LONDON, Oct 25 (AlertNet) - The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) says a six-month probe has been unable to substantiate all allegations made in a report early in the year which found widespread sexual exploitation of refugee children in exchange for aid.

It agrees that refugees are vulnerable to sexual exploitation and says new measures have been implemented to prevent this, but says there is no firm evidence that the problem is extensive, or that it regularly involves aid workers, although Save the Children continues to disagree.

"The allegations of widespread sexual exploitation by U.N. aid workers and peacekeepers cannot be substantiated," said Dileep Nair, U.N. undersecretary-general for internal oversight services

The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and British-based Save the Children commissioned the initial report, made public in February, which was based on interviews and group meetings with 1,500 adults and children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Most of the allegations concerned male national staff who had traded humanitarian commodities and services for sex with girls under 18.

"Sexual violence and exploitation of children appears to be extensive... and involves actors at all levels, including those who are engaged to protect the very children they are exploiting," the initial report said.

"The impression exploitation was widespread is misleading and untrue"

It alleged that perpetrators included staff of the United Nations and international and national NGOs, security forces, government officials, community leaders, diamond miners, logging company employees, and local businessmen, parents, grandparents, priests and teachers.

The OIOS report says: "The impression... that sexual exploitation by aid workers, in particular sex for services, was widespread is misleading and untrue."

Nair said: "We feel the consultants' report unfairly tarnished the reputation and credibility of a large majority of U.N. aid workers and peacekeepers who are out in the field."

'WE DISAGREE'

"We disagree with some of the way that the U.N. has presented its conclusions," said Brendan Paddy of Save the Children UK.

OIOS investigators looked into 43 cases of alleged abuse in depth and substantiated 10 of those.

"I think by anybody's reckoning, that suggests there is a significant problem," said Paddy.

Nair said his team had discredited some of the accounts after interviewing the alleged victims.

In others, extensive efforts to identify the victims had been unsuccessful.

He said: "Nothing that the U.N. has found makes us think that we were wrong," Paddy said.

He suggested that the different conclusions were partly a result of using very different methodologies.

"In many cases they simply couldn't find the people concerned, which is the nature of those kinds of transitory, often fearful, vulnerable populations," Paddy said.

"Nothing has changed"

"Nothing has changed since the first report. Their experiences shows that individual cases are very difficult to prove. We knew that.

"What was very clear was that this wasn't a few individuals who were raising spurious concerns. It was a very widespread concern right across the communities and we got the same consistent story from a very wide number of people in a lot of very different places. That strongly suggested to us that this problem was very real, although we recognised from the outset that it was going to be very hard to pin it down."

'PROBLEM IS REAL'

Paddy said that the formal nature of an enquiry that could be used for legal cases could also put informants off coming forward with their stories.

Despite its criticism of the initial report, Nair said: "The issue of sexual exploitation in the field is a significant one, not just in West Africa but wherever refugees are in desperate circumstances."

"The conditions in the camps and refugee communities do make the refugees very vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and this certainly increases if they are young and they are female."

The OIOS report says: "The consultants... raised an important issue and... provoked a heightened sense of awareness in the international community of the potential for sexual exploitation of victims of forced displacement by those who are supposed to palliate their suffering."

The OIOS investigation was divided into three phases: first to assess the scope of the problem, then to see if it could verify the initial report, and finally to seek fresh evidence.

It reported: "The Investigation Team (identified) new cases of sexual exploitation, ranging from consensual relationships that occurred as a result of the exploiter's position of power to allegations of sodomy and rape of refugees."

Nair acknowledged refugee communities were likely sites for sexual exploitation because shelters were communal, bathing facilities shared, clothing limited and food in short supply.

"The consultants provoked heightened awareness"

The initial report said that the children involved were aware of the exploitative nature of the exchange, but felt it was the only option they had in order to receive food and other basic necessities and to pay for education."

It quoted a teenager in Liberia as saying: "It's difficult to escape the trap of those (NGO) people; they use the food as bait to get you to sex with them."

NEW SYSTEMS

The team's recommendations included setting out codes of conduct prohibiting sexual exploitation, reviewing the systems by which services and goods are distributed in the camps and tightening surveillance and reporting plans.

Paddy said: "We're very pleased that they seem to recognise that this is a real problem and one that they have to address. It would be a tragedy if anybody in any part of the U.N. system tried to use the narrow conclusions of this report."

Paddy said: "It would be very wrong to assume that no U.N. staff were involved or at risk of future involvement in sexual exploitation.

"The only way to control that risk and prevent future sexual exploitation of children, is for everybody -- all the NGOs, the governments, the U.N., -- to take this problem seriously and take serious steps towards addressing it."

Paddy said that many of the larger and more progressive NGOs were working to confront the risk of sexual exploitation within their own organisations.

The initial report found that almost 70 aid workers from 40 agencies had been involved in a complex situation in which most of the allegations concerned sexual exploitation rather than sexual abuse.

"This isn't a question of protecting reputations"

"There has been a lot of engagement to pull together a strategy for action to address this across agencies, because there's no point in individual agencies doing good work if other agencies fail to take action," he said.

"The question isn't one so much of prosecuting individuals concerned. Of course that should happen, but the priority has to be to find systems which can prevent future exploitation and for those to be implemented across the board.

"Public opinion is easily swayed by very negative reports and that's also affected the attitudes of donors, who've asked some hard questions, and I think that's only right. When you raise money in the way that NGOs do, you have no choice but to be accountable to the people who support you."

This isn't just a question of agencies protecting their own reputations, it's a broader obligation of the entire aid community to the children of the communities in which they work," Paddy said.

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