Funding fears may drive charities to hide sex abuse
Charities may be covering up cases of sexual abuse and exploitation over fears that a public backlash could hit donations, aid experts said on Monday in the wake of a sex scandal involving Oxfam, one of Britain’s biggest charities.
Oxfam was under threat of losing its British government funding after a newspaper report said its staff paid for sex while in Haiti to help those affected by a 2010 earthquake.
Aid Minister Penny Mordaunt said the government would cut funding to any charity that did not comply with a new review into their work overseas, which will focus on their duty to protect staff and the people they work with from harm and abuse.
Yet such threats could have an adverse impact if charities decide to cover up sex abuse cases for fear of losing support from the public, donors and governments, industry said.
“People definitely fear the funding shortfall,” Andrew MacLeod, spokesman for Hear Their Cries, a charity fighting sex experts abuse in the aid sector, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“This is not the excuse to cut aid, this is the excuse to fix aid,” added MacLeod, a former United Nations humanitarian official and visiting professor at King’s College London.
The deputy head of Oxfam, Penny Lawrence, (pictured) resigned on Monday over what she said was the charity’s failure to adequately respond to past allegations of sexual misconduct by staff in Haiti and Chad.