Over the past few years Oxfam’s reputation in both the UK and abroad has suffered from a series of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse committed by Oxfam’s employees and agents in overseas emergency and long-term aid operations.
Haiti
After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Oxfam investigated, a year later, reports that Oxfam-employed workers in Haiti were sexually abusing local women and girls.
Seven members of the Oxfam team in Haiti, including the head of the operation, Roland van Hauwermeiren, resigned or were sacked for sexual conduct in 2011. Prostitutes, some possibly underage, had been entertained at Oxfam properties in Haiti.
Oxfam carried out an investigation into the allegations and then did its best to cover the scandal up. Oxfam concluded that the behaviour was not a case of exchanging ‘sex for aid’ and did not make the report public at the time because the prostitutes involved were not beneficiaries of aid.
In February 2018, Mr Goldring, then Leader of Oxfam, admitted the organisation had kept the 2011 scandal quiet but said it was not in anyone’s best interests to be describing the details of behaviour in a way that was ‘actually going to draw extreme attention to it’.
Penny Mordaunt, then International Development Secretary, said in 2018:
What is so disturbing about Oxfam is that when this was reported to them, they completely failed to do the right thing.
Caroline Thomson, Oxfam’s Chair of Trustees in 2018, said the charity was determined to “learn” from what had happened.
The Charity Commission, in its June 2019 report about Oxfam and Haiti, was damning of Oxfam’s behaviour. It found that:
Oxfam GB’s approach to disclosure and reporting was marked, at times, by a desire to protect the charity’s reputation and donor relationships.
The Charity Commission imposed a 19 month statutory supervision of Oxfam, ending in February 2021, because of its failings in safeguarding in the past.
Recent Allegations
There were further allegations made about Oxfam in April 2021, leading to a further suspension in Government funding for Oxfam. Those lessons didn’t appear to have been learned, yet.
In a Hole, Still Digging
In 2020 the Charity’s LGBT+ network wrote a training manual called ‘Learning about trans rights and inclusion’.
Instead of thinking that sexual violence is a problem that Oxfam ought to combat, this training document says:
Mainstream feminism centres on privileged white women and demands that ‘bad men’ be fired or imprisoned.
It is apparently the position of this “training” that reporting sexual violence to the Police legitimises criminal punishment, harming black and other marginalised people.
The Oxfam document says that white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence:
White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetrate through white supremacy.
It appears to be the case that Oxfam is telling its employees that ‘white feminists’ who report rape and think that criminal punishment is a legitimate consequence for those who perpetrate physical and sexual violence against women are the problem rather than the solution.
Viewed through this distorting lens, the UK criminal justice’s record on rape appears to be good. A small minority of rapes are reported. Not all of those reported are prosecuted, and conviction rates are extremely low.
It has been a matter of concern to many involved with the criminal justice system for the past decade that rape is a crime that many men commit with impunity.
Blaming women for white supremacy if they report rape and expect to be protected from it is a new low.
Women who have been raped are not white supremacists, or bigots, or seeking to punish men.
The problem with rape is not women who report it and want justice. The problem with rape is rapists.
Such training could expose the organisation to claims by women who attend such training for unlawful harassment. It might well create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for such women employees related to their sex and race, contrary to the Equality Act 2010.
Sadly, Oxfam now seeks to silence or shame women who have been raped or abused.
Again.
Postscript
Note added 13th June 2021 – the conviction rate as a proportion of initial complaints of rape is strikingly low. It is important to remember, however, that once a decision has been made to prosecute a case, the conviction rate is no lower than other types of criminal offences. The prosecution rate is approx. 3.6%.
One of Legal Feminist’s criminal law specialists hopes to write about this important issue in the future.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48095118
This is hate speech of the rankest kind. Some body should sue Oxfam for this at the very least white women should withdraw their support for it.
A minor addition but Oxfam can’t even seem to get their equality monitoring right: but maybe this is symptomatic of the complete rot that seems to have set in.
Their recruitment monitoring form doesn’t bother asking for the sex of job applicants (which is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010) but does for asks for the ‘gender’ of applicants (which is not a protected characteristic) with these bizarre options:
Man-identified
Non-Binary/gender queer
Prefer to self-describe
Woman-identified
Additionally, they refer to the ‘Employment Equality Regulations 2010’, which, as far as I can see don’t exist (I assume they mean the Equality Act 2010) and also to the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which was repealed over a decade ago by the Equality Act 2010.
See my Twitter thread for further details and a screenshot of their monitoring form.
Given what Amanda has said above, those responsible for this fiasco need to go: and go immediately.
When I retired from work I volunteered with Oxfam.I made good money for one of their charity shops,selling things online.I left the volunteer team .My decision was motored by the appalling effect of the ‘Haiti scandal’ on the morale of the paid staff.They received no support or guidance.They were not prepared to discuss the issues involved,and no one from the larger organisation stepped in to help them talk to the volunteers.This neglect by Oxfam of the welfare of their people was almost on a par with the events of the scandal.Another scandal.Oxfam is a failed organisation.Morally obsolescent.As for all this twaddle about white women not experiencing crime ,that’s another level of immoral incompetence.I could be offended.But I have better things to do.
Disgraceful. But not surprised another NGO in lockstep with Stonewall,as is the NHS .
Thank you JB for the research and excellent article. I did read about the sexual abuse in Haiti, and decided to boycott Oxfam .