-paying jobs in ports, roadworks, et cetera, against the law actually to hire women, which there were a minority of women being hired but until we went looking we didn’t know, great, yeah, lots of laws to protect women that actually are doing the reverse. So there’s that piece of laws as well. But, you know, I think there’s a broad range of tools that we think about. One is transparency and knowledge. So, you know, the launch of the Mexican National Data Bank and Information Center—I wrote it down so I actually said it right this time—I think is important because now there’s actually out there a transparent platform that the government owns that is tracking and putting out there gender-based violence statistics for everyone to see and when everyone sees them they get horrified and then, you know, the population kind of goes, oh, what are we doing. So I think that’s an important tool and creating the similarity of the way people start to look at these statistics so that they’re comparable across countries. Second, you know, the IDB has created a model that’s most robust, let’s say, in El Salvador, Ciudad Mujer, which is an integrated way to look at treating victims of those who experience gender-based violence but also a more holistic way to look at their health, their economic opportunities, and to bring the state to bear in terms of investigation and prosecution. Third is technology. So in Uruguay, we know—and Carrie, you certainly know better than I think probably most in this room—you know, the restraining order is a very flawed instrument. But using, like, ankle monitoring-type GPS-based technology for those on whom restraining orders have been placed so that if they’re violating the restraining order it’s being monitored in real time police can be dispatched so that tragedy does not happen. And then financial tools. So there’s a website that I encourage everybody to look at called asyousow.org and they launched last month a tool that lets you look at every single mutual fund and ETF in this country, and then it’s got a score based on the companies in which it invests and how well each one of those companies do on gender policies and—OK, there are two categories. They sound kind of alike. I pulled up the page so I can say it right. Gender balance and gender policies, and under gender policies, for example, are protections for employees reporting harassment and initiatives to reduce trafficking in human rights risks throughout their supply chain. So you look at your own 401(k) and you say, well, I’ve got this T. Rowe fund and I’ve got that BlackRock fund and I’ve got that PAC Zelidate (ph) fund. I care about this. So let’s see how they all do. And then you go to your employer and you say, you know what, we shouldn’t be in that fund because we need to move money toward companies that are doing the right thing and away from companies that are doing the wrong thing. And the other tool that I’ll mention on that is the Criterion Institute, which has created something called the Trillion Dollar Campaign, and it’s a really fascinating thing that they’ve done, which is they’re getting institutional investors to sign what I will call a letter of intent which says, in effect, I really wish that the money that we invest was being invested in ways that had an impact on gender-based violence. So it doesn’t require somebody to do something. It isn’t a divestment approach. It’s saying we really want our money to help move things in this direction and in parallel with that is work to say what are some of the things money could be invested in to actually move the needle on gender-based violence. And when a trillion dollars starts to speak things start to happen, and that’s the underlying thought there and they’re already at close to $100 billion. Yeah. And so we don’t necessarily think about financial tools as a big tool in the tool set. I think it’s going to become and is becoming an increasingly important tool. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. I have one last question and then we’d like to open it up. Rosa, you mentioned #MeToo, and, of course, #MeToo is kind of hanging over all work around the world right now in terms of thinking about kind of what it means for movement building, what it means for institutional and legal change. So can you talk a little bit more about the #MeToo movement in Latin America? Any promising developments? Any places we should be watching, where it’s reached, where it hasn’t? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think it’s a movement that has had a very interesting impact in Latin America. I think where you’ve seen it more publicly is in the streets and the movements on the streets. Women every day are marching in the streets of Latin American countries demanding accountability and more serious attention to gender-based violence, and we have well-known campaigns in that regard like #NiUnoMenos, for example, the 16 Days of Activism. Like, some of the historical campaigns have also been focusing on the #MeToo movement as well in Latin America. So it’s really interesting to see that. I think it’s very interesting also in Latin America on gender-based violence the activity of the movement itself, you know, of the woman’s rights movement itself and what they have been focusing on and what they’re focusing on right now. I mean, it’s a movement that has evolved historically in terms of what they’re focusing on and right now they have specific fears and concerns that they’re voicing and a lot of it is connected to the #MeToo movement and what has been happening globally, in my view. There’s fears for a regression of rights. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of #MeToo concerns, a lot of documentation of stories, a lot of women coming out with their stories, but also a lot of documentation of what we—fears that we have with specific legislation, with specific—that the steps that or the gains that the women have had to make sure that we don’t lose them, right, in Latin America, and this is probably the most palpable in sexual and reproductive rights. I mean, at the end of the day, even though this is a roundtable on gender-based violence, when you’re thinking of gender issues in Latin America and when you’re thinking of mobilization issues, it’s very difficult to divide gender-based violence from anything happening with sexual reproductive rights and it’s seen as something very interconnected and it is very interconnected in international law. So there’s a lot of fears of regression there. There’s also a lot of fears of this interpretation of what gender is—the contemporary interpretation of what the gender term is or what we have gained in international law when it comes to this gender perspective. There’s a lot of fears toward the gender ideology—I’m sure a lot of you work with gender ideology directly—this interpretation or misinterpretation of gender or what has been defined as international law of this gender perspective that is supposed to be empowering women, that is supposed to be addressing discrimination historically, that is supposed to be addressing gender-based violence to this term that’s supposed to be promoting patriarchalism and traditional notions of the family, right. So there’s a lot of misuse also of language that has been a game and there needs to be not only a redefinition but also highlighting what the real or at least the international law accepted definitions are of this term, so especially gender. So that’s a big fear, I think, of the movement right now. A lot of the human rights, especially the woman’s rights movement, is really fearful of its defenders right now. I mean, probably from the situations that I’ve studied in gender-based violence in Latin America one of the most concerning right now is the situation of women human rights defenders in general. We see killings on a daily basis. We see harassment on a daily basis. We see acts of sexual violence on a daily basis against women human rights defenders for the causes that they defend, for the context where they’re working, for basically defying what the social expectation is of a woman in a society because they’re holding leadership roles. I think it’s a situation of a lot of concern and I know a lot of the woman’s rights movement is very concerned about the situation and this has been the subject of a lot of documentation by not only the Americas’ human rights system but also the United Nations’ system, and I think a lot of women in Latin America are wondering what comes next. If you have #NiUnoMenos, if you have the #MeToo movement, what do we do now? How do we—what do we do with these stories? What do we do with this mobilization? You know, what do we do with all this information that is now public, right? Do we change legislation? Do we change public policies? What are our strategies, you know, to really address gender-based violence in the future? And not only against women, but there’s a lot of concern over girls, for example. You know, this is a huge concern in Latin American countries right now. We have all these girls that are ten years old, twelve years old, basically with early pregnancies because of sexual violence, very well documented. So the layers of the problem are still acute, right. There’s a lot that’s out there now, right, and women are taking a more leadership and protagonistic role in this, right. At the same time, where do we go from here? What does this mean, you know, for the future of international law, for the future of government action in this area, and for multilayer strategies to address these issues, right. I wish I had all the answers, but I don’t. At least I can (throw ?) the questions. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Julie, is there anything you’d like to add? KATZMAN: Yeah, I just had one quick thing, which is that, you know, I think some of this relates to how you redefine what it means to be a man and you can’t forget that side of the equation here, and there are—I just recently stepped down from the board of the International Center for Research on Women and ICRW did this amazingly successful program in the schools of Mumbai, which is now in Maharashtra State as a whole, hundreds of thousands of kids involved in it, using sport to in fact redefine what it means at an impressionable age—of what does it mean to be a boy—what does it mean to be a man, and it’s had a measurable impact on views about violence and later on behavior, and I think that that’s something that the region as a whole has to start to embrace more fully because that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as Rosa said. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And I’ll just add that that theme, of course, was a huge concern of my former boss, Joe Biden, and, you know, with a campaign that he worked—It’s On Us campaign—and thinking about the role of men and boys in addressing and stopping sexual violence in schools and beyond, and so it’s incredibly important. We’re having this conversation in my own university right now about as we’re thinking about retention and promotion of women, for example—you know, taking a step back and saying, my goodness, we’re so focused on kind of women and women’s roles and women’s voices and there’s not a focus on men’s role in all of this. And so as we all kind of think of our own institutions and the ways in which we are advancing these conversations in our own institutions I think it’s a great point. Well, with that, we’re going to open it up for questions. So, yes, please place your cards in a vertical position and I’ll start with individual questions. Well, actually, for purposes of time maybe we’ll group a couple questions at a time and then have our panelists respond. So why don’t I take these first three and then we’ll go down the line. So Loribeth. Q: Great. Hi. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. STAFF: Could you use the microphone, please? Q: Oh, the mic. Yeah. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. We do a lot of work to end domestic and sexual violence here in the States and we also do work through partnerships around the world. Thank you both for your wonderful remarks. I thought I was depressed about our country. Clearly, the depression only grows. But I have a couple of questions. One is about the SDGs, because the U.N. and the Commission on Women, of which we play a role or are involved, has put such an emphasis on ending violence. I think it’s number five. And I’m wondering, kind of from your perspectives from where you both sit how you see that’s going and whether we’re really having any impact, and I appreciated your point earlier about how things stay at the top. The second question has to do with women and employment. Many years ago, we did a project in Russia, in the former Soviet Union, where we used two strategies. One was creating domestic violence programs in small cities but the other was encouraging and creating employment opportunities for women, and we found in that three-year project that was funded by the State Department a real decrease in the amount of domestic and sexual violence in those homes where women had jobs, had access to employment, and were actually more of the breadwinners oftentimes than their spouses. So I’d love your comments on those. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Monica Tejada. Q: Thank you. Thank you for your remarks. Very interesting. Monica Tejada from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. So we have—we’re funding an education project in El Salvador and the data in El Salvador is 90 percent of the victims of sexual crimes are girls and adolescents. So I have two questions. One is how does the analysis—the economic analysis of the costs of GBV take into account underage women and girls who are not officially in the labor market yet and—well, if you could elaborate a little bit of that. And then the second part is are there any interesting programs or measures that address GBV within the schools system that, from your experience, you’ve seen as successful within the Latin American context? Thank you. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And over to Begoña Fernandez. Q: OK. Hi. (Off mic.) BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Do you want to go ahead and— KATZMAN: You go ahead. CELORIO: Thank you so much for your question on the sustainable development goals. You know, I try to be positive in nature because I’m an international human rights law lawyer by training, right. So if not, I would give it up and not do anything, right. So and I think—you know, I think it’s very difficult to measure right now what kind of impact the sustainable development goals have really had. But I do think there’s been a measure of progress. It’s not as if we’re in a moment in time that when we talk about women’s rights or we talk about, you know, the rights of girls, et cetera, that we can say that there hasn’t really been any sort of progress. I mean, every day, especially in the area that I study the most—international human rights law—you see more government action. You see more private actor action. You see more actions from individuals to address gender-based violence. You see more women vocalizing, you know, what’s happening with gender-based violence or their own stories. I mean, you do see a lot of tendencies that, in my view, at least they give me hope, right. It’s very difficult to say that this is an advance or a good practice. I’m usually very careful about using that kind of terminology. But at least I see some steps in the right direction. I think what the sustainable development goals give us is language and a platform—a consensus platform. I’m a big fan of consensus platforms because I’ve always worked historically with governments, and at the end of the day when you have governments on your side there’s a lot that you can accomplish, right. Governments have resources. They have influence. They have connections with other governments. They can use things like international law to protect and to create good interventions. So for me, there’s promise there. I think it’s very difficult to really talk about a good practice or, really, advances at this stage. But there’s been some progress. The problem is that at the end of the day, what most of us are trying to do is improve the situation of women, improve the situation of girls. Make sure we have prevention. Make sure we have adequate redress, right. and we’re not seeing that yet, right. So there’s a long way to go here. But I do think you have at least some light there. In terms of women unemployment, it’s fascinating what you said because most of what I’ve studied and what I’ve learned from my practice is that it does make a big difference, right, to have quality and decent employment, to have economic resources. But then you have documentation in areas, you know, especially in Latin America. For example, so in Juárez, Mexico, which is one of the most—best documented cases in Latin America where there were a lot of killings, you know, right after you had all these maquila corporations coming and employing all these women and suddenly women were the main income earners of their households, right. It’s not clear whether it was the maquilas employing the women. It’s not clear whether it was because they were, you know, the wage earners. But there was a specific change in that locality happening economically in terms of economic roles and it was actually happening at the same time of the killings, right. I think you would have to study more whether this was connected or not. But it was certainly presented, for example, as expert testimony—as part of expert testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights when they ruled on their main case on the killings in Ciudad Juárez. So just—it’s interesting. I think employment and I think quality and decent employment and I think economic empowerment are key. But we have to also study the short term, the medium term effect—what does that mean in terms of gender-based violence. I just think it’s a very interesting issue to look at more. In terms of El Salvador and education and the situation of girls, from my experience, at least in the realm of international law and human rights where I’ve worked with the most, the situation of girls is invisible. It’s invisible, and I think that’s something that we really have to work on, especially in the area of women’s rights. A lot of the standards that we have today were conceptualized not thinking of the particular situation of girls. Even though technically and legally they’re applicable, there’s a lot of nuances and needs there that need to be better studied and there’s a lot of governments that are trying to understand that now, especially—because especially in the past five years the situation of girls in Latin America have become more of a forefront issue, especially because of the situation of the early pregnancies and the situations of sexual violence. But in my view, we’re a long way to go in terms of understanding really the situation of girls and how to best apply international law to really understand the nuances, their needs, and to really protect their human rights, and I think that that’s very connected to your question as well. I think there needs to be more standards developed when it comes to connecting the situation of women and girls and I think we have to start with an understanding of what that means—that connection. We usually lump them together, right, but we don’t necessarily understand what it is—you know, what the specific needs of protection are for girls, you know, and where the differences may lie or the nuances may lie, and I think that’s a shortcoming that we have in international law from the—in that specific field, right. And I think that was it, right. OK. For now. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: So I will start by saying I’ll probably disappoint because I think they were really good questions and I’m not sure I have anything definitive to say in the context of the answers. But, you know, the point about the decrease in violence for women who had jobs, there was a lot of talk early on that the reverse was true and I think as time has gone on it’s become more and more clear that women who have resources are in a better position across the board. You know, it’s interesting in an agricultural context that you do have to be really careful about unintended consequences. So we have an experience where, for example, you use extension services to increase production of what are the cash crops and the cash crops are generally the domain of the male in the household, and that minimizes the percentage of the income of the entire household of the woman who’s generally managing the crops that feed everybody, and it upsets that gender balance and then you see a rise in violence, right. So I think that the big picture of be careful when doing these programs that all look like they might all be good if you then don’t make sure that the women are benefitting from the extension services and et cetera. Do you know, I have a supposition that girls and adolescents aren’t taken into the account in the statistics because we’re looking—the statistics that look at the economic impact—because we’re looking at the formal and informal economies but, yeah, I’m going to guess that those girls are very underrepresented in that and I think it’s a really interesting point and it’s something that I’m going to bring back and ask somebody about. You know, we’ve done some interesting programs in the schools and I was looking to try to find the results of this impact evaluation in either Guatemala or in Mexico where—and I couldn’t find it. There happens to be something wrong with the website, which is also something I’m going to bring back. It won’t let me in to that specific impact evaluation. But where the work that was done in schools with young kids and adolescents really did have an impact on future violence. So there are some programs out there and I’m, you know, more than happy to get in touch with you with those, and how to connect those two agendas about children and girls. So I do think that there’s an underlying issue here, which is if you look at the region and you look at the age of consent, that’s a place where actually more laws are actually needed and, you know, in a lot of countries there’s an issue here around indigenous rights. But that’s a piece of this that—you’re not even there yet and you can deal with that, and I think that’s actually a place where the two agendas do come together and relates to, you know, a woman’s right to her body and what happens there and family planning and, you know, we see all sorts of statistics around this, which I think could be better leveraged and thought about if we’re thinking about the intersection of the two agendas. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: So let me ask my colleagues—my CFR colleagues—may we go over for a few minutes? OK. So we have five minutes. So I see about five or so cards up. Why don’t we—why don’t we just go through the remaining— KATZMAN: Take them all. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Let’s tick them off. We’ll be efficient. We’ll do this. Go ahead. Q: Hi. Thank you so much. My name is Aapta Garg. I work with Promundo. And I wanted to ask in terms of when the—when governments are looking at these numbers around the economic cost, to what extent are they going deeper towards more entrenched and preventative—entrenched norms and preventative measures to address these rather than just kind of accommodating measures? I mean, we talk about the single-sex trains but that doesn’t stop men from harassing women on the trains. It just removes the women from those opportunities. And thinking beyond just kind of like how do we, like, put a bubble around women. And then I guess kind of a little bit further, how do we—to what extent are they also going beyond punitive measures to address violence? Because in many countries—I’m thinking of Brazil in particular—you have communities that have high interactions with the police that don’t necessarily address the root causes of violence but actually can exacerbate it. So how do we address violence without increasing police interactions for communities that are highly surveilled anyway? And then in terms of school-based interventions on preventative violence, in El Salvador our colleagues in Brazil are working on our program (age ?) program in the school-based situations there. I don’t have data on that. But I’m happy to connect you with our colleagues in Brazil if you would like that— KATZMAN: Sure. Q: —as well as anyone else who wants to have that information. Thank you. KATZMAN: Yeah, and I should have mentioned program (age ?) program in because we’re involved in that and it’s rolling out. Q: Hi. I’m Cindy Dyer from Vital Voices, and I just have a quick question as a follow-up to the question about laws and policies. I know that many of us are familiar with the many countries that are passing femicide laws to address high rates of GBV and they’re certainly willing to use their criminal justice system to address, you know, really outrageous forms of violence against women, which is good. But I’m wanting to know if any of you are familiar with countries that are trying to address GBV by focusing on the low-level violence against women so that we can try to prevent the need for all the femicide laws. Are there any countries that are really trying to aggressively address first-time violence or low-level violence that does not result in a front-page newspaper story? Q: Hi. I’m Jenna Ben-Yehuda, recovering State Department official—(laughter) —and I teach at GW on security and the Latin—in Latin America. MS.     : How is that recovery going? (Laughter.) Q: Right. I’m sure there are others. MS.     : (Laughs.) I’m sure there are. Q: So, you know, Rosa, your excellent comment on the need for donors and multilateral actors to come together on some of these issues had me thinking back to my Haiti days—like 2004, pre-earthquake, major raise round, right? So like these—I mean, could you use the donor roundtable model; like when there is a no-kidding crisis, what would this look like for multilaterals if this were really treated as a crisis? Because I think it is a crisis, but it’s kind of like a creeping, silent crisis. So if we take Julie’s point about the data and how these countries are barely creeping up with 2 percent GDP growth, right? I mean, if they could harness even half of that, there would be like landslide electoral victories for incumbents, right? Like, it would really be huge. So I mean, kind of a big question, but like what would that look like to have a huge, multilateral kind of donor community push to come together on these issues, collapse some of these strategies, band forces, and just charge ahead? Q: Sure. Hi, Cindy Arnson with the Woodrow Wilson Center. Thanks. Just as a note of advertisement, we’ve had over the past year and a half a project with the IDB on gender-based violence, lots of resources on our website covering various Latin American countries. My question goes mostly to Julie, and it has to do with how—and I’m not disputing the data, but I’m just wondering how one measures the economic impact of gender-based violence on GDP. And I agree that it’s a very good tool for getting people’s attention, but what goes into that calculation? Q: And mine builds off of—I’m Alex Arriaga with Strategy for Humanity. Mine builds off of the previous. So just umbrella question: In terms of what is happening in the region, there are some countries where we have really seen a reversal, and true threats on what has been gained, I think, in Nicaragua, for example. And at the same time, Julie, you have spoken about some very exciting initiatives with specific countries, so just big picture, I’d like to know how you are addressing—you know, how you’re—especially with the bank, how are you addressing the countries that are truly reversing, how that’s impacting your programming with them, and also, big picture, are there countries where you see the trend and potential for championing in a positive way? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And Judge Brower, you had a question. Q: Thank you. Charles Brower. I’m the only one not attributed to having any institutional connection on this list, but I’m an international judge in The Hague at the World Court, and also the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal by appointment of both Republican and Democratic administrations. I just have two questions. Apart from emphasizing the importance of training boys how to be tolerant, non-violent men—that’s the major half of the—you’ve got to deal with the offense as well as the defense. My two questions are simple. Do these efforts involve also those whose gender identification has changed—so-called trans? The other is the march of thousands upon thousands of people from Central America through Mexico currently to the southern border of the United States—I understand from interviews on television and from reading the print press a lot of it deals with the gang violence. People are afraid of being murdered because their relatives have been murdered, and they live in poor sections governed by gangs, but a lot of them have said—and its mostly women and children—heavily women and children saying if I go back there my husband will kill me. Now I wonder what all that says about the degree of success of these efforts in that part of the world. Does it simply say, well, you know, we’ve just got to keep on, or does it offer any judgment—preliminary judgment as to the level of success in that area? Period. Thank you. I figured it was appropriate for a gentleman— Q: In the interest of time I’ll just pass. Q: —to ask a question. KATZMAN: OK, I’ll pick off a few hopefully accurately. So the question about entrenched norms and how you get beyond treatment, on the one hand, and punitive measures on the other—so, you know, I’m not so sure we want to get beyond punitive measures, and I hear what you are saying about policing in communities, but I think that goes to the model of policing. And we actually—you know, I think the impunity is such a big problem that punitive action is OK in my book, in many ways. And so we’re really focused on the model of policing, so in Honduras we have worked really hard to change the model of policing to integrate with the country many more women into the police force so at the community level women can—and it goes to another question that was asked, I think—women can go to the police locale and report lower levels of violence, not when it ends up being femicide, and have somebody who takes that report seriously, and a process in place to respond to that kind of report. So, you know, it is part of changing the policing to a community model and not just a come in and raid the neighborhood to get guns, for example. So I think there is a certain amount of nuance associated with how you operate along that spectrum, which I think, Cindy, goes largely to your question as well. So Jenna, I just—I think that what you said is really interesting and important, and you know, there are parts of the region where there are donors who are focused on this topic, and where we have tried to collaborate, and we do collaborate with those donors. I don’t think that anyone really has—we’ve tried to cast this as a big issue, and we have—you know, we’re a demand-driven institution, and so where we have demand, that’s how we’re approaching it, with that kind of lens. But across the region, and thinking about it the way you said it, I think there’s some really good food for thought there, and I’d like to continue that conversation. So how do you measure the impact relative to GDP? I will tell you that those numbers are not IDB numbers; those are GiZ numbers, and the methodology which—the specific of which escape me at this moment was really very detailed. So there’s a really robust methodology which we would like to now replicate. We’re looking for donors so that we can replicate this in other countries, and Andy—who you know well—can have a conversation with you about that. Judge Brower, I—yes, so the question of people with other gender identities, that—if we think that women’s gender-based violence toward women is bad, you know, multiply it, raise it to the tenth power, right? And so that is a part of the work that we do, but we—I mean, without doubt it’s an even more complicated path, but the reforms that we are working on, and where we work on this topic, we do it in an umbrella sense so that it’s not just, you know, not—not bipolar—yeah, forgot the word that— MS.     : Gender binary? KATZMAN: Thank you—gender binary. Thank you. The comment that, you know, a lot of people are fleeing gender-based violence, I think there’s no question that the scale and the scope of the things that are being done are not sufficient to be able to say it can change in any way, shape, or form—at the macro level we’ve changed culture; it just hasn’t happened. And it has been exacerbated by the fuel of gangs and guns into Central America, and so it has made a bad situation worse; not a bad situation better. And everything that is being done—back to Jenna’s point—in some ways are still gathering drops in large buckets. And that’s why there is a lot more that needs to be done. And just, Alex, I—I think for—well, for—speaking for the IDB, it’s hard to—if you have a country that is going in the wrong direction, that probably—although not necessarily—implies that their engagement on the topic with an institution like ours is not necessarily robust, which makes it hard to then kind of have a dialogue around why that is happening—not impossible, but not as the central core of the message or the work with that country because they must not be focusing. But the flip side, we are trying very hard to take all of the very positive things that are going on in the region and use those to be advocates and leading voices. So when Mexico puts up the website that creates great transparency around the scope of the problem, we’re not marketing that platform to every country in the region. When Argentina says, OK, I’m going to do all these things from changing the way we investigate femicide, to changing the way that we train our officers, to gathering all the data in certain ways, we’re marketing that across the region. And I think that’s the way we can carry the positive messages and start to show how that pays dividends to the countries. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, with that, I want to thank our panelists. Please join me in thanking them. (Applause.) And I want to thank all of you for your excellent questions and participation, and for joining us. So stay tuned for more CFR roundtables. You will be getting them in your inbox. Thanks. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.