I am reading a book called The House on Vesper Sands, in which a woman who is trying to save girls and young women from lives of destitution and all that entails dismisses the suggestion by an amateur investigator that a supernatural force may be behind a spate of recent disappearances among her vulnerable charges. “I’ve seen a good deal of the world,” she says. “And it’s darker than any of them stories. Men need no magic to do harm. If they did, there would be a good deal less suffering in the world.”

It was a line that kept coming back to me as presenter and producer Ramita Navai’s documentary The UN Sex Abuse Scandal unfolded. Her film set out the scale and dimensions of – well, I was going to say the predatory behaviour of some uniformed members and civilians undertaking UN peacekeeping missions. But as we saw recently when objections were raised to a Guardian headline on migrant children “selling sex” to pay for passage from Italy to France, on the grounds that it could more accurately be rendered “children being raped by adults” (it was amended to “sexually exploited”), there are many ways to put these things. By the end of the gruelling hour it was clear that another description, at least as accurate, might be that it was the bleakest reading yet taken of men’s capacity for sexual violence.

Navai’s film involved careful, dignified interviews with survivors of rape and abuse at the hands of those whom they had looked for protection. It calmly laid out the parlous state of the system for reporting and prosecuting the crimes and supporting their victims, and the historical and continuing impunity with which the perpetrators operate as the UN talks fine talk about zero tolerance, but when it comes to walking the walk prefers to slump into the nearest armchair with a shrug and, perhaps, a hopeless shake of the head at the intractability of the problem. “So many men to control,” seemed to be the attitude – “what can you do?”.

In the past 15 years, 1,700 allegations of UN sexual violence have been made, from Bosnia to Cambodia, Congo to Haiti. These are only the ones reported and recorded. We can infer that, as with statistics on just about every form of sexual violence, they represent the merest tip of the iceberg. A total of 53 uniformed peacekeepers and one civilian have been jailed as a result.

We heard testimony from two children who fell victim to French troops – there to protect them from warring militia in Congo and the Central African Republic – five years ago. Alexis, then 15, described children giving peacekeepers oral sex in return for soldiers’ rations. “They weren’t even good rations,” she noted. “They were just their leftovers.” Daniella was 10 when a group of peacekeepers offered her water, then grabbed her, took her into a house, “took off my clothes, threw me down and had sex with me, then told me to go”.

Sexual harassment and assault rife at United Nations, staff claim Read more

Word reached a UN human rights worker, who compiled a report full of what Paula Donovan, a campaigner against UN sexual abuse, described as “stunning revelations … that [the UN] treated as just another report from the field.” It wasn’t until the report was leaked to the media that an independent inquiry was commissioned, which uncovered a tale of complacency and buck-passing that amounted to gross institutional failure and an abuse of authority.

In the three years since, it seems that little has changed. Thirty-two new allegations of exploitation and abuse have been lodged with the UN so far this year. A dropbox nailed to an office in the middle of nowhere and not labelled in the local language was where violated women were supposed to leave their complaints. Promises of victim support have, at least as far as Navai’s numerous interviewees’ experience went, gone unfulfilled. A single day’s inquiry by the documentary team’s local producer found several young women whom the UN said it could not find. It seems these things are not difficult if you have the will.

The team also passed on their discovery of a hitherto unknown victim of former UN peacekeeper Didier Bourguet, convicted in 2008 of two of the 20 rapes of children with which he was charged, including a 12-year-old girl. Navai also interviewed Bourguet, who is now out of prison. He assured her it had been easy to find children. “If you have money. Of course, they were starving. That’s why.”

If only there were some diabolical external force to blame. But here we are, in a world in which peacekeepers can be predators, care systems effectively funnel girls to grooming gangs, and call logs and police reports from immigrant child shelters in the US show men already moving in on the newest-minted mass of vulnerable children – and needing no magic to do harm.