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Despite UN "zero tolerance," officials haven't stopped decades of serious abuses. According to MICROCON:
It "suggests that the existence and potential long-term perpetuation of a highly gendered peacekeeping economy threatens to undermine, if not actively contradict, the goals and objectives to gender roles and relations that are generally an implicit or explicit component of most contemporary peace operations."
In fact, sex trafficking and exploitation is wide-ranging, including slavery and prostitution. The UN calls it "transactional sex," involving peacekeepers.
In countries like Bosnia and Kosovo, "domestic sex work and sex trafficking have become a seemingly permanent part of the" economy. Their peacekeeping missions affect both supply and demand. They "effectively creat(e) avenues (for) trafficking of women for sexual exploitation into/through these areas."
Organized crime also gets involved. The prevalence of rape and sex slavery increases. Women and young girls are brutally exploited, and "documented cases of UN soldiers (show) that, far from helping the victims," they become clients or otherwise are implicated in the trade.
Former prisoners said they saw girls forced into UN vehicles and driven away. International military and civilian personnel are directly involved in the sex industry, including trafficking.
A 2002 Turin Conference on Trafficking, Slavery and Peacekeeping report said "peacekeepers are often part of the problem." Connected to organized crime, it's well known that human trafficking provides "an important revenue source."
UN "zero tolerance" is more rhetoric than policy. Wherever they're deployed, peacekeepers serve power, not populations they're mandated to protect.
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