Award winning professor shows how Queen’s expands its global health impact

A new $2.5 million  project puts Queen’s at the forefront of research on hidden harms in humanitarian work.

Faculty and researchers investigate health, justice, and equity in global contexts, and a recent multimillion-dollar award to Dr. Susan Bartels demonstrates how Queen’s is engaging with these challenges internationally.

Bartels, an emergency physician, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Humanitarian Health Equity at Queen’s, received a $2.5 million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership grant to investigate sexual exploitation and abuse involving United Nations peacekeepers and humanitarian workers. The project co-directed with Sabine Lee of the University of Birmingham and involves an international team of researchers based in Canada, Germany, and several ofthe study regions.

The project aims to investigate the number of people impacted, the barriers they face in reporting exploitation and abuse, and how accountability can be achieved for survivors.

“This is known as a silent or hidden epidemic. Those most impacted by sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers and aid workers are often from historically marginalized communities,” Bartels said in an interview with The Journal. “The same structural power imbalances that enable the abuse also make it difficult for survivors to speak out and pursue justice.”

The study spans Haiti, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, and Kosovo sites which were chosen for their history of humanitarian crises and peacekeeping missions.

“We’re very keen to have geographic diversity,” Bartels said. “We didn’t want this to be framed as a problem of a particular region. We wanted to be able to illustrate that this may be a pervasive issue that spans cultures, languages, contexts, and continents.”

Bartels hopes the findings will shift policy conversations away from the narrative of “a few bad apples” and toward recognition of systemic issues within peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

The project aims to broaden earlier research by including men and boys, and intentional outreach to persons with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “We believe these groups [men/boys, persons with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community] are also impacted more than has historically been appreciated,” Bartels said. “Their needs in terms of response and recovery may be different.”

At Queen’s—a member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) and the Canadian Association for Global Health (CAGH)—global health is also an important part of undergraduate learning. Courses like GLPH 271 and 471, designed by Jenn Carpenter, associate professor in Emergency Medicine and cross-appointed to Public Health Sciences, equip students to analyze health issues through the perspective of political, economic, and social determinants.

“My goal is to foster advocacy for equity,” Carpenter said in an interview with The Journal. “Things aren’t going to be equal in the world, ever. But making it equitable, making sure that everyone, no matter who their parents are, where they were born, have some, if not the majority, of the same opportunities to be healthy.”

Carpenter emphasized the importance of listening to communities and the feedback of her students to shape her teaching. “We have to always remember that the people on the ground in the community are the experts. We have to be humble, ask the right questions, and collaborate to fill needs”, she said.

“The students inspire everything I do—every change I make to the curriculum,” she said. “When they return from placements and share what went wrong, that feedback goes immediately into the curriculum. And when I’m vulnerable and share my own mistakes, it encourages them to reflect and avoid making the same ones.”

For Bartels, this integration of education and research is essential. “Global health isn’t just service delivery. It’s about justice and accountability,” she said. “Recognize our privilege in studying and working at a place like Queen’s, and how that can be leveraged for communities facing different challenges.”

“Doing research in a way that’s engaged with community members and amplifies marginalized voices,” Bartels said, is what she hopes students will take away from her work.