Anyone who has worked for an international aid organization in a disaster setting will have come across incidents of immorality or embezzlement, over-mighty behaviour, sexual misconduct and the rest. Shocking though this is, it is not very surprising. These environments are invariably chaotic, lawless, violent and deeply unequal. The people hired to work in such settings frequently have to face down warlords to get access to victims, argue aid convoys through armed checkpoints, risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, in the effort to bring relief to vulnerable people. Those able and willing to do those things often have a go-getting, driven and macho mentality. And this can lead to the creation of a dysfunctional and testosterone-loaded micro-culture.
Of course we would not expect sexual and other forms abuse to be tolerated among aid workers. And once Oxfam knew what was going on in Haiti in 2011, senior executives did their best to sort it out. Culprits were sacked or made to resign. The misconduct was reported to charity regulators and covered by the media – needless to say, not with every lurid detail. New safeguarding measures and improved staff vetting were introduced. With hindsight, they failed to act ‘adequately’, as they have confessed. But to label this a ‘cover-up’ is, in my opinion, grossly unfair.
The 2011 earthquake in Haiti devastated an already excruciatingly poor country, with a degree of brutalized misery in its slums as bad as any I have seen. Few UN, bilateral or NGO agencies rushing in emergency relief performed well. But I believe that the actions taken by Oxfam’s top people to deal with the abuse in their offices and residences once they found out about it were guided by the over-riding need to protect the victimized and avoid damage to programme recipients, as Mark Goldring, the current Executive Director, has explained. The sweeping accusations of a lack of integrity among Oxfam’s senior staff and officers are thoroughly undeserved.
