United Nations agencies and the southern Sudanese government are to establish a task force to monitor cases of sexual abuse and exploitation involving international staff, officials said.

"To my knowledge it would be the first such task force," David Gressly, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan, said at a one-day workshop on the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation on Tuesday in the southern capital of Juba.

Participants agreed to launch a public information campaign against the abuse.

"There are 13 ongoing investigations being implemented by the OIOS [Office of Internal Oversight Services]," Aster Zaoude, head of the Conduct and Discipline Unit in the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), said. Two of the investigations, she added, could not be substantiated but four military personnel had been repatriated, as had one member of the UNMIS police.

"There will be incidents; we need to be prepared to enforce our policies," Zaoude added.

The southern Sudanese Vice-President, Riek Machar, said: "This is an important workshop and we in government welcome it, particularly because this was a burning issue; it will help to clear the air."

The southern Sudanese government, he added, expected to be informed of reports about sexual misconduct "so that proper action can be taken in a timely and ordered manner".

The UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on 4 January that at least 20 children said they had been picked up in Juba by UN peacekeepers. The children said they had been forced to have sex, often in official UN vehicles, by the blue berets, who had been deployed to help stabilise the region after a 20-year civil war that ended with the signing of a peace agreement in January 2005. The report, which noted that some of the children were as young as 12, prompted a UN investigation.

"The GOSS [government of Southern Sudan] was caught unawares and we were pressed by the world and the Sudanese people who wanted to know what had happened." said Machar. He added that the government had also been "in the dark" about investigations into the crime.

"Our country has been split over the deployment of UN troops in Darfur," Machar said. "When the press talked about sexual abuse and exploitation, [certain] groups used it to try and stop deployment."

Saying the government would be informed of the outcome once the investigations were complete, Gressly explained: "We have agreed to strengthen our contact. It is a concept that has been agreed to, the challenge is now to take it on and make it function."

The task force will include Sudanese ministers and operate under the auspices of the Vice-President.

On the issue of compensation, Gressly said: "Systems of compensation are already in place for accidents and so forth; we are trying to identify what the system can provide in terms of compensation for these kinds of incidents."

The civilian and military arms of the UN operation had taken measures against possible abuse, in line with the organisation's zero tolerance policy to sexual exploitation of children.

The UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, trained more than 5,000 UN and non-governmental humanitarian and development staff since 2003 on the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation. UNMIS also includes the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation in its training programmes, and bans its staff from notorious bars and market areas at night.

There are thousands of UN personnel and other aid workers in southern Sudan, but according to Jennifer Kiti, an expert who set up training and reporting systems on sexual abuse and exploitation for agencies and NGOs in southern Sudan, mechanisms to enforce the UN's strict code of conduct issued in 2003 are insufficient to prevent abuse.