It takes around five hours to drive to Dekoa from Bangui: two on one of the few paved roads outside the capital; three on a short but bone-crunching dirt road that cuts through the forest and past dozens of tiny villages.

Inside this unassuming, mid-size town almost everybody seems to know a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of UN peacekeepers. During the four-month investigation that began in mid-2016, more than 150 women were identified as potential victims and 41 peacekeepers from Gabon and Burundi were identified as suspects. Allegations were also made in Dekoa against French peacekeepers deployed on a separate mission called Sangaris.

The Dekoa allegations came a year after another sexual abuse scandal involving peacekeepers in CAR hit the headlines. In April 2015, an internal UN report was handed to the Guardian newspaper by an American advocacy group, AIDS-Free World, whose

Code Blue Campaign aims to end impunity for peacekeeper sex abuse. It contained allegations that children as young as nine had been raped and sodomised by French Sangaris soldiers.

The alleged abuse took place in a camp for internally displaced people at Bangui M’Poko airport between December 2013 and June 2014. The soldiers had been deployed to protect civilians after a predominantly Muslim alliance of rebels from northern CAR, called the Séléka, ousted then-president Francois Bozizé and triggered a brutal civil conflict that is still reverberating today.

Instead of acting on the allegations, an independent review in December 2015 found that the UN passed the issue “from desk to desk, inbox to inbox, across multiple UN offices, with no one willing to take responsibility”. The review, led by a Canadian judge, highlighted “unconscionable delays” in providing the children with basic medical care, psychological support, shelter, food, and protection.

☰ Read more: The children of M’poko

IRIN also found problems with victim assistance in Bangui after interviewing three young women aged 18-20 who said they were being supported by UNICEF but described infrequent contact with the agency’s staff and a lack of psychosocial support. The women said they had been enrolled in different vocational training programmes over the past year but none were in school and their programmes had all finished. “I have got nothing,” said one, who was living in her grandmother’s small two-bedroom house, just a stone’s throw from the site of the now closed displacement camp where she said she had been raped. In PK12, a district of Bangui, IRIN met with the director of a local NGO, Yamacuir, that supports 12 young victims abused by international forces. The director, Paulin Baifo, said its contract with an international NGO had ended last year and it was unable to pay for the children’s school fees, forcing many to drop out. Monthly food packages and other material support had also stopped. The NGO was so short of cash Baifo said its staff were selling coal at a local market to pay the bills. Baifo said he had raised the issue with UNICEF at a recent meeting, but “they have done nothing”. “We don’t have the means to support the children at the moment,” he said. UNICEF said it had no partnership with Yamacuir but would “look into” IRIN’s findings. Interviewees also expressed disappointment in the decision not to bring charges against Sangaris troops. The decision came even though many victims had provided detailed descriptions of the men who abused them. One teenage girl who said she was raped by a French soldier in Bangui when she was 14 said her abuser was tall, muscular, and had a tattoo that began on his neck and snaked down his arm. “Justice is important,” she said, “But there is nobody to support me so that it can be served.”

In Dekoa as in Bangui, it was again at a displacement camp that peacekeepers targeted many of their victims.

A second alleged Dekoa victim told IRIN she met a Gabonese peacekeeper at a checkpoint at the entrance to the camp and began what she described as an “official relationship”.

“‘We have come to protect the population, but I need to have a woman and I have fallen in love with you,’” she recalled him saying.

The peacekeeper offered her $7 to rent a house 50 metres away from his base. “I had regular breakfast and food every day thanks to him,” she said.

The relationship continued for four months until the soldier told her he was returning to Gabon. By that stage, she said, she was visibly pregnant with his child. The soldier told her he would send money to support the baby. But when she tried to contact him after he left, the line never connected.

Left alone with the child, she turned to UNICEF, which was tasked with providing victim assistance and did so in partnership with local NGOs. After registering her name and taking her details, she said she was given a one-off payment of around $35, a kit with sugar, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a plastic jerrycan, and a one-off group counselling session with around 30 other women.

None of it was sufficient. She spent the $35 almost immediately on a trip to Bangui for her uncle’s funeral. The sugar and hygiene kit lasted just a few weeks. Even the group counselling session wasn’t enough to make sure “we don’t make the same mistakes again”, she said.

Today, the young woman ekes out a living selling a locally brewed alcohol at Dekoa’s central market. It takes her a week to prepare a single batch that she then sells for $7. It’s not enough to buy daily food and clothes for her child, let alone for her to return to school.

“At first I thought we would register and receive support,” she said. “But it didn’t come.”

Swanson, the UN’s top investigator, disputes some of the women’s accounts. He told IRIN that DNA testing “on around 20 victims and their children” has shown “with a high degree of confidence, that the soldiers identified were not the fathers of the children they were alleged to be.” These DNA results have not been made public.

Every victim IRIN spoke to described a similar lack of support. A third woman, aged 23, said she was raped by a Gabonese peacekeeper one evening back in 2014. After he had finished, she said he gave her around $2 and said “come back tomorrow and we will discuss”. She met the man early the next morning and engaged in “consensual sex” on three further occasions because she needed the money.

She made no eye contact and barely took a breath as she raced through her story. She said she wants to move away from her family to escape stigmatisation – “everyone calls me the Gabonese wife” – but needs money to start a business. She said she was currently at school but on the cusp of dropping out because her father had not paid this year’s fees. Worst of all, she said she is in almost the same financial position that led her into the relationship with the man who raped her.

“If I had more money it would help me forget and it would mean I would not have to consider trading sex for money,” she said.

☰ Read more: The struggle for social acceptance

Some of the most disturbing allegations from Dekoa involved French troops working separately to the UN. According to information leaked to AIDS-Free World, four girls were allegedly tied up and forced to have sex with a dog by a Sangaris military commander in 2014. Each girl was given the equivalent of $9 and released. IRIN established that at least two of the girls involved were forced to relocate to other parts of the company to escape stigmatisation. One of the girls was reported to have been labelled the “Sangaris dog” by members of the local community. Such stigmatisation appears to have kept a number of women from reporting cases of abuse by Sangaris troops. Four said they were speaking of their experiences for the first time in interviews with IRIN. These new alleged victims, aged between 21 and 32, provided names and physical appearances of the soldiers. One woman, aged 30, described beginning a relationship with a Sangaris soldier involved in military logistics. She said she met him two or three times a week over a six-month period at the Sangaris base, receiving between $2 and $10 each time. She said he promised her a passport so that she could travel to meet him in France, but then left without saying goodbye. When NGOs began registering people’s names for distributing aid, the woman said she was too ashamed to come forward and did not consider what had happened to her as sexual abuse or exploitation. Now, she said she has begun to think differently. “I was living as a refugee and I had no money,” she said. “This is why he abused me.” Another victim, now aged 21, said she met a clean-shaven 18-year-old Sangaris soldier on three separate occasions during his deployment. She said they met in an abandoned house close to the Sangaris camp. The man would bring a mat for the floor and food packs for her to sell on at the displacement camp. With her father absent and her 27-year-old sister recently deceased, he offered a crucial lifeline. “There was nobody to support me,” she said. Like the first women – and several others interviewed by IRIN – the 21-year-old said she had been too afraid to come forward when the NGOs began registering names. “They call you ‘women of Sangaris’,” she said. “I didn’t want this to happen to me.” IRIN shared the names of women who had given their consent to the UN’s Conduct and Discipline Team in Bangui, which said it would investigate their allegations.

In a statement to IRIN, UNICEF said it provides “recurrent distributions” of hygiene kits and other non-food items to sexual abuse victims in Dekoa and confirmed a one-off cash payment of between 10,000 to 20,000 CFA, or $20-$35, was provided to victims in June and July 2016.

“We continue to improve our programming with partners to provide appropriate assistance to victims,” a spokesperson said.

UNICEF added that “Dekoa is one of the hardest to reach places in the Central African Republic”, and that “the security situation is very volatile”.

Dekoa has experienced bouts of insecurity. Currently, though, it is free from armed groups. IRIN reached the town by taxi from Bangui in under five hours, on a road controlled by the UN and national gendarmerie.