The recent reporting on safeguarding failures in humanitarian programmes in eastern Chad has prompted important conversations about organisational accountability, investigations, and survivor support.
These discussions matter.
They also provide an opportunity to reflect on broader questions that extend well beyond any single organisation.
While the full circumstances of every allegation in Chad are neither public nor ours to interpret, the case reminds us of challenges that safeguarding practitioners encounter repeatedly across humanitarian settings. Across investigations, organisational reviews, and safeguarding practice, the same questions continue to emerge.
Why are some forms of harm recognised immediately while others remain invisible for years?
Why do some concerns enter safeguarding systems, while others are treated as misconduct, poor management, or interpersonal conflict?
Why do organisational categories often fail to reflect how people actually experience harm?
These are not simply technical questions.
They are questions about how safeguarding understands power.
Safeguarding Depends Upon Definitions
Every safeguarding system relies on definitions.
Definitions determine which team becomes involved, which procedures are followed, which expertise is required, and how organisational accountability is understood.
In this sense, definitions are not simply descriptive.
They are governance tools.
They shape what institutions are able to recognise.
This becomes particularly important when considering sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment.
Many safeguarding frameworks distinguish clearly between these categories. Sexual harassment between colleagues is often addressed through workplace conduct or human resources procedures. Sexual exploitation is frequently associated with relationships involving affected populations or beneficiaries.
These distinctions can be administratively useful.
Yet they can also create blind spots.
Across CTDC's work, what we see repeatedly is that power rarely follows organisational charts.
A line manager may control contract renewal. A supervisor may influence promotion, deployment, performance reviews, or access to professional opportunities. An international staff member may exercise authority over nationally recruited colleagues. A consultant may influence future employment. A senior colleague may hold significant informal power through reputation, networks, or institutional influence.
These relationships are characterised by dependency.
When unwanted sexual conduct occurs within such relationships, the question should not simply be whether organisational guidance defines the behaviour as harassment or exploitation.
The more important question is whether power has constrained another person's ability to exercise genuine choice.
If safeguarding definitions focus primarily on organisational status rather than relationships of power, coercive dynamics may be understood as workplace misconduct when they also reflect exploitation.
The category changes.
The power relationship does not.
People Do Not Always Report Using Safeguarding Language
A second lesson that emerges repeatedly across safeguarding practice concerns reporting itself.
There is often an assumption that sexual exploitation and abuse cases are either reported through safeguarding channels or not reported at all.
Reality is rarely so straightforward.
People frequently disclose parts of their experience without identifying it as sexual exploitation or abuse.
They may report favouritism.
Bullying.
Poor management.
Misuse of authority.
Retaliation.
Conflicts of interest.
Inappropriate behaviour.
Professional misconduct.
Sometimes this reflects uncertainty about organisational terminology.
Sometimes individuals fear that explicitly reporting sexual exploitation will expose them to greater personal risk.
Sometimes they have limited confidence that safeguarding mechanisms will protect them.
Sometimes they simply do not yet interpret their own experience through safeguarding language.
Whatever the reason, organisations should be cautious about assuming that safeguarding concerns only enter institutions through safeguarding reporting mechanisms.
Across organisational practice, concerns initially reported as management problems or misconduct may later reveal patterns of coercion, abuse of authority, or sexual exploitation.
This does not mean every misconduct complaint is a safeguarding case.
It does mean that safeguarding systems should not become so narrowly defined that they overlook early indicators because they arrive under a different organisational label.
Safeguarding is not only about investigating allegations that are explicitly identified as sexual exploitation and abuse.
It is also about recognising patterns of power before those patterns become visible as safeguarding failures.
When Technical Categories Fragment Lived Experience
Another recurring challenge concerns the relationship between safeguarding and gender-based violence.
Within humanitarian systems, sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), gender-based violence (GBV), and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) are often treated as separate technical domains. Each has its own guidance, funding mechanisms, specialist expertise, and reporting requirements.
These distinctions have practical value.
Yet people's lives rarely fit neatly within institutional architecture.
A community volunteer may also be a refugee.
A healthcare worker may also rely on humanitarian assistance.
A casual labourer may simultaneously be an employee, a community member, and someone receiving aid.
The same individual may experience workplace harassment, exploitation linked to employment, violence within the home, and exploitation connected to humanitarian assistance.
From an organisational perspective, these may belong to different frameworks.
From the perspective of the person experiencing harm, they are often interconnected experiences shaped by gender, dependency, discrimination, and unequal power.
This matters because organisational systems can unintentionally fragment experiences that people themselves experience as continuous.
Safeguarding should certainly maintain conceptual clarity.
But conceptual clarity should not come at the expense of understanding how power operates across different aspects of people's lives.
Moving Beyond Technical Compliance
The humanitarian sector has made important progress in strengthening safeguarding systems over recent years. Reporting mechanisms have improved. Investigations have become more robust. Survivor-centred practice has rightly become central to organisational responses.
These developments should not be understated.
Yet stronger procedures do not necessarily produce stronger interpretation.
An organisation may have comprehensive policies while still misunderstanding how exploitation first becomes visible.
It may receive repeated concerns about misconduct without recognising broader patterns of coercion.
It may distinguish so sharply between safeguarding, human resources, and gender-based violence that relationships between them become difficult to see.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to improve safeguarding procedures.
It is to strengthen safeguarding analysis.
Because safeguarding is ultimately an interpretive practice.
It depends upon people's ability to recognise power, understand dependency, identify coercion, and appreciate that harm rarely arrives already organised according to institutional categories.
Seeing What Organisations Have Learned Not to See
Cases such as those reported in Chad remind us that safeguarding is not only tested when allegations emerge.
It is tested much earlier.
It is tested in how organisations define harm.
How they interpret concerns.
How they distinguish between misconduct and exploitation.
How they understand relationships of power.
And how willing they are to question the conceptual frameworks through which safeguarding itself is organised.
The strongest safeguarding systems are not simply those with the most comprehensive procedures.
They are those capable of recognising harm before it conforms to organisational definitions.
Because institutions cannot respond to what they have not first learned to see.
Reach to Us
Have questions or want to collaborate? We'd love to hear from you.