If it's cultural, it's not human rights violation.

'Cultural sensitivity' is a concept much touted (though rarely defined) in our line of business. The idea that humanitarian workers should respect the culture in which they work, and, if that culture is not their own, that they should make an effort to understand it, is one generally agreed on. But I find a certain amount of doublethink, and occasional excursions into extreme idiocy based on fuzzy and misguided efforts at cultural sensitivity.
First of all, I find my fuzzy opponents referring to culture as if it were a static thing, and homogenous within national, religious or other delineations, instead of the constantly evolving and complicated thing it is. 'Muslim culture', 'African culture', and, a pet hatred of mine as a term' Western culture' are described as though each could invoke an identical set of values and customs. Thus, a humanitarian colleague of mine with an extreme case of the fuzzies, pondered on whether it was ethical to design education programmes targetting in girls in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, since, she said:
 "They don't go to school, and they're happy like that. It's not their culture to go to school"
When I pointed out that education was the right of every child according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, she countered that the Convention was ' a Western concept' and only subsided when I informed her that Afghanistan was a signatory to this 'Western' Convention. Of course, there are so many things wrong with her initial statement that I could have argued from so many different angles; such as the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that women and girls are 'happy' to be deprived of education in Afghanistan, or the validity of cultural traditions which exclude half of the population from basic services. Or whether culture really should trump human rights, even if they are a 'Western' concept.
As I said, this colleague was an extreme case -she also came up with the classic line, during a discussion on bribery;
        "If it's culture, it's not corruption"
I feel that a well-meaning but uninformed rush to be culturally sensitive can lead us into the same basic errors as those committed by bigoted or prejudiced people, therefore rendering such attempts perfectly counter-productive. To be elaborately 'sensitive' to a national or religious culture while assuming homogeneity and accord among all the people of that country or faith to me smacks of the same kind of ignorance as racism, with better intentions.

Humanitarian Workers and Securtity

In the throes of an essay on international humanitarian law and the protection of humanitarian workers, I came across a very interesting paper. Attacks on humanitarian workers have increased substantially in recent years, with the latest horrific example of the ten people working with International Assistance Mission murdered in Badakhshan, in Afghanistan. These murders were claimed by the Taliban, and then denounced as ‘a crime’ by a senior figure in the Taliban.

The security of humanitarian workers is something I think a lot about, pour cause, and this paper, based on analysis and not only theorising, exploded some assumptions.

Figures for humanitarian workers who have been killed have risen in recent years. World Humanitarian Day, below, is held on the anniversary of the Canal hotel bombing , which happened seven years ago, and killed 22 people in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq.

 While many humanitarians blame the increasing militarisation of aid and the blurring of boundaries between armed forces and humanitarian agencies; the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan are an example of this, there is no actual evidence to suggest that terrorists, criminals and murderers distinguish between agencies that cooperate with the military and those who comply strictly with a policy of neutrality. The motivation of those who carry out these attacks is not clear to those working in the humanitarian sector. Though we may theorise that cooperation with foreign military powers makes targets of civilian workers, we don't know it through empirical evidence. We may deplore such cooperation for other reasons , such as the clear contradiction of humanitarian mandate ( I certainly do), but we can't prove that such organisational intricacies are important to those who murder humanitarian workers.