‘Instead of helping us, they destroyed our lives’: More than 50 women in DRC accuse Ebola aid workers of sexual exploitation and abuse

More than 50 women have alleged sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the Ebola crisis.

The number and similarity of the accounts suggests a widespread culture of abuse, with men claiming to be from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Unicef and other leading NGOs using the promise of employment to coerce local women into having sex with them.

In interviews carried out during a joint investigation by two news agencies lasting nearly a year, 51 women recounted multiple incidents of abuse during the 2018-2020 Ebola crisis, some as recently as March.

Their accounts of the abuse - which included allegations of being “ambushed” in hospitals, locked in rooms with threatening employers, and drugged by would-be counsellors in hotel rooms - were often corroborated by aid agency drivers and local NGO workers.

Two women were impregnated, while many told the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian of the lasting trauma induced by their encounters with the international workers.

Many women said they kept silent about the incidents for fear of reprisals or losing their jobs. Most also said they felt ashamed. 

“Why would you even ask if I reported it?” investigators were asked by one woman allegedly offered money for sex by two men claiming to work for UN agencies. “I was terrified. I felt disgusting. I haven't even told my mother about this.”

Many women knew the men’s names and nationalities, which included Belgium, Burkina Faso, Canada, France, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast

More than 30 of the allegations were made against men claiming to work for the WHO, which deployed some 1,500 staff in the fight against Ebola. 

Eight women accused men purporting to be from Congo’s health ministry, while multiple women singled out perpetrators claiming to belong to World Vision and Unicef. 

Individual allegations were made against men who said they worked with Oxfam, the UN migration agency IOM, and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

Many women said they were approached outside Beni's main supermarkets, in job recruitment centres or outside hospitals where lists of successful candidates were posted.

“You'd look to see if your name was on the lists they posted outside,” a 32-year-old woman who said she was impregnated by a man identifying himself as a WHO doctor told reporters. “And every day we'd be disappointed. There is no work here.”

One woman said the practice of men demanding sex had become so common, it was viewed as the only way of finding a job in the outbreak response. Another called it a “passport to employment”.

Perpetrators routinely refused to wear condoms, the women alleged - at a time when physical contact was being discouraged to halt the virus’s spread. 

In another instance, a 32-year-old Ebola survivor said she was phoned by a man who invited her to come for a counselling session at a hotel.

After accepting a soft drink in the lobby, she woke up hours later in a hotel room naked and alone. She believes she was raped. 

“I lost my husband to Ebola,” she told investigators, adding that she did not tell anyone about the incident because she already felt shunned by peers afraid of catching Ebola from her. “Instead of help, all I got was more trauma.”

A handful of aid agency drivers corroborated organisational affiliations of the doctors, health workers and administrators, who appear to have carried out most of the alleged abuse in hotels that doubled as hubs for UN and NGO offices.

According to four drivers interviewed, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardise job opportunities, the men used official drivers to shuttle women to the hotels and to their homes and offices.

“It was so common,” one driver told the news agencies. “It wasn't just me; I'd say that the majority of us chauffeurs drove men or their victims to and from hotels for sexual arrangements like this. It was so regular it was like buying food at the supermarket.”

One woman said the man who abused her drove in a vehicle marked “World Health Organisation”.

The aid agency drivers told reporters that young men were also exploited sexually. And according to a recruiter for an NGO speaking on condition of anonymity, other young men were paid to procure women.

The WHO said its director general had ordered a thorough review of the allegations, which would be “robustly investigated”.

 Anyone found responsible will face “serious consequences”, the UN agency said in a statement on Tuesday, adding: “The betrayal of people in the communities we serve is reprehensible. We do not tolerate such behaviour in any of our staff, contractors or partners.”

The probe has prompted an internal inquiry at World Vision, which said the reports were “shocking” as all staff were trained on preventing sexual abuse and it was working hard to address “entrenched cultural and power inequalities”.

A Unicef spokesperson said it had received three reports involving two partner organisations responding to Ebola, whom he declined to name, but said the cases appeared to be different from those discovered in the probe.

“Despite our best efforts, cases of sexual exploitation and abuse in DRC remain grossly under-reported,” he said, adding that the agency had introduced 22 ways to file complaints in Congo, including a confidential hotline and complaint boxes.

Spokespeople for IOM, MSF, Unicef and Congo's health ministry said in mid-September they had no knowledge of the accusations brought to their attention, and several said they would need more information to take action. 

The response to the DRC’s tenth and deadliest Ebola crisis, which was the second-largest ever seen, involved more than 15,000 people and cost £540m. The UN cautiously declared the outbreak over in June.

A programme to protect against sexual abuse was put in place a year after the operation began, the UN's former Ebola response coordinator, David Gressly, told investigators. Most women interviewed were unaware of hotlines and other ways to report abuse.

The investigation highlighted the underfunded, poorly considered and male-dominated nature of programmes established to tackle sexual abuse within humanitarian operations, critics said, as experts called on donors to push for reform.

“Donor governments should take a much stronger stance and must ensure that taxpayer funds are not misused for the purposes of violating the rights of vulnerable aid recipients,” Miranda Brown, formerly with the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the news agencies.

One 24-year-old interviewee was reported as saying: “If they really wanted to help people, they would have done it unconditionally. Instead of helping us, they destroyed our lives.”