The Blue Helmets’ Dark Side : A Quantitative Study of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peace Missions

Abstract: Protecting human rights is the core mission of the UN, yet peacekeepers commit human rights violations, including sexual violence, during missions. While the literature has focused on qualitative research to assess the factors that make sexual exploitation and abuse occur, few studies have looked at it from a quantitative approach, and none have looked at the effect of the mission mandate. Doing so allows me to gain a more rigorous and evidence-based understanding of the relationship between the variables. The data comes from the Conduct of UN Field Missions from 2010 until 2019, focusing only on UN peace missions. Using this dataset, this study will be the first statistical study to explore the effects of a specific mission mandate, peace enforcement, on the occurrence of sexual violence committed by peacekeepers. The logistic regression finds support that the number of military troops deployed increases the odds of observing SEA reports. With the ZINB model, I find marginal evidence that missions with peace enforcement mandates are associated with increased SEA reports. Both predictor variables are significant when including a lead variable for the number of reports. While these results show some patterns in the data, further research is needed to investigate the relationships deeper.