Oxfam: time to learn, not destroy

Feb 15, 2018 Editorial, Features / Columnists

(Republished from the Guardian)

On 12 January 2010, a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. One of the poorest countries in the world, it was utterly unprepared. Roads and bridges, hospitals and government buildings as well as thousands of homes collapsed or were severely damaged. At least 220,000 died – including more than 100 aid workers already in the country – and as many again were injured.
Scores of aid agencies with hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of relief raced to bring help, each agency hastily recruiting hundreds of extra workers. Among these men and women of goodwill who were dispatched to organise medical help, to inoculate, feed and protect the thousands of vulnerable people were seven Oxfam employees who, it has now emerged, spent their time off procuring young, possibly underage, girls and women for sex.
It is likely that some of their victims were reliant on the aid Oxfam provided, with donations collected on street corners and jumble sales in Britain. The enormity of employees of an organisation dedicated to ending poverty, hunger and social injustice hosting sex parties said to be of Caligulan proportions amid the wreckage of a humanitarian catastrophe is what turns a scandal into a crisis that could damage the whole UK charitable sector.
A year after the earthquake, in 2011, Oxfam’s head office was alerted by a whistleblower to the allegations. The charity then made two more serious errors of judgment. First, it played down the seriousness of the offences. The Charity Commission was told only that “serious misconduct” relating to abuse of power and bullying was being investigated.
Later the Department for International Development was misled in the same way. As a result neither treated the report with the seriousness it required – and both are now rightly furious at the way they feel they were deliberately misled.
The second mistake was to fail to prevent the four men who were sacked and the three required to resign from working in the sector again. Allegations about sex parties in Chad in 2006, four years before the Haiti earthquake, led to the sacking of one senior employee. Roland van Hauwermeiren, who resigned after the Haiti scandal emerged, was head of Oxfam in Chad at the time.
Reputational harm is an existential threat to charities. It is not an accident that Oxfam has been caught out; it is the same mix of negligence and complacency that has exposed the Catholic and Anglican churches to similar disaster.
After Haiti, Oxfam tightened its safeguarding processes. But this may well be the tip of the iceberg. One challenge for organisations working with children and vulnerable people is the acknowledged risk posed by sexual predators seeking out respectable cover for contact with their potential victims.
Oxfam denies giving references to the employees sacked or allowed to resign after the Haiti allegations, but Mr Van Hauwermeiren went on to another senior job in Bangladesh working for a French charity, and another man involved is reported to have gone on to work with the Catholic aid charity Cafod.
What this crisis must not be allowed to do is undermine the case for generous aid spending as both a moral obligation and as pragmatic policy.
The Oxfam case involves fewer men than can be counted on two hands. The courageous and dedicated efforts of thousands of its employees have saved millions of lives in the most gruelling and dangerous circumstances. They and their peers in other charities deserve the best defence. That means honesty and transparency, and a conspicuous determination to root out anyone who threatens their reputation for it.

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