Story
26 June 2026
Zero violations is not a reason to celebrate. It is a reason to worry.
Vitalii Zakharchuk, UN Ukraine RCO Senior National PSEA Coordinator, spoke about how isolation turns people into targets for abusers, why transparency from organizations like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) should be read as a sign of strength, and what needs to change so survivors can speak up without fear."If the system doesn't see a person, it can't protect them." Isolation as a gateway to abuseSexual exploitation and abuse, he explains, is never about sexuality or desire. In 100% of cases, it is about the abuse of power. A humanitarian crisis already creates a huge gap on its own, between those who hold resources and access to help, and those who have lost everything. Vulnerability is not an inborn trait; it is created by the conditions that society, or a crisis, push people into.To explain the inner block that keeps people silent, he points to an everyday example familiar across Ukraine: the way English used to be taught, with the focus on mistakes and judgement rather than practice. That same shame, moved into the realm of safety and rights, becomes lethal. Fear of stigma or of being rejected by one's own community, for instance, the fear of a person from the LGBTQ+ community that their relatives will turn their backs on them — is, in Vitalii's words, "the best fuel there is for an abuser."Add intersectionality on top, and risk factors do not simply add up; they multiply. An internally displaced person living with a disability who is also part of the LGBTQ+ community faces isolation that climbs steeply. If that person encounters hints of exploitation in exchange for basic help, where do they turn? Are hotlines set up for people who cannot hear or see? That is why, he insists, SEA prevention without real inclusion is a fiction.Prevention built into design, not bolted onOne of the sector's biggest problems is the "silo approach," where each actor, housing, education, and protection digs its own closed tunnel. SEA prevention, he warns, cannot be added to a development programme at the last minute to satisfy a donor; it has to be built into the architecture of a project from the design stage.Wherever resources and new positions of power appear, so do new dependencies. If microbusiness grants or retraining programmes have unclear selection criteria, a single grant manager can end up with sole power over who receives help, creating a direct risk of coercion. If an institutional building is designed without inclusion specialists, the result can be toilets or showers that are not adapted for wheelchair users, forcing a person with a disability to depend on someone else for basic needs. Any forced, unregulated dependency in a crisis, this person says, is a potential opening for abuse.The goal is to make SEA risk assessment as routine as a financial audit, shifting from a "protection in a crisis" mindset to a "safe development" one, where every person knows that a job or social assistance is their right, not a favour owed to whoever manages it. The MSF case: transparency as strengthWhen Doctors without borders (MSF) announced that it had investigated cases of sexual exploitation and abuse within its own organization and dismissed 18 staff, many in the sector read it as a blow to its reputation. But it is actually the opposite. "When you open the annual report of a big agency that says it works with millions of people in a brutal crisis, and you see the number 'zero violations,' that's not a reason to celebrate. It's a reason to worry."Across a million beneficiaries in extreme conditions, an absolute zero is statistically impossible: either a perfect world has been built, or walls of silence have been built instead, walls that keep survivors' voices from reaching the top. What MSF did, this person argues, was not a reputational crisis but a sign of institutional maturity, proof that its reporting mechanisms genuinely work, and that zero tolerance does not mean the absence of incidents, it means an uncompromising response when they occur. Burnout and the normalization of violenceThe hardest day-to-day challenge in Ukraine is the burnout of the whole system after years of war. Under constant shelling, the mind adapts and attention narrows to survival, which pushes people into "firefighting mode": drop off aid and move on, because there is already a new crisis in the next region.Responding to cases matters, but by the time an investigation opens, the harm is already done. Prevention, by contrast, is the long game, systemic, often invisible, and slow, and it means building a culture in which every humanitarian worker understands that the aid they distribute is not theirs to hand out from a position of power, but a resource people are entitled to. Toward communities, the message has to be repeated constantly: all aid is free, and no one has the right to demand anything in return, no services, no hints at intimacy, no special treatment, not even silence about problems.A national network, not isolated effortsThis work is now moving to a new systemic level. The PSEA Network has rolled out across Ukraine at scale and already counts more than 200 members. It is not just a coordination platform on paper but a locally rooted ecosystem, co-chaired by the Ukrainian Foundation for Public Health together with World Vision International, combining international resources with the expertise of professionals who know each community from the inside.When more than 200 organizations line up behind the same safety standards, Vitalii says; the result is "a dense net of prevention, response, and support", not scattered attempts at protection, but a proper national accountability system.Effective protection from sexual exploitation and abuse requires real inclusion for people with disabilities, minorities and LGBTQ+ communities; development programmes designed from the outset with these risks in mind; institutions willing to investigate and be transparent about wrongdoing, as MSF did; and an approach centred, without compromise, on survivors rather than on any organization's reputation or funding. The question that needs to changeFor the system to work at full strength, this person argues, there has to be a fundamental turn toward a victim-centred approach as an iron rule: the interests, safety and confidentiality of the person who has been exploited come before any organization's interests. No one should have to fight to be believed."In our society, there's still this question that comes up far too often: 'Why did he/she/they stay silent all that time?' Our shared job is to make sure we forget that question for good. Instead, those of us working as PSEA focal points should be asking ourselves every day: what do we have to change in the system today, so that people can speak up openly and honestly, without the slightest fear?”What needs to happen nowUkraine's PSEA Network remains open to humanitarian and development organizations, donors and community groups willing to put this principle into practice. Build SEA risk assessments into every project from the design stage, not as an afterthought; make reporting channels genuinely accessible to people with disabilities and minority communities; and treat openness about wrongdoing, not silence, as the real measure of an organization's integrity.The choice is not between protecting an institution's reputation and protecting survivors. It is between a system that looks safe on paper and one that actually is. Every organization working in Ukraine has a role in building the second kind.
