How to handle bad behaviour in a charity?

There is an awful lot of being wise after the event here. It's all too easy with hindsight! The woman who was chief executive of Oxfam at the time of the Haitian incidents has agreed that with the benefit of hindsight, she might have done things differently. She also explained that the reason for not immediately dismissing the head of country was a desire to have his cooperation in finding the full extent of the problem. Again, that may or may not have been wise, but it was clearly done with good intentions.

I fully support the points made by durhamjen, and welcome the insight offered by Jimbow. It isn't Oxfam that exploited vulnerable people, it is staff hired by Oxfam in good faith who breached their employment conditions.

The staff involved in Haiti were not prosecuted because the Haitian police were not willing to prosecute. Haiti is a destination for sex tourism, with prostitution largely driven by poverty. Anyone who truly cares about the exploitation needs to look for ways to alleviate the poverty.

The Charities Commission is often criticised for not intervening in poorly run charities. Their claims now sound very much like covering their backs. If it mattered to them, why didn't they ask questions in 2011 as to the precise details?

It's true that some charities are little better than fraudulent, and sadly there are a lot of overpaid charity bosses. But I don't believe either of these is true of Oxfam. Its chief executive is paid around £150,00 which is more than I've ever earned, but Oxfam is a very large and complex organisation. I don't think the CEO salary is unreasonable and I'm happy to support Oxfam.

Unlike much of the Haitian aid, Oxfam tries hard to work with local people and to make lasting changes as well as deal with immediate crises.

I fear that some of the outcry comes from people who just want an excuse not to do anything about suffering people who can be conveniently put out of sight.

There have been 100,000 NGOs operating in Haiti and there is no mechanism for passing information to all of them. There is no international equivalent of the sex offenders register.

I am an admirer and supporter of Oxfam and I think it does some great work. However, in this instance, I feel that it has dealt very badly with this matter.

I'm not sure whether they were duty bound to publicise but in my view it would have been wiser to come clean about what had happened. Many things of this nature eventually come out into the open, especially if an individual or an organisation has made some powerful enemies, so - apart from being the most honest approach - it may also be the one to reduce the damage.

What I do find absolutely unacceptable, if the reports I heard were accurate, is that the people who were dismissed were given good references, with no mention of them having been sacked for gross misconduct. So other charities ended up employing people who had, I think, shown themselves to be totally uscrupulous and lacking in humanity and completely unsuitable for a sensitive job helping communities and individuals in need.

It is worrying to think that this sort of behaviour may not be not confined to Oxfam employees but may be occurring in other charities. There has already been a scandal about members of UN peacekeeping forces raping and sexually abusing women and girls. It really is quite alarming and depressing.

I didn't say you hadn't read it. The only thing you found to comment on was the last two sentences, that's all.

How come you think that I haven't read the full article durham? I quoted only the one part of the article that I thought salient to refer to in my post. Would you like me to go through the whole article and dissect and critique it? not going to happen

're your confirmation of recognition of the true tragedy in all of this; the reason I asked is because your posts yesterday seemed to be concentrating more on JRM and his involvement in The Times and BSkyB, than the real issue of sexual exploitation of vulnerable people by a UK charitable organisation.

Of course MissAdventure as in any other organisation, transparency and increased public awareness has got to be good, and in the long term should increase confidence, but the damage done will initially affect funding and morale I should think.

I have said I recognised it in a couple of other posts, Chewbacca, but you are only interested in the one I didn't say it in.
Perhaps I should put a disclaimer at the beginning of every post I make, should I?

" No organisation the size of Oxfam has no muck. Real, fallible, people work for it. They do not advertise for saints because there are none. The C of E and RC churches have proved that. But so does casting around humanity itself do so. In a world of flawed people the question is how organisations deal with the crises those flawed people create."

How come you missed the whole of the rest of the article, and only focused on the final two sentences?

Surely though, the minority who do behave in such a way should be dealt with appropriately? Not just given the opportunity to move on and continue elsewhere.

I agree * Anniebach*. I like to think that the majority of those working in charities are not behaving in such an exploitative way. It is easy to become cynical and I fear that giving will be very much reduced to worthwhile causes in the future.

One ofthe things that also appears in the report is that there was "bullying" and "intimidation" of staff members by this group of men. Does anyone know if the terms and conditions of Oxfam workers are governed by UK law? And if they are could some of those intimidated have brought action against the charity and the men?

Absolutely Annie, completely agree with you, but there had already been reports of staff hiring prostitutes when they were working in Chad in 2004, so Oxfam were aware of the history then but did little about it.

I have, sadly, become very cynical about the big charity organisations having read just how much they are keeping 'in the bank' while pleading desperation and poverty. Why do charities need millions stashed away when animals need help, people are starving, and they keep metaphorically 'rattling the tin'. I give locally and directly if possible.

I'm in awe durham. They're so frightened that Oxfam is right they are resorting to desperate measures to discredit the charity. The cost will be to the victims of the next world disaster that requires humanitarian intervention.

The "cost" will actually be that victims of the next world disaster will be helped by volunteers who don't prey on their vulnerability by taking advantage of them for their own perverted and depraved gains. Do you seriously, honestly think Oxfam handled these incidents correctly back in 2011? Can you really not see beyond the left/right wing politics on this particular issue durham and not see it for what it is; the exploitation of poor, vulnerable people at a time of huge tragedy and loss? Surely you recognise that don't you?

200 aid workers were in Haiti, we mustn't forget the Good done by the 193

Probably because it was becoming increasingly apparent that the story wasn't going to go away this time Annie and it couldn't be airbrushed out, as in 2011. It irks me that Oxfam had personnel in Haiti who were in desperate straights following the earthquake and they were taken advantage of by the very people Oxfam sent there to help them. Even up until yesterday, Mark Goldring (CEO) was telling the BBC "With hindsight, I would much prefer that we had talked about sexual misconduct, but I don’t think it was in anyone’s best interest to be describing the details of the behaviour in a way that was actually going to draw extreme attention to it.” So where is Van Hauwermeiren and his accused co workers now, I wonder? Still spreading his version of charitable works across the world?

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/02/11/the-times-campaign-against-oxfam-is-all-about-defending-inequality/

Why has the Observer joined in Chewbacca ?

For ‘prostitute’ in the refugee camps read ‘desperate women who would do anything to help their families’, not refugees hanging about street corners needing their next fix.

Sadly Charity work, sports coaching, music teaching and care work will always attract, along with the good guys, a small minority of sexually exploitative people because their jobs make it just so easy.

I refuse to give to Oxfam and all the other big charities.
I am not lining the pockets of the over paid Ceos who get paid over £100,000 a year. When I earn a tiny fraction of that
It absolutely disgusts me

3300 cases. Clearly a very much bigger issue than Oxfam fessed up to in 2011 then. The Times were right to bring this back into the public domain again, imo.
I agree with Radicalnan that some large charities do have form for whitewashing their more dubious activities, just so long as the money keeps rolling in. Far stricter controls are needed, especially when they work with vulnerable people.

It wouldn't be because the Times backs Rees-Mogg in his anti-aid stance, would it, as in a Sky interview?
Who owns Sky? Who wants to own BSkyB?
Who owns the Times?

radicalnan I agree about the monitoring of charities. People just will not seem to accept that they are one of the 4 power forces in the world and they all need to be regulated.
Charities are run like business and the larger ones often behave in the same way that corporations do.
I have come across this in my work when I acted for an executor who was refusing to pay money to a charity because of the £500,000 it had previously received, only slightly more than £20,000 had been spent on the objects and the rest had all gone to the directors as salaries.
The Charities Commission said that it was outside its remit to investigate that (which I don't believe is true) and that the money had to be paid over. There were no funds to challenge the Charity Commission and so the money had to be paid over.
It used to be possible to look at charity accounts online. Now you have to download them for a fee and so people are discouraged from doing that before they donate.
There are so many problems with charities that it puts people off giving which is a shame.
In an ideal world, charity would just be adding value to people's lives rather than providing necessities but it is what it is and aid workers often have absolute power over people who have lost everything. That needs very good oversight.

It is being discussed in the C of E synod at the moment, 3300 cases, I believe.

It’s disgraceful the way they simply move on the problem, allowing the miscreants to get similar work with their reputation untarnished, potentially putting other vulnerable people at risk. It’s similar to how the Catholic Church dealt with priests caught abusing children in their parish - an ‘internal investigation’, a report lodged and the abuser moved to another parish. Did the fact that this all didn’t come to light until years after the event make the reporting of it any less valid?

The same man who ran the operation in Haiti had previously been based in Chad and apparently there were the same problems there which were reported.
It seems to be a bit like the church was in the past - if problems are reported, move the cause of the problems somewhere else.
I think one of the problems is that at one time it became out of fashion to consider prostitution as abusive particularly in poor countries but when you consider that these are people who control the supply of food for women who have families to feed, it becomes very sinister.
There have been reports about Unesco having problems of this in refugee camps for a long time.
One of the things that has come out is that there was nothing in their employment contracts about sexual misconduct.
At least hopefully this will be addressed now.

I worked in the local hospice shop and we had targets to meet (volunteers) and no protection for us when bullied but....the CEO went to jail for fraud, he had not been in any way qualified, he was a builder who just took a chance on a falsified CV and got the top job.

Charities will whitewash all they can because they make money out of selling myths.

I don't think that charities are monitored anywhere near closely enough, Kids Company was a scandal on our own doorsteps and people seem to have swanned off unscathed.

Local cultures and infrastructures are disturbed by the work of charities, apart from immediate emergency relief, we should leave people alone to sort their problems as they see fit.

This empire building encourages the abusers and ought to be factored in as a known risk before we start dabbling in other people's lives. Jimmy Saville.need I say more??