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On Monday, the UK pledged at least £87 million of humanitarian aid to Yemen which is half the amount pledged by the Government at last year’s United Nations event. This comes less than a month after it was revealed the British government licenced arms exports to Saudi Arabia worth £1.4 billion between July and September 2020.

The proximity of these announcements exposes the Government’s uneasy balancing act: juggling the roles of both arms exporter and humanitarian.

The UK has granted export licences to Saudi Arabia worth around £7 billion since March 2015, the year Saudi Arabia became involved in the conflict in Yemen.

In the same period, an estimated 8,759 civilians have been killed in airstrikes according to the Yemen Data Project, with British equipment being implicated in some incidents.

An airstrike on a ceramics factory in September 2015 which killed one person and injured two others, including a child, is one such incident. Research by Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights organisation, suggests that at least one bomb used in the airstrike was made in the UK. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres said recently: “It is impossible to overstate the severity of the suffering in Yemen”.

Two thirds of people in the country require humanitarian support which is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of the UK’s three biggest cities: London, Manchester and Birmingham. Of those, 50,000 are starving in famine-like conditions and 400,000 children are severely malnourished.

The UK’s decision to halve its aid to Yemen has been widely criticised in light of these statistics, including by Mark Lowcock, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

In a press conference on Monday he said: “Some countries have particular responsibilities in Yemen, the UK is one of those”.

“The worst famine the world has seen in decades” could be averted Mr Lowcock continued, “if those with a particular responsibility and those with particular leadership history and those with particular power take up their responsibilities”.

But Anna Stavrianakis, Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, cautions against the idea that the UK giving more aid to Yemen would solve the humanitarian crisis there.

“When you look at the cause of humanitarian disaster it is the war and so it is not possible to both facilitate the war by selling weapons that creates the disaster to which you then claim to respond”.

According to UK law, the Government should refuse an export license where there is a clear risk the items being licensed might be used in a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

“At the start of the conflict in Yemen, there were arguments to say that clear risk threshold wasn’t met”, Molly Mulready, former lawyer at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said at a webinar this week about arms sales to conflict zones.

However, as more evidence about how Saudi Arabia conducts itself in warfare comes to light, she says, “that line becomes more and more difficult to hold”.

The Government justified licencing arms exports to Saudi Arabia in July by saying that “possible” violations of international humanitarian law were “isolated incidents” rather than “patterns of non-compliance”.

“The British Government is essentially turning a blind eye to their weapons sales having an impact … and it’s been a continual policy of basically denying the reality of Saudi action in Yemen” said Murray Jones, Defence Researcher at Action on Armed Violence.

This was evident at the UN pledging event on Monday where James Cleverly, Minister of State for Middle East and North Africa, said: “Peace is the only way out of this terrible conflict and the only way to alleviate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.

According to Anna Stavrianakis, it is this disconnect between the cause of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the UK providing aid which is key to balancing the roles of arms exporter and humanitarian.

She said the pinch point will come “when more attacks on civilians can be traced back to UK made weapons” because this would firmly relate the need for humanitarian aid with UK supplied weapons attacks on civilians.

A Government spokesperson said: “The Government takes its export responsibilities seriously and rigorously assesses all export licences in accordance with strict licensing criteria”.

Funding to aid organisations should be conditional on them having “robust” safeguarding measures in place, said Labour MP and chair of the International Development Committee, Sarah Champion, in a press conference earlier today.

Ms Champion said the Government’s focus on ensuring known perpetrators are not reemployed in the aid sector is not enough given so few perpetrators are ever convicted. Instead, “the Government now needs to be embedding safeguarding in every project it funds”.

Embedding safeguarding means aid organisations proactively preventing exploitation and abuse from happening. As well as having accessible and effective reporting mechanisms in place to respond sensitively, and in a timely manner, when allegations are made.

Speaking about how to address exploitation and abuse in the aid sector Sarah Champion said: “Money is the thing that will motivate the organisations to act or not act”. She suggested that making funding conditional on implementing safeguarding measures will encourage change within the sector which has been hit by multiple high-profile abuse scandals in the last few years.

In a 2017 report 40% of women and girls receiving humanitarian aid in Syria disclosed experiencing sexual exploitation and abuse and the exploitation of women by Oxfam employees received widespread media coverage in 2018. More recently, over 50 women in the Democratic Republic of Congo have accused Ebola aid workers of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Many female aid workers have also been victims of abuse while working in the sector. In a 2016 survey of over 1000 female humanitarian aid workers conducted by the Humanitarian Women’s Network over half had experienced unwanted advances from male colleagues.

Sarah Champion’s statement comes two weeks after the International Development Committee published a report on sexual exploitation and abuse in the aid sector.

It found that 26% of respondents to their online survey had witnessed sexual exploitation and abuse of aid recipients but only 16% thought their organisation had safe reporting and complaints mechanisms in place so that such incidents could be reported.

Ms Champion says there has been little action by the Government in response to her committee’s report so far because of the current focus on Covid-19. However, the pandemic has made many people more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse due to food shortages and cuts to aid.

The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, recognised this in a virtual meeting with the International Development Committee. “It has become harder to report it, harder to investigate it and harder to bring people to account” he said referring to abuse during the pandemic in his response to a question about what the Foreign Office is doing to hold aid organisations to account.

The United Nations have previously warned of a “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence as women and girls are disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr Raab later promised to personally look into the possibility of introducing DBS checks for aid sector workers. Sarah Champion is hopeful this will go ahead because it will likely only require government guidance rather than legislative changes.

Content warning: sexual assault/rape

Universities have a duty to create a safe learning environment and to provide support to students when things go wrong. Without knowing the scale of sexual misconduct within their institution, universities will not be able to effectively prevent it, support victims or hold perpetrators to account.

A high proportion of universities that responded to a freedom of information request claimed to have five or less or even no formal reports of sexual assault annually in recent years. This is a far cry from the 20% of students who reported experiencing sexual assault and the 12% who reported being raped in a report by the National Union of Students in 2019.

Some universities have started to address this lack of formal reporting.

In 2017 Cardiff University launched its Disclosure Response Team (DTR) which allows students to disclose incidents of sexual misconduct anonymously so the university can better understand the scale of the problem.

From the outset, the number of disclosures they received vastly outnumbered the formal reports at other universities. In 2019/2020, the 141 disclosures of sexual assault, including rape, dwarfed the five or less formally reported incidents at seven of the nine other UK universities who provided comparable information for that year.

Students who contact the DRT and identify themselves are given confidential support and, if the individual feels it is the right thing for them, guided through the formal complaints procedure.

Incidents of sexual misconduct can make people “feel out of control” says Amy Sykes, the Wellbeing Coordinator at Cardiff University, and so the emphasis for the DRT is on reassuring people that they will not be made to do anything they do not want to do.

Disclosing incidents of sexual misconduct is important because it can help the student process what has happened and access the support and specialist resources they may need. The DRT aim to “take the burden off the student” so they can move forward and continue their studies, Amy says. It also gives universities an idea of the scale of the issue so they can invest in preventative action.

In the first year of the DRT, 2017/18, half were anonymous disclosures but in 2019/20 97% were identified disclosures, suggesting a growing trust in the system amongst students.

Meanwhile, at other universities students are calling for their institutions to take action.

Laila Ahmed, a first-year student at the University of Warwick, started a petition demanding the university take more pro-active action to address sexual assault and rape cases, including more support for victims and tougher sanctions for perpetrators. It currently has over 48,000 signatures.

She blames the underreporting of sexual misconduct on the lack of guidance given by the university about how to report it and what support is available. After her friend experienced sexual misconduct and did not know how to report it, Laila “had to do some digging” to find out for her.

She was “shocked” by how low the number of formal reports of sexual misconduct were at Warwick. Based on anecdotal reports amongst her peers, she feels that there have been more incidents in her first term than the 12 formally reported in 2019/20.

A report by Durham University found the most common barrier to reporting sexual misconduct was students thinking nothing would be done if they reported it, closely followed by students being worried they could not prove it happened.

Other barriers included, feeling embarrassed, ashamed or partly to blame, being worried they would not be believed, not knowing how to make a formal report and fear the perpetrator would retaliate.

The university also acknowledged that delays in dealing with reports “has the potential to impact students’ wellbeing, academic progress, and relationship with the University”. Laila echoed Durham’s findings, saying a lengthy reporting process puts people off. People do not want to “live in the bubble of trauma for so long”.

The impact of these barriers to reporting can be seen in the consistently lower number of formal reports of sexual misconduct to Durham University compared to the number of disclosures.

There were nearly five times more disclosures than formal reports in the five years from 2014/15 to 2018/19.

The difference between disclosures and formal reports of sexual misconduct at Durham shows universities must not take low numbers of formal reports as evidence sexual misconduct is not happening. Instead, it should set off alarm bells that their students do not know what avenues are open to them and do not feel they can go to the university for help.

Without an understanding of the scale of the issue, universities will struggle to address sexual misconduct and fail their students in the process. Facilitating, and recording, disclosures like Cardiff and Durham would be a starting point.

As the number of signatures on Laila’s petition shows, “people want to see change”.

This decade, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is set to overtake user dependant methods as the main method of contraception provided by NHS sexual health clinics in England. This follows a shift in favour of LARC over the last 10 years, with intrauterine contraceptives and the implant seeing the greatest increase in uptake.

In 2019/20, 794,000 females used Sexual and Reproductive Health Services for contraception in England.

For 54% of them, their main method of contraception was user dependent, such as oral contraceptives and male condoms, down from 74% in 2009/10.

The rest opted for LARC, which is the intrauterine device, intrauterine system, implant and injectable contraceptive, nearly double the proportion in 2009/10. This shift follows a 15 year effort by the Government and NHS to increase the availability of information around LARC so females can make a more informed choice about what method is best for them.

Penny, 24, stopped using oral contraception after five years because of bad side effects. She opted for the implant instead because she “wanted a lower dosage [of hormones] option that was more reliable” and liked that you “don’t have to think about it for three years”.

She feels that more information about LARC is readily available now than when she first went on the pill.

Research by Imperial College London, found that uptake of LARC is associated with a decrease in unplanned pregnancies. LARC is more effective than user dependent methods because it is not reliant on the user in order to be as effective as possible. Despite the 18% decline in the use of oral contraceptives over the last 10 years, they are still the most common method of contraception, with 38% of females accessing NHS sexual health clinics in 2019/20 taking them.

This remains above the 19% and 18% using intrauterine contraception and the implant, respectively. Even after increases in their use of 110% and 89% over the last decade.

As of 2019/20, 13% use male condoms as their main method of contraception, following a 50% decrease in their use as contraception, and 9% use the injectable contraceptive.

If these trends continue, LARC is likely to overtake user dependent methods as the main contraception method provided by Sexual and Reproductive Health Services in England within this decade. This should lead to less unplanned pregnancies and more females using a method of contraception that suits their needs.