How to handle bad behaviour in a charity?

www.savethechildren.org.uk/what-we-do/child-protection/children-in-conflict

Every sixth child in the world now lives in a warzone.

Your link (Sat) was interesting dj as were the informed comments on that site. I followed a further link from it to Tufts University which had done an extensive report on Sexual Assault in relation to Humanitarian and Development Aid workers. It appears that Oxfam was identified as having the best practice for addressing sexual harassment & assault so I wonder what other similar agencies are like, and whilst in no way condoning how Oxfam dealt with the inexcusable abuse I wonder why they have been particularly singled out?

Because they want to look at poverty and tax havens, Lazigirl?

Things are looking blacker and blacker for the Oxfam suspects.

Does it matter if or why Oxfam was "singled out" to make unethical behaviour by some charity workers public knowledge? Perhaps there was a lead from somewhere or someone. Since the Oxfam story broke evidence of poor practice in other charities has surfaced as well. Maybe the Oxfam story was just the shoe in the door.

Whatever the reason it's good that what has been exposed has been. In the long run it will bring improvements.

I think the problem is that the sexually predacious, especially paedophiles, will seek out the jobs and professions that enable them to indulge their perversions with minimum chance of being caught.

The problem first came to light in the 1980s and the presence of rings of paedophiles in local authority care homes. Gradually the spotlight moved round; to schools, to the churches and other religious organisations, to teaching, organisations for children, politics, the BBC. In the last few months - and in this week's court case - we have seen the shaming of men who used their passion for football to access and abuse boys and youths.

No-one has until now looked at charities, especially those providing aid in war torn, famine or natural disaster struck areas. What we saw was selfless charity workers, doing humanitarian aid and often putting their lives in danger, that among them were workers who were using this work to mask more perverted activities has been slow to dawn on the general public and indeed the agencies themselves.

I think what we need to realise is that there is no sector of activity that is immune from attracting people like this, who join organisations where they think they can pass unnoticed and indulge their perversions. Their numbers are not large, but the effect of their activities on those in their care is widespread and devastating, Safety can only be obtained by eternal vigilance and a willingness to not relax our vigilance when the person concerned seems heroic and virtuous.

I totally agree with MOnica's analysis of the current focus on sexual exploitation of vulnerable children and adults by some of those working in the charitable sector, particularly in countries where war or natural disaster has left people homeless and in great need.
I read that Oxfam employs 4 safeguarding officers and 22 media specialists. How on earth an organisation as big as Oxfam thinks it can manage risk with only 4 safeguarding specialists is beyond me.
The CEO who made the ill judged and offensive comments that they hadn't murdered babies in their cots rationalised and excused these comments by saying he was speaking when under stress. Being under stress can't possibly excuse making the thought processes that led to such comments.

I can't understand why any man employed by Oxfam or similar organisation doesn't understand that paying women for sex is exploitative and unacceptable. That is particularly true when the woman being paid for sex is in need of the kind of support an organisation like Oxfam should be providing.

Good post Iam64 and just to say that they were not always women either, some were just children.

Good summing up of the problems M0nica, and in fact our lack of awareness about the infiltration of charities by these evil people is astonishing, given all we have learnt over the years of other organisations where this has proved to be rife.

I must say it did occur to me that with everything that is happening in other sectors, major charities, especially those going to impoverished countries at time when, after war or devastation, people are so desperate and dependent on aid agencies, should have been aware of the particular dangers of their work and, more importantly, realised the importance, when they did discover it, of admitting it openly and saying what they are doing to stop it happening again.

Instead they followed the route of so many sectors before them, denial and then cover up. While, when these abuses first became known of in the 1980s, it was understandable though reprehensible, that organisations were so shocked and unbelieving themselves, of the heinous nature of the offences committed. Nowadays there is no excuse for cover ups and denials.

Interesting article about how the author, Aidan Hartley, feels Oxfam has 'gone wrong' in other respects:

Oxfam’s troubles began when it became politically correct The Spectator

In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father, Brian Hartley, worked for Oxfam during a famine in Uganda’s Kara-moja. Like Dad, the other Oxfam people I remember in East Africa were earnest agriculturalists or engineers who had been overseas most of their lives. Some of them were religious or socialist, but they all had the technical skills to help local farmers rebuild their lives after wars or droughts.

The focus was on development. Like my dad, most were sandal-clad volunteers who worked for the charity for free. They helped farmers cultivate better crops or breed improved livestock to stop soil erosion, vaccinate cattle, plant trees and dig boreholes.

Since Quakers founded Oxfam in the 1940s to help civilians in Greece, it has saved and improved countless lives. I admired the charity so much that while at university I would secretly (because I feared my fellow undergraduates might laugh at me) visit its headquarters in north Oxford to do odd jobs.

As a correspondent for Reuters in the 1990s, I came across Oxfam in Somalia, Central Africa and Ethiopia. Africa’s humanitarian crises were now known as ‘complex emergencies’ or, in the case of South Sudan, the ‘permanent emergency’: war, famine, pestilence and death on a vast scale. Once again I saw Oxfam technicians doing impressive, hands-on work for civilians in refugee camps, delivering clean water and food.

Around the turn of the century, during Tony Blair’s government, everything suddenly changed. UK charities like Oxfam had failed to move on from the cycle of emergency to sustainable development, and yet the crises were getting bigger and nastier and the do-gooders had never been in such demand. Budgets exploded. Aid groups got so much money they could hardly keep up with the ‘burn rate’, which is what they call the need to spend funds before the end of a financial year so that donors do not cut the flow of future cash.

From the 1980s-era shabby offices in Oxford and Nairobi, where the staff looked as if they wore the donated clothes sold in their charity shops, Oxfam grew into a slick operation with huge international offices across Africa and other hotspots, populated by young graduates in suits living on good pay. They look like bankers.

During my visits to these offices, I have wondered how often many of these aid workers ever visit what they call ‘the field’. They attend workshops, seminars and even retreats, but they are not the old technicians in dusty sandals we once knew.

Suddenly Oxfam became like a large corporation with 19 global franchises — last year it raised £408 million in donations — and this created its own momentum to raise yet more money. Fundraising by itself gobbled up £26 million of Oxfam annual revenue, and the media became a key tool for mobilising more cash.

Meanwhile, there was a gradual shift of emphasis from development work in the field towards ‘advocacy’ and what Oxfam calls ‘influencing’. The year before last, Oxfam says it spent an incredible €67 million on ‘a worldwide influencing network’ to ‘support progressive movements at all levels’.

These terms describe campaigns to focus on ‘social justice’ in the third world to mobilise what the charity calls ‘The Power of People Against Poverty’. Instead of delivering clean water and food to poor people, Oxfam’s literature promises to help locals ‘exercise their right to have clean water’.

Some of this ‘social justice’ work involves what Oxfam calls ‘holding governments and businesses accountable’ in third world countries. Talk to people in Africa and many will say this involves harassing private investors and bypassing local elected rulers. Oxfam says this is about building a fair and just world without poverty, but this huge shift in its focus seems to be aimed at exonerating the poor from responsibility, inciting their resentment against private capital and blaming the West, stoking guilt and making Africa into a utopian playground for socialists from Sussex University.

Land rights, tax havens, forgiving third world debt: you might agree with the intentions behind these campaigns that Oxfam has pursued, but they are a far cry from providing a hand pump for villagers in Congo, or vaccinating cattle in Sudan against rinderpest. Oxfam claims that last year more than £300 million was spent on its core activities of development and humanitarian aid, but these included projects such as the one in Zambia called ‘I Care About Her’, which aims to ‘mobilise men and increase their role in condemning and stopping violence against women and girls’.

Is all this leftist agitprop really what the good people of Britain signed up for when they made out their direct debits, or when they bought second-hand dinner jackets from Oxfam shops? Surely donors want Oxfam to help the poor with real things: food, clean water and the tools to get back on their feet and rebuild lives after conflicts or natural disasters. Oxfam claims that it monitors the effectiveness of its own projects so that it can successfully help people in ‘resilient development’.

It was with sadness that I read in the charity’s report for last year that it is carrying out a great deal of work in Kenya’s Turkana region, where, it notes, 95 per cent of people live in absolute poverty. This is exactly where my father helped start a number of projects for Oxfam in the early 1980s. In those days, I recall that people lived simple lives, but few lived in the dire poverty of the sort we see now. The real discussion people should be having about Oxfam and other UK charities working in places such as Turkana should be: after all that money, what went wrong, why, and what next?

Good article, thanks baggs for sharing.

Thank you Baggs,for posting this very informative article.It sounds like there needs to be a complete overhaul of how charities procure & use our donations.

Another good article about the state of large charities:

The hand of charity has become a fist
by Paul Collier

The Oxfam sex scandal conjures scenes of abuse masquerading as charity. But the humbling of a “moral superpower” is warranted: some of our charities have acquired power without responsibility, “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

Charities have built power through their image as warriors for the poor. While trust in both government and business has collapsed, they have burnished their credentials as the people we can believe in. Unfortunately, this rests more on smart public relations than on any genuine systems of accountability.

Oxfam started as an emergency response to famine; charitable responses to humanitarian emergencies are still needed, and Oxfam is one of the charities that has developed real competence in doing so. A few bad apples should not deflect from this valuable role. But ambitions have ranged way beyond humanitarian emergencies into core issues of economic and political development.

Here, charities have been tempted beyond their competence. The high regard in which they are held has given charities real power. Aid agencies, such as the UK’s Department for International Development and Unicef, are under relentless media attack for “wasting aid”. The charities need their approval and know it. They extract a price for their support.

One abuse of their power has been moral imperialism. Aid agencies have long insisted that governments adopt particular policies in order to get the money. This is a bad practice that strips governments of responsibility for the policies, making them accountable to donors instead of their own citizens.

The agencies used to fuss only on economic policies, but now charities have piled into this power game, loading the latest fashions in western morality onto these agendas.

I am in Uganda, where charities have insisted that aid should depend on sexual morality. First, American churches insisted that President Yoweri Museveni’s effective campaign against Aids, which was essentially “don’t sleep around”, be replaced by an absurd message of abstinence.

More recently, other charities have demanded that the Ugandan parliament accept gay rights.The real moral issue here is not gay rights but national sovereignty: the values of a society should not be dictated by a foreign power.

Africa needs electricity. Ethiopia has good conditions for hydropower but aid agencies have long been too fearful of charities to finance dams: charities interpret “human rights” as the power to refuse relocation.

My home town of Sheffield gets its water from the Ladybower reservoir which, when it was built, flooded an ancient village. Should the “human rights” of villagers have been allowed to trump the needs of half a million people? The “rights” on which western charities now insist would have left Sheffield dry.

Other African countries want to use coal: a veto by charities blocks this because donors refuse to provide finance for it. Yet Germany gets a third of its energy from coal. African governments are understandably furious at these double standards.

People escape poverty through productivity. Companies are essential for transformed productivity because only they can organise jobs that harness scale and specialisation. Currently, the typical African works solo and so is doomed to poverty.

Charities have made this worse by being instinctively hostile to business. Intimidated by their priorities, the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, imposes demanding “environment, social, and governance” requirements as a condition for its support, even in the poorest countries where the overriding priority is jobs.

Satisfying these criteria is an agonisingly slow process that further constrains the chronic shortage of firms in the places where they are most needed.

In our book Refuge, Alex Betts and I proposed that European firms should bring jobs to Jordan so that Syrian refugees could work. This long-overdue approach is rapidly being adopted as official policy globally, instead of the humiliating policy of camps.

But when we talk to companies, their main fear is not that they might lose money, but that they would risk their reputation when charities attack them for exploiting refugees.

Jordan is a $12,000 (£8,500) per capita country, the refugees have come from a $2,000 per capita country: any job consistent with Jordanian standards would be heaven for a Syrian. Yet charities are inadvertently impeding refugees from restoring their dignity.

So much for moral imperialism. Charities are also disturbingly close to the ethics of the protection racket. Aid agencies need their support, and part of the price for it is that aid money be given to them to expand their own activities. Charities run services such as healthcare and this looks good in the photographs, but in bypassing the country’s government and diverting aid to themselves, they undermine the main route by which governments acquire legitimacy with citizens.

Charities in the 21st century are, like the Church of England in the 19th, the beneficiaries of misplaced trust, social ills exposed in Anthony Trollope’s novels. If sex scandals help to puncture this, they will have served some purpose. Some of their staff have paid harlots; some charities have used their power like harlots. The harlots have to go; but the sector needs its Trollope.

Paul Collier is professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford

The salaries paid to senior charity employees is nothing short of obscene, and I am struggling to understand why they need premises in extremely expensive locations and millions in the bank. Apart from setting aside funds for expected 'outgoings', surely the rest should be passing straight through the organisations like the proverbial dose of salts and arriving where it is needed. Why are charities investing millions? Perhaps I am naive but the extreme urgency of the appeals we see in the media would suggest that a family in a war torn city with no water or food cannot wait for a well invested bond to mature,and people are giving money to help now, not in 2020 when an accountant deems it a good moment to cash in.

No surprises for me Re Baggs posts. It was in the early 80s that I was informed by a priest what Oxfam were about.

So what did you and the priest do about it, petra?

Interesting posts Baggs .

Oxfam may prove to be the tip of the iceberg where all this is concerned.

Days behind as usual.

Some people have a life durhamjen !

The ones who are on gransnet more often than I am?

Nobody is on more than you though.

Except for you, lemon, as you would realise if you bothered to look.

Thanks Baggs, interesting and informative articles.

Sexual predators seek opportunities to join organisations which they think will give them access to vulnerable people with least chance of discovery. And the chaos of a poverty stricken country after war or disaster provides just such opportunities

The only solution is eternal vigilance and checking, but, at times that will fail.

Personally, I think the problem with Oxfam is hubris. They were one of the first charities to work with impoverished people in countries outside Europe, they won the trust of government and got a lot of money from them and as a result developed an overwheening sense of their own importance and believed that they could be instrumental in bringing political and economic change to the countries they helped.

I have never donated money to Oxfam preferring smaller more focused charities who concentrate on delivering their specific skills through smaller, carefully chosen projects. I am sure one day one of them will have sex scandal and an employee who betrays their trust, but I think the chances of this happening is lower than in the big international charities.