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Tracking the Toll: Measuring Violence Against Aid Workers

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Abstract

Despite their protected status as neutral aid providers under international humanitarian law, aid workers have fatality rates exceeding those of uniformed military and law enforcement personnel. Unlike military personnel, moreover, humanitarians have no system of “force protection,” and humanitarian principles preclude the use of deterrent weapons. Instead, their main tools are negotiations with belligerents for secure access and actively cultivating acceptance with local communities. Every year, since the data has been recorded, hundreds of aid workers have been killed, kidnapped, or seriously wounded in the course of their work, and deliberate violence is a more common cause of workplace-related death of aid workers than accidents or illness. Although these attacks are concentrated in a small number of countries, in these high-violence contexts, the problem is becoming more intractable and the violence more intense. Consequently, the ability of humanitarians to meet the needs of affected populations is greatly reduced.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-26411-6_1
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Notes

  1. 1.

    Knox-Clarke, P. (2018). The State of the Humanitarian System, 2018 Edition. London: ALNAP/ODI, p. 17.

  2. 2.

    US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) – Current and Revised Data.” US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#rates

  3. 3.

    Data from FBI, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2017” https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2017/tables/table-1.xls, and Statista, “Number of full-time law enforcement officers in the United States from 2004 to 2017” (https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/).

  4. 4.

    Ibid.

  5. 5.

    The aid worker population estimate is calculated by compiling the staffing figures of the principal international and national humanitarian organizations, including national and international NGOs, the International Red Cross/Crescent Movement entities, and the United Nations humanitarian agencies. Missing data is systematically imputed by a formula for conditional mean imputation using average budget-staffing ratios.

  6. 6.

    From AWSD, “About the Data,” https://aidworkersecurity.org/about: “‘Aid workers’ are defined as the employees and associated personnel of not-for-profit aid agencies (both national and international) that provide material and technical assistance in humanitarian relief contexts. This includes both emergency relief and multi-mandated (relief and development) organizations: NGOs, the International Movement of the Red Cross/Red Crescent, donor agencies and the UN agencies belonging to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Humanitarian Affairs (FAO, OCHA, UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN-Habitat, WFP and WHO) plus IOM and UNRWA. The aid worker definition includes various locally contracted staff (e.g., drivers, security guards, etc.), and does not include UN peacekeeping personnel, human rights workers, election monitors or purely political, religious, or advocacy organizations.”

  7. 7.

    Hargarten, S. (1985). Fatalities in the Peace Corps. JAMA, 254(10), 1326. doi:https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1985.03360100076017

  8. 8.

    Sheik, M. (2000). Deaths among humanitarian workers. BMJ, 321(7254), 166–168. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.321.7254.166

  9. 9.

    Stoddard, A., Harvey, P., Czwarno, M., & Breckenridge, M. (2019). Aid Worker Security Report 2019, Speakable: Addressing sexual violence and gender-based risk in humanitarian aid. Humanitarian Outcomes, June, p. 6.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 7.

  11. 11.

    Silver, N. (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t (p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group, p. 9.

  12. 12.

    Silver, N. (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some. Penguin Publishing Group, p. 12.

  13. 13.

    15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other. (2019). Tylervigen.com. Retrieved 21 January 2019, from http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

  14. 14.

    O’Neill, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown.

  15. 15.

    Duffield, M. (2019). Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World. Wiley, p. 9.

  16. 16.

    Neuman, M. and Weissman, F. (Eds.) (2016.) Saving Lives and Staying Alive. Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management. London: Hurst, 2016.

  17. 17.

    In an interview with the LA Times about his book, Mark Duffield observed “What’s new—or late in the case of this stage of capitalism—is that the digital world no longer requires the direct intellectual mastery, management, or even the skilled labor it once relied upon. Humans are out of the loop, as it were.” From Evans, B. (2019) “The Death of Humanitarianism.” Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 21 March 2019, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-death-of-humanitarianism/#!

  18. 18.

    Attributed to the statistician George E.P. Box, whose writings included various versions of the aphorism, beginning in 1976.

  19. 19.

    Examples include the Sphere Standards, a multi-agency collaboration to codify measurable performance standards, and tools such as the Emergency Capacity Building Project’s Good Enough Guide: Impact Measurement and Accountability in Emergencies.

  20. 20.

    Miliband, D. @DMiliband (2016, May 27) [Twitter post]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/dmiliband/status/736251885359894529

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Correspondence to Abby Stoddard .

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Stoddard, A. (2020). Tracking the Toll: Measuring Violence Against Aid Workers. In: Necessary Risks. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26411-6_1

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