Learning to investigate with care

What one safeguarding specialist’s journey reveals about investigations, power, and doing no harm.

From early influences to a career in safeguarding

For Tina, working on protection from sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment (PSEAH) was a natural outcome of her long-standing interests and professional experiences. Her path into safeguarding was shaped early on by reading and paying attention to how power, inequality, and silence affect women and children.

Starting at a young age, she gravitated toward stories that examine what happens when power is misused, and people are left without protection.

She remembers reading The Burning Bed and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as novels by Norwegian author Herbjørg Wassmo that dealt with themes of child abuse, loneliness, and survival.

“These were the books that kept me up at night,” she says.

That early interest shaped how she viewed the world and her place in it. Tina went on to study political science, anthropology, and languages before joining the United Nations, where she worked closely with women’s rights organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Women’s Refugee Commission.

She also met influential figures in the gender equality movement, including Bella Abzug, a prominent feminist leader and former U.S. congresswoman—experiences she describes as deeply formative.

“I think I was trained by all of that,” she reflects. “By the people I met and the conversations we were having.”

Working across contexts and seeing the same patterns

Tina went on to hold senior roles across international organizations, including with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), The Inter-American Development Bank and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Eventually, this work led her into more specialized safeguarding and PSEAH roles.

“It became part of everything I did,” she explains. “No matter the title, the issues were always there.”

Her work took her to crisis-affected contexts such as Niger, Ukraine and Haiti, where she was directly involved in protection and coordination efforts.

Regardless of region or income, Tina noticed the same issues kept resurfacing everywhere: underreporting, limited resources, unclear responsibilities, weak investigations, and systems that failed to support survivors.

“There are many similarities between all types of countries in how the safety of women and children is addressed,” she says. “And unfortunately, it’s often not addressed enough.”

Today, Tina supports the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) on the implementation of their safeguarding policy. While administratively housed under the World Bank, GPE operates independently, working on education reform in countries affected by crisis.

In her experience, safeguarding is often treated as a compliance requirement or disconnected from local realities. Reporting mechanisms may exist on paper, but survivors often struggle to access real support. Their safety and well-being also depend on whether local health services are equipped to respond — for example, whether clinics have trained staff, appropriate medical protocols, or the ability to collect forensic evidence.

Adding to the difficulty, international actors too often maintain parallel systems instead of strengthening what already exists in the countries where they work. This leaves survivors navigating fragmented support, moving between internal organizational processes and national services that may be under-resourced or disconnected.

Another challenge: investigations may be launched without sufficient training or a survivor-centered approach. “It is a societal problem that women and even children are sometimes partly blamed for their own abuse.” You have to be trained so that even in the questions or the analysis, the person doing the investigation isn’t blaming the victim, directly or indirectly.

There’s a misconception that if a policy exists, the problem is solved. But policy alone doesn’t protect anyone.

Power, silence, and accountability

A recurring theme in Tina’s work is power: who holds it, who loses it, and how easily it can be abused when safeguards are weak.

She speaks openly about how organizational hierarchies, gender inequality, and colonial legacies continue to shape responses to sexual misconduct. Too often, investigations focus on institutional risk over the needs of survivors.

“There’s still this idea that reputational risk is more important than survivor safety,” she says.

She also highlights the persistent misunderstanding between confidentiality and anonymity — and how mismanaging either can put survivors at risk. Confidentiality is about who can access the information. Anonymity is about not knowing who the person is at all.. For Tina, transparency about processes, available support for survivors, and informed consent are non-negotiable.

Survivors need to know what’s happening, what their options are, and what the risks might be. Without that, consent isn’t real.

Investigating without causing harm

Through her work, Tina became increasingly concerned about how investigations into sexual exploitation and abuse are handled.

She noticed that cases are commonly led by professionals trained in fraud or compliance, without including survivor-centered approaches. While technically skilled, they may not be equipped to deal with trauma, power dynamics, or the emotional weight of reporting.

This concern led Tina to enroll in the Investigator Qualification Training Scheme (IQTS). By that point, she had worked alongside investigations for years and wanted to better understand investigative practice and strengthen her ability to contribute meaningfully to safeguarding work.

I didn’t want to just ‘understand’ investigations. I wanted to understand how to do them properly, without causing harm.

Through IQTS, she encountered a rigorous, practical framework that challenged assumptions and placed care, ethics, and accountability at its center. What stood out most was the emphasis on how investigations are experienced by survivors.

“An investigation isn’t just a process. It’s an emotional experience for the person who has already been harmed.”

She describes the training as intense, research-based and necessary, especially for professionals who may come from legal, compliance, or audit backgrounds but lack training in trauma-informed approaches.

It’s almost like shock treatment. Especially if you haven’t done investigations before.

Conducting live investigative interviews with reported offenders, survivors, and witnesses played by trained actors is daunting. Being watched by the instructor and course participants keeps you on your toes.

She points out the role of organizations like Humentum and CHS Alliance in making this kind of learning possible, particularly in a sector where investigative training has long been uneven.

She speaks particularly highly of the facilitation, describing Aurélie Gremaud-Laforêt as a “fabulous facilitator” who helps make complex investigative principles accessible and clear.

Putting survivors at the center

(Watch the playlist to hear Tina’s insights)

One of the strongest takeaways from the training for Tina was the emphasis on survivor-centered practice.

“When someone reports, they are already very vulnerable,” she says.

She notes that survivors often experience fear, shame, and concern about retaliation. Many blame themselves, worry about losing their job, their reputation, or their place in their community. Without careful handling, investigations can unintentionally worsen those fears.

She also brings a personal understanding to this work, having spoken openly about her own experience as a survivor and the lasting impact of shame and self-blame.

“If you get it wrong,” she explains, “you don’t just fail procedurally. You risk retraumatizing someone who already feels unsafe.”

The course reinforced the importance of informed consent, clear communication, and non-judgmental engagement. It also highlighted how easy it is — even unintentionally — to place responsibility back on the survivor through poorly phrased questions or rushed processes.

When victims understand that they will be taken seriously, there is a higher chance that they will report, and there’s a higher chance that abusers will be disciplined.

The need for training, especially beyond the humanitarian sector

Tina also points to a growing gap in investigative capacity, particularly outside the humanitarian sector.

Large consulting firms and private companies are increasingly involved in handling misconduct cases, yet often without specific training in sexual exploitation or abuse.

“These cases are not the same as financial investigations,” she explains. “They require different skills.” She searched for similar, publicly available courses in Norway and found a three-hour training that a law firm offers about handling investigative interviews, but none on how to investigate sexual misconduct.

Tina recommends leaders of public and private entities around the globe to demand certification similar to IQTS before assigning anyone to carry out investigations into SEAH. Without specialization, mistakes happen, and survivors and reported perpetrators may suffer. Additionally, a reported offender can use procedural errors to dismiss the findings and counter-sue.

She also emphasizes the role of leadership. Safeguarding failures, she observes, rarely stem from a lack of policy. More often, they stem from a lack of understanding at management levels, where decisions about resources, timelines, and risk are made.

“Managers set the tone,” she explains. “They shape culture, priorities, and responses. If they don’t understand safeguarding, the system won’t work — no matter how good the policies are.”

Learning, unlearning and doing better

Taking IQTS was, for Tina, part of an ongoing learning process, a space where participants are challenged to question assumptions and learn from one another. The training pushed her to think more carefully about survivor engagement, evidence handling, and decision-making under pressure.

Even for someone with her years of experience, Tina found the training useful. “It forces you to slow down and really think about what you’re doing,” she says.

For her, the message is clear:

“If organizations want people to come forward, they have to show that they know how to respond.” As she puts it:

the better the investigation becomes, the better the support for the survivor, the safer the organization will become for everybody.

Conducting investigations requires care.

It requires competence.

And above all, it requires a commitment to doing no harm.

Over 1,300 professionals have strengthened their investigative practice through IQTS in the last two years — you can, too.

Start your journey today