Sex Charges Stun Officials in West Africa

West African officials expressed disgust Thursday at a U.N. report that has uncovered allegations of widespread sexual abuse of children by relief agency workers.

Liberia’s deputy health minister, Arthur Saye, said he was disappointed to learn the country’s relief workers were among those implicated in the probe. “I did not know that the people we thought were helping the needy were the ones endangering their future,” he said.

In neighboring Sierra Leone, Information Minister Cecil Blake said it was a “shocking revelation” and promised that anyone found guilty of sexually exploiting refugees would “face the full force of the law.”

But in the camps that accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people displaced in more than a decade of fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone, refugees are all too familiar with such abuses.

“Here in this camp, it happens plenty, plenty times,” said a mother of seven at a camp in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. “They take advantage of our condition.”

The allegations were contained in an interim report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the British aid group Save the Children, which uncovered evidence of abuse at camps in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The allegations cover 67 workers and 40 humanitarian aid groups.