Sabrina is a believer in the potential of the UN, but also witness to the negative results of UN interventions. Her research now looks at accountability for crimes committed during UN peacekeeping missions.

She wants to use her skills as a practitioner and a researcher to make real change and actively contribute to policy reform and knowledge impact.

Sabrina is completing a PhD in accountability to victims of sexual exploitation by United Nations Peacekeepers.

Read more about Sabrina and her research.

Transcript

[Melanie is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Melanie: So, my research journey kind of began with the way that my life started. I'm the child of a soldier and I grew up living on military bases. By the time I was 18 and finished high school, I think I'd been to about 14 different schools in three countries and quite a few different states in the US.

And part of traveling around quite a lot like that is you meet lots of different kinds of people. You hear different sounds, different accents, different types of music, eat different kinds of food. And for me, it was sort of my first experience of what the United Nations looked like and felt like.

And also, part of travelling, it can be quite lonely when you're moving around a lot. So, my older brother and I were quite avid musicians. When I was in high school and in university, I used to run from orchestra rehearsals to model United Nations class. As I was running between the university buildings, I always felt that I was doing the same kind of work in each space, in both the orchestra and in model United Nations. I was arriving as prepared as I could with all the technical aspects of my craft. I was then also interacting with and listening to people as carefully as I could to understand what the concerns of the day were or what the sound or temperature was like in the room. And then the third thing is I always felt that I was adapting and compromising in this process of listening and preparation so that we could create something new.

Now, in model United Nations, you sort of pretend to be a member of the UN. You represent a country, you interact with other people who are pretending to be ambassadors and world leaders, and you try to solve the world's problems. And this often required quite a lot of compromise in order to take steps further.

So, this love for the United Nations eventually eclipsed the love for music, and I went on to study international relations and shared my passion with as many people as I could for what the UN was and what it could be.

The UN for me is an incredible symbol of what the world can do in its greatest moment of adversity. It's not just about bringing the world together to try to end wars at Earth's darkest hour, but that the world would also try to improve the quality of life for people everywhere.

And the thing that has always interested me the most about the United Nations is what it does in UN peacekeeping missions, where a coalition of international forces are sent to a country that's at war and that's attempting to emerge from that war.

So peacekeeping missions are sort of a symbol, a physical symbol, of the UN's presence. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to go to places that the UN had been in its peacekeeping missions.

And in 2011, I ended up in Cambodia. I ended up volunteering for a local organisation that looked after and represented a number of women and girls who had been victims and survivors of sexual violence.

During my time there, there were a couple of things that I found out. One of which was that the child sex industry in Cambodia was largely a legacy of the UN presence in the peacekeeping mission in the 1990s.

Now, finding out this information about the UN peacekeepers was completely devastating. I was the UN's number one fan. I thought it was unimaginable that soldiers who were going to do this incredible work, this important work, this symbolic work, that they would perpetrate such harms.

The second thing that I found out on this trip is that the women and girls in the shelter had actually really very few life chances. There were almost no opportunities for legal accountability of their perpetrators. There were very few services that were available for them to access, and there were very few opportunities actually, in terms of their life chances beyond leaving this shelter.

So, seven years after that trip to Cambodia, I started my PhD. My research is collaborative with the United Nations Association, UK, which is an organisation that wants the UN to do well, and like me, believes in the aims and principles of what it can achieve.

So, I look at accountability for sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by UN peacekeepers and related personnel. So, my research calls for a radical rethinking of accountability in global governance using the case of UN peacekeeping. If we look at accountability as only a set of procedures or boxes that we need to take in order to demonstrate that we have done all that we can in response to an issue, then we're really kind of failing not only the core mission of the UN, but we're also doing a great disservice to the people that the UN is meant to be helping through its peacekeeping missions.

And taking an approach to accountability that thinks about what happens to victims should also focus on those three lessons that I learned at the very beginning of my journey.

The first one is, yes, the technical side; the preparations, the procedures, something being in place that’s locked and tight.

The second element is that we have to listen. We have to listen so keenly to make sure we are hearing the wide array of voices who are stakeholders on this issue. Victim’s and survivor’s voices have been filtered or muted or bypassed at almost every stage of the UN’s accountability agenda for 30 years.

And the third thing that the UN needs to do is it needs to be willing to compromise. It needs to create new space for what accountability could mean.

There needs to be at least the possibility that victims and survivors to articulate the kind of answer that they want in accountability arrangements.