TO COMPLAIN OR NOT TO COMPLAIN: STILL THE QUESTION ...

To complain or not to complain: still the question
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included a wider range of difficult-to-reach beneficiaries, some of whom were highly
vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse. Invitations deliberately included unaccompanied
minors, single mothers (some of whom had been pregnant teenagers), widows and widowers,
people with disabilities, and a cross section of refugee professionals working for NGOs in
Osire—to name some but not all of the groups included.
Thanks to UNHCR and AHA’s advance preparations, Namibia was the only country where
BBC participants included youth under age sixteen. All youth received invitation letters,
meaning that their parents were informed of and had consented to their participation in
discussions about sexual exploitation and abuse prevention/response in Osire. Consultations
with youth under sixteen were conducted with either their (adult) youth club mentor and/
or the Osire school vice principal present.
Prior to consultations, participants received in-person reminders of their consultation date.
This facilitated participation by sixty-six out of seventy-four of those invited. A languageappropriate
introduction to the BBC was conducted with each participant. Discussions were
translated into Portuguese, French and English.
All consultations were held in a comfortable new annex attached to the hospital. The
space was designed for future HIV/AIDS voluntary testing and counseling and provided
an excellent drop-in location but also the privacy of a door with which to close out foot
traffic into and out of the hospital outside. Site-based discussions were combined with direct
observation in the camp and around the hospital, police barracks and women’s centre.
V. CONSTRAINTS
Consultations in Namibia were more formalised in terms of venue, scheduling and deliberate
grouping. For some participants this may have decreased their level of comfort when
discussing sensitive issues with peers who were neither friends nor acquaintances, resulting in
less frank responses. 12 One constraint of all consultations being held in the hospital meeting
room is that discussions were conducted behind tables, with participants seated in chairs.
This seating arrangement created more of an “us and them” division between researcher
and participants as opposed to other country consultations conducted in more informal
spaces. Most scheduled discussions ran on time with only one group seriously overlapping
into another. Refugees who were unable to join during their scheduled times showed up
in unscheduled periods (such as the end of the day) keen to participate. Because the BBC
team did not want to disappoint the few latecomers or uninvited individuals who wanted to
participate in the consultations, it stole time that would otherwise have been spent asking
about sexual exploitation and abuse in the marketplace or through random home visits.
Other than sharing lunch in the women’s centre, very limited time was spent out and about
in the Osire community.
With the exception of students or professionals who spoke English quite well, most other
discussions required translation back and forth from English, Portuguese and French. Thus,
conversations were cumbersome and sometimes slow moving. Although the translators were
reasonably capable, with one outstandingly good exception, they were apathetic about sexual
exploitation and abuse and performed their duties to a minimum performance standard. This
also reflected their disgruntlement with what they felt was inadequate incentive payment for
their services.
Simultaneous to the consultations, an SGBV mission and training captured a lot of refugee time
and attention. Many of the SGBV committee members were in an off-site training and were
12
Conversely, some participants may have been more comfortable discussing sexual exploitation and abuse
related perceptions given that they were not in groups with neighbors and friends.