MANY aid workers are “too scared” to report cases of sexual abuse and exploitation while working in developing countries in fear of losing their jobs, a Commons committee heard today.

Dr Miranda Brown told MPs that it was “just too dangerous” for aid workers, many of them junior staff on short-term contracts, to whistleblow when abuse is inflicted on vulnerable aid recipients — overwhelmingly women and children — by their colleagues.

She told the international development committee: “Aid workers know what is going on. They see it. But are not in power to report it.”

Committee chairwoman and Labour MP Sarah Champion asked Ms Brown who would have the power to punish someone for reporting abuse.

She replied that “superiors” engaging in sexual exploitation or abuse against people who rely on them for aid services and food have the power to simply not renew contracts of junior aid workers.

It is also common for both workers and abuse victims to be forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, she added.

Ms Brown criticised the British government’s Department for International Development — soon to be merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — for not yet having conducted an audit of whistleblower protections within aid organisations.

The “vast majority” of aid workers have “no contractual protections,” she added.

It comes after Oxfam failed to report child sex abuse and exploitation in Haiti.

Ms Brown said she has been “blacklisted” by the UN, her former employer, for five years. She was the chief of the East and South Africa section for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights when she reported peacekeepers’ sexual abuse of children in the Central African Republic.