Where you might come in
We are entering the next phase of our AidWorkVoices project and again need your help, this time from a few of you who want or may be wiling to share your stories.
One of the most interesting nuggets to come from the survey data thus far are the thoughts you’ve had about identity. In the post “You are as you are seen” many of our respondents–you–wrestled with exactly that: how you are seen by those around you matters on many levels. Many of you believe that the way you are seen (for example: young, white, attractive Western female) has an impact on your overall effectiveness. A second impact is that on the self concept of the aid worker: how she or he feels about her or himself.
Our goal at this particular stage is to deepen the data with more in-depth voices speaking about identity management both in the ‘field’ and in other locations, including at home, and throughout the aid industry. We especially want to hear from aid workers whose ‘at home’ identity (what Goffman would call ‘back stage’) may at times present a challenge.
We’re specifically working here with the concept of “master status” in sociology. There are two general categories of master status: Those that are disclosed as soon as people see you, such as skin color, sex (probably), age (possibly), and some kinds of physical disability or special-ability; And those that can remain disclosed with some effort, for example religion (or lack thereof), sexuality, and relationship/marital status.
Who would we like to talk to? We are interested in more in-depth interviews with aid workers that may have faced and/or currently face workplace challenges related to “how they are seen.” Basically, we want to talk to any aid or development worker in a setting where your sex, sexual orientation, marital status, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, local/non-local designation, age, religion, worldview, or other identity status somehow shapes your ability to be effective. Some examples include (but of course are not limited to):
Jewish aid workers in predominantly Muslim locations, or vice versa.
Atheist aid workers working in faith-based organizations and/or in locations where devotion to some religion is expected (Bangladesh comes to mind, based on recent news coverage).
Non-heterosexual aid workers in, well, most anywhere.
Red-headed aid workers (or those with some other exceptional physical attribute. Any 2 meter+ aid workers?)
Differently-abled aid workers (sight/hearing impaired, ambulatory challenges, etc.)
Medication dependent aid workers (e.g., insulin dependent).
You get the idea…..
Specifically we want to arrange open-ended interviews (via phone, Skype or otherwise) with aid workers who deal with identity management issues such as the above. If you are interested and/or have questions please send a message to me (Arcaro) with details of how you would prefer to be contacted.
We expect that interviews will take approximately 30 minutes. While we may need to interact with you as yourself in the context of an interview, we promise to maintain your anonymity in any publication or other external reference to your interview.
The big picture
We are now entering a very intense phase of analyzing and writing about all of the survey results, both quantitative and qualitative. In addition to making regular (weekly) posts to this blog we are in the midst of outlining a book-length treatment of all the results. Our hope is that we have a beta-version draft out by late fall.
Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers
So, last week The Guardian online ran an article in the Global Development Professionals Network section, in which the authors sort of rambled on about the importance of discussing the sex lives of humanitarians. Yes, you read that right. A research fellow and an adviser at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) want to have a little chat about aid worker sex lives–that is, our sex lives.
On the outside chance that you missed their arousing discussion, check it out.
Yeah, yeah. Aid worker notoriety vis-a-vis all things sexual is legendary. I don’t think there’s any other aspect of the aid worker experience that is more commonly or gleefully portrayed in pop culture remakes of our allegedly exciting lives than our sexuality. From the apocryphal Emergency Sex, to the far-fetched tale of a UK housewive-turned-UNICEF warrior for the poor, to any one of several flaccid attempts to capture the aid worker experience as prime-time television drama, we see very quickly that the common denominator ain’t the Sphere standards for emergency WASH or an obsession with humanitarian accountability. My own first (and by far most commercially successful) furtive fumble down the path of humanitarian fiction shamelessly capitalized on the mythical hyper-sexualization of expat aid workers. Heck,even The Guardian’s own blush-worthy moment on the subject of aid worker sex life indiscretion seems to confirm exactly what everyone already thinks, and so we’ll forgive @IDS_UK for prematurely… er… raising the flag just a little too high on this one. Because, see, if you look at what actual aid workers are saying in the Aid Worker Survey, it would seem that we’re not really as busy getting busy as everyone seems to want to believe.
Let’s look at the results so far from Question 26: Which response below best describes your coping mechanisms (coping with stress, coping with burnout, coping with loss of idealism)?
Q26 responses (combined female & male)
[The response choices (paraphrased) are: I don’t experience burnout; Physical release (yoga, running…); Self medication (alcohol…); Finding strength in one’s faith; “Emergency Sex”; and Reading & writing about the humanitarian experience.]
I’ll skip straight to the spoiler: “Emergency Sex” scored dead last at 3.4% and 4.4% of female and male respondents, respectively.
The majority of all respondents (41% of females, and 40% of males) chose “Physical release“–yoga, running, or some kind of physical exercise as their primary stress release or coping mechanism. The remaining categories ranked as “Self Medication” (23% Female, 21% male), “Minimal Stress” (13% female, 18% male), “Reading/writing about the humanitarian experience” (12.8% female, 7.8 male), and “Strength from faith” (5.5% female, 8.5% male).
You can look at this breakdown in many ways. But for now, from a staff care perspective (and writing as a manager and frequent leader in field operations), I find the prevalence of “self medication” the most troubling in this lineup. In response to The Guardian’s hand-wringing, I’ll simply point out that according to our data thus far, it seems that more aid workers pray as a coping mechanism than engage in sexual activity.
Q26 responses in table form (combined female & male)
This is the only question in the Aid Worker Survey which addresses or gives the option of sex, specifically, and so for sure we’re assuming a potential link between work or context-related stress and aid worker libido. Although the writers from IDS cover a wide range of aid worker sex related worries in their article (not just sex as stress release), on the basis of only the response data from Q26, it is reasonable to ask whether this really ought to be the first thing HR (or security, apparently) worries about.
It’s also worth taking another look at some of the other data, too, though, with a view to the IDS’s angst about our sex lives. Q12 “Which best describes your relationship status?”, for example. The choices under Q26 are: Single and dating; Single and not dating; In a relationship. Here’s how it shakes out.
Response to Q12 (disaggregated by sex)
For the moment let’s assume that “single and dating” and “in a relationship” sort of hang together. In this context something like 68% of females and 83% of males are in some kind of relationship. No, I’m not naively assuming that dating or being in a relationship rules one out from participation in the alleged sexual misbehavior. Anyone can have a bad deployment, or just an evening of drunken (likely, according to Q26…) indiscretion, and of course there are those who are serially unfaithful. But based purely on personal observation as a long-term aid worker, it is my opinion that relationship status does make a difference. For all of their sometimes rough edges, aid workers are usually people of some kind of principle. Moreover, in my real job as a supervisor and frequent mentor to young newbs, I can tell you that there is no issue which comes up as frequently as relationships, specifically the desire for a relationship. When aid workers are in relationships–even relationships with challenges–the gravitational pull is toward doing everything possible to make those relationships work.
The ins and outs of aid worker sex lives will surely make interesting reading (to some). But that it’s something we must absolutely worry about now… well that’s a bit of a claim.
By hardly the second sentence into The Guardian’s article (written by those two researchers from IDS):
“…your day-to-day management challenges also included arguments over what time your colleagues could watch porn in the common room, and negotiating how staff could get to and from a brothel. Yet it is often a reality of the job and it is time we talked about it.”
Where to start? How about here: In a prior post, my research partner on this project described the “typical” aid worker, based on the results of this survey to-date. Once more with the spoiler: it’s a single, 30-something female. You can read the numbers in different ways (and we’ll eventually make raw data available in full), but basically the proportion of the single, 30-something women is above two-thirds of the total.
Based on the simple proportion of women to men in the industry overall, along with what we know from other sources about the propensity of men versus women when it comes to behaviors like paying for sex or consuming pornography, the statement above feels like a bit of overblown hand-wringing.
Also, I just have to say: in 23 years of continuous aid work, including quality time in some of the more notorious team houses in some of the more notorious responses, I have never (not once to-date) heard of aid workers watching porn in the common room. Nor have I ever heard of anyone ever needing the permission of the security manager before sleeping with someone from another other organization (see the caption under the photograph in the original article). And these days I usually supervise the security manager.
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Surely some of the issues raised by The Guardian matter. The power dynamics involved and the potential for exploitation when aid workers become involved with local people while deployed (especially if they become involved with beneficiaries or disaster survivors) is terribly serious and worth larger, honest discussion. But a call for more discussion of aid workers’ sex lives (scintillating as that all might seem) needs to be grounded in some actual data, and framed in ways which correspond to real issues, rather than over-the-top, made-for-TV stereotypes.
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Think I’m wrong? Sound off on in the comments thread below this post, or on my Facebook page, here.
Want to take the Aid Worker Survey yourself? (of course you do) Do it!
J. is a full-time professional humanitarian worker with more than twenty years of experience in the aid industry. He currently holds a real aid world day job at a real humanitarian organization as a senior disaster response manager.
In a previous blogosphere life J. wrote a blog about aid work called Tales From the Hood, and was half owner/curator of the uber-awesome Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like.These days he occasionally blogs about serious topics at AidSpeak (aidspeak.wordpress.com).
J. has written several books, including the world's first humanitarian romance novel, Disastrous Passion, and a non-fiction book entitled Letters Left Unsent.
Follow J. on Twitter @evilgeniuspubs
…but there is so much more being offered by many respondents.
As I read though the many responses to the various open ended questions on the survey many patterns emerge. One pattern is that many people will qualify their statements and add critical context. Here are just three examples that came in response to the question about corruption [“Please use the space below to elaborate on the questions above related to corruption.”]:
In the organisation, it is bloated with money and many people simply gorge at the trough of development aid. I am thankfully removed from this in my field, I have little reason to interact with others in my organisation. I do see the old boys network everywhere, the British upper middle classes in particular seem to have taken over other organisations, such as parts of the UN for example. Corruption is endemic to the human condition however. Regarding the region (mostly Africa) – there is a fine line between helping ones friends and families and corruption, in some cultural contexts this line is not where we expect. It is imperialism to impose our values on others like this when we have so much ‘acceptable’ corruption in our own private and public sector. We should get our own house in order (for me, the UK) before we judge others.
Where do I begin? Once of the problems of BIG AID is the endemic corruption it carries with it. In poor countries, lots of money connected to faceless donors creates a magnetic field around it which distorts markets, expectations and integrity. Battling this is a full time job and demands a canny understanding of the context. This demands battle hardened veterans who stay around and can manage the corruption issues. However, the nature of humanitarian work is one of constant turn over, so this is an issue. When it comes to “development work”, then they have no excuse for the rampant corruption, which I have witnessed. I really feel that development aid of the big dollar variety has in many places really created corruption, dependency and undercut local efforts at self-development. It’s almost as if this industry was in the business of keeping itself busy under the myth of lifting people out of poverty.
I did not like your choices. A key challenge for humanitarian actors is a very narrow donor base (US+N/W Europe) which is vulnerable to budget cuts. We are also entering a new time where most people live in middle income countries, and their governments have greater capacity. In many cases our business model is no longer so relevant. ‘Humanitarian’ work has really ballooned in scope and volume during the last 15 years, in part to get around Paris Declaration-type principles and circumvent host country governments. I think this will have to be scaled back. We are also all very confused what ‘humanitarian’ is – is it defined by the funding source (donor country emergency funding) or is it the type of work (temporary and unplanned)? Much if not most work funded by donors through emergency envelopes is really quite routine and planned, but this modality allows less recipient government scrutiny and coordination – for better or worse.
The issues raised in these two thoughtful responses are many, timely, and critical to the future of humanitarian aid work.
The third example above sums it well: “I do not like your choices.” Indeed, I agree most closed ended choices are boxes that beg to be questioned.
The nature of the beast with any survey is that you are taking a snapshot: this is how people responded when they took the survey. Happily -though with no surprise- many who gave us the gift of their time and thoughts in the survey have nodded at the inherent limitations of trying to put into boxes and short answers their insights and have offered up some narrative haikus that offer good points of departure for more discussion. As I have pointed out before, that is indeed the main point of this exercise, this survey.
To rephrase, the inexorable trap of inferring a monolithic and oversimplified answer to any question, particularly the sometimes nuanced and complex ones in this survey, can be minimized -or at least addressed- by openly recognizing that taking a snapshot of a process is impossible: the transform from many dimensions (certainly temporal being the main one) to just a flat two-dimensional view is a trick no one has mastered completely.
As we continue to move forward with collecting responses I must offer a heartily ‘thank you’ to all who have so thoughtfully joined the conversation thus far.
Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers
Though I don’t have any firm numbers to go by, a quick scan of available data is that English is not the first language of most humanitarian aid workers. While it is a fact of life that the default language of many (most?) organizations in the aid world industry is English (with French coming in a very strong second), of the over 300,000 aid and development workers globally I’ll repeat: for most English is at best a second language.
This fact is perhaps reflected in our data in that we have attracted a very small number of local aid workers:
Our main goal in taking on this project was to provide a space for more discussion about the lives and views of aid workers and so, toward that goal and more specifically toward the goal of hearing more -and more diverse- voices, we are working on translating the survey into Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Please send us a Tweet if you have suggestions for other languages – especially if you have someone able to do the translation.
In other news, check out this article in Devex International Development Career Forum that mentions our survey and also quotes my collaborator J.
Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers