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What the UN doesn't want you to know
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mattyb
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Apr 2, 2013, 05:20 AM
 
     
Tiresias
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Apr 3, 2013, 09:29 AM
 
I liked the part when she put Baileys in her coffee.
     
shifuimam
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Apr 3, 2013, 11:05 AM
 
That is utterly horrifying.
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subego
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Apr 3, 2013, 11:42 AM
 
Seems typical. The only thing that's surprising is it's the UN instead of private contractors.
     
lpkmckenna
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Apr 3, 2013, 12:45 PM
 
That UN peacekeepers are fncking trafficked prostitutes is no surprise to me. Being in the army, I can tell you one indisputable truth: soldiers love prostitutes, and they don't care how they ended up as prostitutes.

I find it amazing that Canada's deployed troops in places like Afghanistan have the "no alcohol" rule pounded into them like it's God's Own Gospel, but penalization for using prostitutes on deployment is barely considered.
     
subego
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Apr 3, 2013, 12:52 PM
 
That's always been a part of the military. If you might die tomorrow, you want to get your freak on first.

IMO, the problem is it's being shoved under the carpet and hence becomes this big grey area.

The military needs to drop the prude shit and provide their own prostitutes. It's okay to be up-front about slaughter, but not okay to talk about willies?
     
The Final Dakar
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Apr 3, 2013, 01:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by subego View Post
The military needs to drop the prude shit and provide their own prostitutes. It's okay to be up-front about slaughter, but not okay to talk about willies?
Maybe it'd help cut down on all the sexual assault going on.
     
subego
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Apr 3, 2013, 01:08 PM
 
It would. I think it would also move it to the prostitues.

You'd have to have to train soldiers not to rape prostitutes. I'm not kidding.

How's that for an MOS?
     
Shaddim
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Apr 3, 2013, 03:09 PM
 
When we went to the ML Bunny Ranch, not to get our freak on but only as tourists (honestly), I'd say 70% of the Johns were military, going by haircuts and most even wearing uniforms and BDUs. I believe, if handled correctly, it would be a benefit to allow professional girls to service the troops. But, who is severely damaged and/or coerced and who isn't? It would require some intensive screening. Speaking of the BR, you could instantly tell the women who were happy sex workers apart from the dead-eyed abuse victims. Bubbly good-time girls vs full service automatons. It freaked us out, and we'd been to similar digs in Amsterdam and Germany. One very lovely young girl, she claimed to be 22 but I'd guess no older than 19, said pointedly (and quietly) that we could do anything we want with her for the right price, including humiliation and "rough play", without any emotion or humanity in her eyes. We finished our drinks, had a photo taken with Air Force Amy and few others, and left.

The article is what I'd expect from the UN, no surprises there at all.
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Phileas
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Apr 3, 2013, 09:52 PM
 
I read about this some years ago - the abuses were (are) truly horrifying.

From what I've read, the majority of sex workers in Europe today are young women from Eastern Europe and Russia who were promised work, then had their passports taken away and were forced into prostitution. Because they are are, technically, illegal immigrants most of them are as scared of the police as they are of their abusers.

It's an awful situation. I have zero problem with sex workers who choose freely, but the guys behind these crimes are the lowest of the lowest.
     
ghporter
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Apr 5, 2013, 08:03 AM
 
UN peacekeepers are national military forces from member nations. The UN should not tolerate this sort of behavior by anyone representing the UN, and I find it disgusting that a supposedly "professional" military organization from anywhere could be so...so... I don't even have a word to describe this behavior.

This sort of stuff should make the member nations providing troops do something very harsh to the perpetrators, particularly since it seems to be almost an institutional problem in the peacekeeping locations, and it should be something the Security Council addresses immediately. It impacts the usefulness of peacekeepers everywhere, and keep in mind that peacekeeping forces are paid for by the UN, so I think the Security Council needs to act and act strongly, establishing strict standards of behavior with hefty penalties (how about fines that exceed the payment to the member nation providing the troops, since this is a big money maker for some countries), or risk not just a decline in the relevance of the UN but making the organization counterproductive.

Of course I am also quite disgusted that my own service, the USAF, seems to have a major problem with getting basic training instructors to think more about their mission and not at all about taking advantage of their students. Geeze folks, "service" is supposed to mean taking care of people, not "finding opportunities to get laid." Grrrr.

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shifuimam
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Apr 5, 2013, 10:03 AM
 
Yeah - what bothers me as much as or even more than the people who force these women into prostitution is the fact that, as of now, the biggest company providing contracted personnel to the UN has done nothing about this.

The men who were identified as knowingly paying for sex with trafficked women and even getting a cut of the profits from the trafficking business were not fired or disciplined or criminalized - they were simply sent back to the United States by DynCorp.

The guy who headed up the Bosnian UN Mission was aware of what was going on and completely complicit and unwilling to pursue charges against UN employees involved with trafficked women.

That's the part that really just makes me want to hurl.
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subego
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Apr 5, 2013, 11:33 AM
 
Originally Posted by ghporter View Post
This sort of stuff should make the member nations providing troops do something very harsh to the perpetrators
Well, there's your problem.

This is the UN.
     
subego
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Apr 5, 2013, 11:35 AM
 
Originally Posted by ghporter View Post
Of course I am also quite disgusted that my own service, the USAF, seems to have a major problem with getting basic training instructors to think more about their mission and not at all about taking advantage of their students. Geeze folks, "service" is supposed to mean taking care of people, not "finding opportunities to get laid." Grrrr.
Cross-rank banging is allowed?
     
ghporter
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Apr 5, 2013, 12:36 PM
 
Originally Posted by subego View Post
Cross-rank banging is allowed?
No, and the instructor/student relationship is a particularly special one that had required a lot of attention from leadership to prevent instructors from either unfairly helping or hindering their students.

Since the early 1980s it has been specifically prohibited for instructors (in any setting) to engage in anything but an extremely closely limited professional relationship with students. This was later clarified as "any" student in any school. Basic training is a very special example of a setting where the instructor has a huge amount of control over the students' careers and lives, and at the moment there is a very large investigation into some several dozen Military Training Instructors and their behavior with female trainees. Only recently there have been insights into abuse of male trainees as well, though so far it has been limited to essentially physical and emotional abuse, while a large number of females have come forward to report having been sexually abused by their instructors, or by MTIs after the females had finished basic training.

The concept of "fraternization" between ranks ("cross-rank banging" and other relationships) has morphed from disapproving of relationships between officers and enlisted people in the same chain of command to the Air Force essentially demanding that there be NO personal relationships between ANY enlisted member and ANY officer member. In some cases this has taken the edict to "avoid even the appearance of" compromise of the integrity of the chain of command to some pretty silly heights, and has ended a number of careers; some people found their personal relationships to be more valuable to them than their military careers and simply acted on that. In my experience, it is awfully hard for anyone in one chain of command (say the hospital organization) to have any real impact on the career of someone in another chain (say the supply organization), but The Brass seem to have extrapolated "fairness" to mean "draconian for everyone, regardless."

In my last instructor job, as a Master Sergeant teaching people only one or two steps in rank below me, I was specifically prohibited from even "setting up a lunch meeting" with my students. At that point in their careers, my students could use guidance and mentoring from more experienced NCOs, yet this was prohibited because of the supposed potential for abuse of position to either enhance or impair a student's career. I don't know of cases like that, but I suspect that there had been a few that were quietly handled by a short-notice reassignment of an instructor to somewhere remote and without a training mission.

For an institution that has as one of its core principles "Integrity in all we do," it seems that the Air Force has a very poor grasp of who should and shouldn't be trusted with positions of responsibility and authority. It makes me wonder about who those people in Pentagon offices are and whether they are paying attention to the right things...or if they themselves should be trusted, since they're the ones who set up the rules for choosing assigning people as MTIs in the first place.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
subego
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Apr 5, 2013, 12:50 PM
 
Very interesting. Thank you!
     
lurkalot
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Apr 6, 2013, 05:33 AM
 
     
mattyb  (op)
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Apr 6, 2013, 07:44 AM
 
And after sitting around and talking about it for a while, probably sampling vastly over-priced food and beverage, what did our esteemed UN bureaucrats actually DO?
     
Sealobo
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Apr 6, 2013, 08:48 AM
 
shared. thanks.
     
lurkalot
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Apr 6, 2013, 10:08 AM
 
...
( Last edited by lurkalot; Apr 6, 2013 at 10:10 AM. Reason: DP)
     
lurkalot
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Apr 6, 2013, 10:09 AM
 
     
Phileas
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Apr 6, 2013, 04:10 PM
 
That's the report I read. Thanks for digging it out.
     
shifuimam
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Apr 6, 2013, 05:11 PM
 
By the way ... it was more than sketchy that Jacques Paul Klein's Wikipedia entry was written more like a school paper on why he was awesome than an unbiased article on his history with the State Dept. and UN.

I added a couple lines pointing to some of the articles about his total apathy and inaction regarding Bosnia's trafficking problems.

What a louse.
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