Prevention, risk mitigation and coordination

1The 2015 IASC Guidelines: GBV is everyone's business

The IASC Guidelines for Integrating Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Action (2015) are aimed at non-specialist actors. They cover thirteen thematic areas (shelter and settlement, water, sanitation and hygiene, food security, nutrition, health, education, CCCM, livelihoods, protection, housing, land and property, mine action, child protection, logistics) and follow the programme cycle:

• Assessment, analysis and planning: ask questions about risks, not about cases.
• Resource mobilisation: budget for lighting, locks, female staff.
• Implementation: programming, policies and communication.
• Coordination with other sectors and the GBV sub-cluster.
• Monitoring and evaluation with indicators disaggregated by sex, age and disability.

They rest on three goals: reduce risk in every sector, promote resilience of individuals and communities, and aid recovery by addressing the causes.

2Mitigating risks sector by sector

Mitigation means designing aid so that it does not create or increase risks. Concrete examples from the Guidelines and the Sphere Handbook:

• WASH: sex-segregated latrines and showers, with clear signage, an internal lock, lighting, at a safe distance from shelters; the Sphere Handbook recommends a ratio of about three female latrines to one male latrine in public places.
• Shelter and CCCM: lockable doors, partitions for privacy, grouping of female-headed households near services, lit pathways, mixed committees.
• Distributions and transfers: daytime hours, separate queues, nearby points, female staff, lists held by the organisation and not by intermediaries, an accessible complaints mechanism.
• Food security and livelihoods: fuel or improved stoves to limit firewood collection, analysis of the intra-household risks of cash transfers.
• Education: safe routes, separate latrines, female teachers, code of conduct.

Safety audits carried out by mixed teams, with day and night exploratory walks and focus group discussions with women and adolescent girls, make it possible to identify risky locations. They focus on places and services, never on individual cases.

3Safe spaces and prevention

Women and girls safe spaces are formal or informal places where they feel physically and emotionally safe. They offer psychosocial support activities, information, life skills, peer support groups and a discreet entry point to case management: coming to the space does not signal that one is a survivor. They are designed with the women themselves (hours, location, childcare) and run by trained female staff.

Prevention targets the causes: transforming social norms with men, religious leaders and young people (long-term community approaches such as SASA!), women's economic empowerment, women's leadership in committees, prevention of child marriage. It takes time: in the acute phase, response and mitigation are prioritised while preparing for prevention.

Protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) by humanitarian personnel is a pillar of it: a ban on any sexual relationship with a child and on any exchange of sex for aid, a duty to report, and assistance to the victim following the survivor-centred approach.

4Coordination and data ethics

The GBV Area of Responsibility (GBV AoR), led by UNFPA within the Global Protection Cluster, coordinates the response. At national level, a GBV sub-cluster develops with the authorities the standard operating procedures (SOPs) and the referral pathway: who does what, where, how to refer, with which form and which consent. The Inter-Agency Minimum Standards (2019) set sixteen standards for quality GBV programming.

The GBVIMS enables service providers to collect case data in a standardised and safe way, with consent, and to share only aggregated and anonymous statistics under a signed information sharing protocol. GBV data describe the people who accessed services: they never measure prevalence and must not be presented as such.

Golden rules: never any individual data in cluster reports, presentations or emails; no list of survivors requested by a donor, an authority or a partner; no small numbers published by village when they could identify someone.