U.N. Sexual Abuse Investigations Read Like 'Manual in How Not to Investigate' Sexual Assault

"On the world stage, the United Nations takes an uncompromising stance on sexual abuse, trumpeting a 'zero tolerance' policy for infractions by its employees and condemning rape laws that require a woman to show injuries to prove that she did not consent.

But within the United Nations itself, the system for examining sexual misconduct by employees is so inconsistent that investigators sometimes use those same contentious laws to help guide their inquiries - a clear example, critics say, of the broad gap between the organization's public pronouncements and its own practices...

The United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, has promised to make accountability for sexual misconduct a central part of his leadership... But to many women in the industry, these measures sidestep the deep structural problems that have allowed decades of sexism and abuse within the United Nations to continue.

They say internal investigations give greater credence to powerful men who deny wrongdoing than to the women who accuse them, and that reporting systems are so byzantine that it is often unclear how to make a complaint, or what happens to the women who do...

More than a dozen women who worked at five United Nations agencies over 10 years, whose names are being withheld because they fear workplace retaliation, described a system that they said was stacked against them. Some said they were accused of being overly emotional when they tried to report an incident. Others described being verbally abused for seeking to report it...

Ed Flaherty, a lawyer who represents United Nations employees, including in sexual abuse cases, said the current process for investigating assaults was fundamentally flawed. 'The U.N. should not be investigating itself,' he said. 'God help you if you're on the wrong side.'"