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Humanitarian protection: the glut of “protection messages” as a sign of a wider unease

At the height of the 1982-1985 famine in Ethiopia, a cruel joke was often heard in Spain. A particular European religious leader visits a refugee camp, and seeing a desperate mother holding an emaciated baby, he asks her: What’s wrong with him? Lowering her gaze, she answers, in a barely audible voice: He does not eat! The leader shakes his head, looks reproachingly at the baby and goes, gently pinching his cheek: But you must eat!

Granted, this is a pretty bad one -but mind you, it is not exactly a joke. A message to mothers to prioritize breastfeeding, entirely void of context, featured highly on key messages by an UN agency during the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa. Since the inception of the current protection coordination system, and in particular during emergencies, Protection clusters or sectors regularly produce short, public “key messages” or “protection messages” of highly general context and with limited analysis of causes or culprits of protection problems. They are also in most cases addressed generally to “communities”, or to “government authorities”.

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#MeToo and Syrian refugee women in the Bekaa

A few months ago, #MeToo movement founder Tatiana Burke made a powerful call for sexual abuse victims to organize to provide resources for all who experienced similar trauma – saying that the time has come to put greater focus on the victims, rather than the aggressors.

It is, thus, a good moment to consider how much the momentum generated by the #MeToo movement is reaching the most oppressed women, and how can we help and support their own initiatives. And there is little doubt that refugee women are among the most oppressed communities on Earth, suffering from combined forms of abuse and discrimination.

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Humanitarian protection: are we doing a good job?

A few days ago I tried on myself a quick and dirty test to evaluate how effectively we humanitarians use our time. It made a big difference. Here it is:

1.           Measure the time you invest in talking to other humanitarians – e.g. coordination meetings, training, mainstreaming, etc. Humanitarians are here assumed to be people who know their jobs, i.e. you shouldn’t need to invest a lot of time in persuading them to do anything or to stop doing anything.

2.           Measure the time you invest in talking with people you work for: refugees, IDPs, war or disaster affected, etc., or people you really need to persuade to do things or stop doing things: Government officials, insurgent leaders, army commanders.

3.           Compare both times.

4.           Ask yourself if you’re doing a good job.

Good luck!