Over at the United Nations, whose member organization UNAIDS recently lost its deputy executive director Luiz Loures amid allegations that he sexually assaulted a female colleague, there is a similar official minuet of remorse and remonstration. Indeed, Newsweek reported in August that eight male complainants alleged that UN official Ravi Karkara sexually harassed them on the job. The quasi-Orwellian twist here is that Karkara heads up the agency’s iniitiative for the global empowerment of women—against, say, things like sexual harassment. Weary observers of the Western aid scandals can by now fill in the blanks themselves: promises to investigate, earnest assurances of better vetting to come, a pledge to bolster protocols of internal reporting, and similar refrains of collective reassurance ring through tense hallways frequented by grim-faced aid bureaucrats.

Like the organizations themselves, the recommendations for reform are thick with jargon, and billowing with vague talk of improved bureaucratic vigilance and executive transparency. All this will be carried out at great expense, and after a great passage of time—the sum of it all designed to drag out the underlying allegations until they’ve mostly been forgotten.