Making rules

One of my more recent projects at my job is to work with NGOs on improving their capacity to prevent and respond to sexual exploitation and abuse by staff members. You start off thinking it's a cut-and-dried subject: sexual exploitation and abuse = bad; it must be stopped.

But it gets so much more complicated when you start applying it to real life. (And I think that's where it gets interesting). The Secretary General's bulletin on special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, which applies to all UN staff and which most NGOs apply to their own staff (or at least have a similar code of conduct), prohibits sexual activity with persons under age 18 regardless of the local age of consent. But what about local staff who marry under-age girls? The rule is a lot fuzzier on this. Exchange of any sort of money, goods, or services for sex is prohibited - but what about the payment of marriage dowries?

The latest question which has come up is about domestic violence perpetrated by staff. At first I thought it's a no-brainer: it may not be covered by the Secretary General's bulletin if it's not sexual violence, but it seems pretty clear that domestic violence should be a violation of any organization's code of conduct, even if under local laws beating your wife is considered okay.

So I was thinking maybe we need to look at adding something into our Codes of Conduct about domestic violence, or violence in general, to make sure it's covered when local laws don't prohibit it. But then where does it end? If we prohibit staff from beating their wives, then (I would hope) physical violence against children, including spanking, should also be prohibited.

But there's bound to be a lot of resistance, even in the West, to telling people they can't discipline their kids however they want (I should know - I was spanked regularly when I was a kid - my mom says grounding takes too much time, the kid mopes forever, and she'd rather just spank the kid and be done with it). But how can we claim any moral high ground if we say violence against some people is okay but violence against others is not?

Where, in the end, do we draw the line between respecting local cultures and imposing our values on them (especially when it's clear that our own values could use some improvement)?

I think this project is about to get more controversial. I love it.