The UN has a problem: it's not just gender violence, it's child rape

That is a figure that should be hard to ignore. Yet the UN continues to use legal and sovereign immunity claims to prevent the prosecution of offenders.

This immunity rests on challengeable legal foundations and can be waived by the UN. But the world body chooses not to waive immunity, instead using this legal fiction to protect child rapists.

Not a single one of the accusations the UN lists on its website, and specifically those that involve the rape of children, has been prosecuted.

For at least 20 years the leadership of the UN has known about this sexual violence problem and for years it has failed to act. Indeed, former Secretary General Kofi Annan listed his failure to address the problem decisively as one of his regrets. His successor Ban Ki Moon has also acknowledged that not enough has been done.

Current Secretary General Guterres has proposed a four-part strategy to deal with the problem. This entails putting the rights and dignity of victims at the forefront of the UN’s efforts, working relentlessly to end impunity for those guilty of sexual abuse and exploitation, building a civil society network to support UN efforts, and raising worldwide awareness of the problem.

Releasing the 2016 UN annual review Guterres said,

I fully recognise that no magic wand exists to end the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse. Nevertheless, I believe that we can dramatically improve how the United Nations addresses this scourge.

Many people in power have known for decades of the sexual abuse by the UN and for some reason it continues. It is one of the reasons I quit the UN in 2009 calling out the abuse in my 2013 book “A Life Half Lived”.

Three years later, is the world just beginning to see the scale and scope of the problem? Are we today with the UN precisely where we were with the Catholic Church in the 1980s?

If we are, then as a global community, we need to do better than just “dramatically improve”. This scourge must be stopped now. Children in conflict zones need our help.