Scores of aid workers have been caught pushing West African refugee children into having sex in exchange for food and medicine sent to save their lives, an aid agency said today.
Britain's Save the Children said a study, carried out after girls in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone reported sexual exploitation, had revealed a startling level of abuses involving 67 aid workers employed by 40 agencies.
The full report, commissioned by Save the Children and the UN refugee agency UNHCR, is due to be published in mid-March, but some findings have already been released.
"It was not a surprise because the girls had been telling us that there was sexual exploitation. What surprised us was the scale of it," Ms Jane Gibril, Save the Children's program director for Liberia and Ivory Coast, said.
"The report indicates that there is a great deal of exchange of sexual services for humanitarian services. Food, medication, plots of land have all been used to gain sexual services," she said from the Liberian capital Monrovia.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by a dozen years of savage intertwined conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Many of the displaced survive only because of the help of aid agencies.
Children have often fallen victim to the region's turmoil, being mutilated, raped, press-ganged into warring factions or forced into prostitution by poverty.
Ms Gibril said most of those involved in the sexual exploitation of children were local employees. Among them were two Save the Children volunteers and one staff member, all of whom have now been dismissed.
But she said there were also reports of sexual exploitation by foreign peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), which helped bring a decade of war to an end last month.