OXFAM SEX STORM IS ‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’
As charity admits to ‘moral failure’, former minister says civil servants covered up abuse across aid sector
A FORMER aid minister has claimed the Oxfam sex scandal is ‘the tip of the iceberg’.
Priti Patel said there had been cases of abuse across the charity sector for 20 years amid a ‘culture of denial’. She also accused officials in the Department for international Development of complicity in a ‘ cover- up’ of sex claims involving aid agencies. it came as Oxfam was last night shamed into a grovelling apology. its chief executive admitted there had been a failure of ‘moral leadership’ following allegations of sexual misconduct by aid workers.
Miss Patel’s successor Penny Mordaunt warned the scandal had put the charity’s £32million-a-year UK aid funding at risk, and
condemned the behaviour of some Oxfam staff as a ‘complete betrayal’. It came as:
Oxfam’s chief executive said he could not rule out the possibility that other scandals would emerge;
Ministers said Oxfam must co-operate with investigators or risk losing its government funding;
The charity was forced to announce a shake-up of its recruitment, to ensure bosses are tested on tackling abuse;
Miss Mordaunt said she will use an international summit this week to demand donors and charities redouble efforts to challenge sexual harassment;
Marks & Spencer, which works with Oxfam on a project to donate old clothes, suggested it could review their relationship. A source at the retailer said: ‘We will be keeping a close eye on the situation.’
Oxfam is facing mounting criticism over its handling of the sex allegations, but has denied it tried to cover up the use of prostitutes by its aid workers in Haiti in 2011.
Four members of staff were dismissed and three, including the charity’s country director Roland van Hauwermeiren, resigned before the end of the 2011 investigation.
The charity said claims that underage girls may have been involved were not proven.
It also emerged over the weekend that 87 Oxfam workers had been accused of sexual abuse in the past year alone. Other charities have also been caught up in the scandal. Save the Children reported 31 incidents in the past 12 months. Ten of the allegations were passed to police and civil authorities. Workers for the British Red Cross and Christian Aid were also reported. All four charities receive millions of pounds from Dfid.
Yesterday, Oxfam said it was ‘shamed’ by what had happened in Haiti. Caroline Thomson, the charity’s chairman of UK trustees, said: ‘It is clear that such behaviour is completely outside our values and should never be tolerated.’
Chief executive Mark Goldring added: ‘I think there’s no question that the people running the Haiti programme in 2011 failed in terms of moral leadership.’
Asked whether he could say for certain this ‘was it’ and there was ‘nothing else out there’, he told Channel 4 News: ‘No.’
Mr Goldring added: ‘We have been back through our records as thoroughly as we can and we will carry on doing that.
‘What we did after 2011 was strengthen our whistleblowing lines, our complaints section, our training – that has not been enough. We have to carry on improving.’
Last night Miss Mordaunt said she would be writing to all aid agencies which receive Dfid cash, ordering them to declare all abuse claims they are aware of and to confirm they have informed the authorities.
The International Development Secretary told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the failure to pass on information showed an ‘absolute absence of leadership’. Asked if she thought Oxfam had failed in its ‘moral leadership’, she replied: ‘Yes, I do.’
Miss Mordaunt said she would meet executives from the charity today. She will also meet with the Charity Commission later this week. She added: ‘ If [Oxfam] do not hand over all the information that they have from their investigation and subsequently to the relevant authorities, including the Charity Commission and prosecuting authorities, then I cannot work with them any more as an aid delivery partner.’
The watchdog said it had written to Oxfam ‘as a matter of urgency’ for further information. It said an Oxfam report on the investigation stated there had been no allegations of abuse of beneficiaries and made no mention of any potential sex crimes involving minors. ‘Our approach to this matter would have been different had the full details … been disclosed to us at the time,’ it added. Miss Patel said she had not been aware of specific claims within Oxfam, but had raised the issue of abuse involving aid workers with Dfid while head of the department. ‘There has been in my view, not just a cover-up with Oxfam, there is a culture of denial in the aid sector about the exploitation and sexual abuse that has taken place historically for decades,’ she told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics. Asked whether Whitehall was complicit in the cover-up, she said: ‘Put it this way – my former department did not raise this issue with me, I raised it with them through my own investigations …
‘This [sex abuse] is well documented … people knew in Dfid, I raised this directly with my department … the UN said last year there were 120 cases involving 300 people – and that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a culture of denial [of sexual abuse] in the aid sector.’
Miss Patel said ministers should have taken action years ago. ‘A government department should have been calling for prosecutions … and actually taking money back from Oxfam as far back to 2011,’ she told Sky News. ‘I did my own research and I have to say I had a lot of push-back within my own department … the scandal is, within the industry, people know about this.’
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Miss Patel said: ‘The Oxfam prostitution scandal … is atrocious, but only the tip of the iceberg.’
She added: ‘When I raised this issue [of sex abuse in aid agencies] in Dfid, appallingly it was dismissed as only a problem with UN Peacekeepers, which my subsequent investigations showed to be incorrect … I found this abuse has been occurring across the aid sector for over 20 years and that many senior people in aid simply dismiss this issue with a three-letter acronym – SEA. SEA is not just Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. These letters were meant to convey the worst of crimes, child rape.’
She added: ‘British crime authorities have been warning since 1999 that predatory paedophiles are targeting the aid sector … [the] UN Secretary General revealed in his 2016 annual review that there were 145 cases involving 311 victims of “SEA” in the peacekeeping part of the UN alone, just in one year.
‘ Last year, he revealed … the problem was bigger in the civilian side of the UN, outside of peace-
‘Has been happening for decades’
keeping. This includes Unicef and other agencies.’
oxfam’s Miss Thomson said: ‘We will continue to address the underlying cultural issues that allowed this behaviour to happen. We also want to satisfy ourselves that … we fully learn the lessons of events in 2011.’ She said staff had come forward with concerns about the vetting of workers, and that these would be examined in detail.
New measures include strengthening vetting, an independent whistleblowing helpline, and a recommitment to report ‘any issues that arise that could affect the safety of those we work for’. Comment and Dominic Lawson – Page 16
THE only surprise is that it has come as a surprise. I refer to the revelation that senior aid workers for Oxfam in earthquakeravaged Haiti had indulged in orgies with prostitutes (some of them, allegedly, children).
Nor should it have come as a surprise that Oxfam’s bosses gently eased out those involved but told no one — not the Charities Commission, nor the Department for International Development (which hands it well over £30 million of taxpayers’ money a year) — that the man in charge of its Haiti operations, Roland van Hauwermeiren, had used his organisational skills to set up what were described, disgustingly, as ‘young meat barbecues’.
In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr yesterday, the Secretary of State for International Development (DfID), Penny Mordaunt, asked about what amounted to a cover-up, declared: ‘I don’t know what Oxfam’s motivation was for behaving in this way.’
Really? Unless she is shatteringly naïve, it must be obvious to Ms Mordaunt why Oxfam told no one exactly why its most senior man on the ground in Haiti and a number of his colleagues had been ‘let go’.
Scandal
It was for the same reason that in the 1980s both the Catholic and Anglican Churches had covered up sexual abuse by their own clerics. They wanted to protect the reputation of their organisations — and that was much more important to them than honesty.
But Oxfam brushed its scandal under a carpet of euphemisms and dissembling as recently as 2011: it is far from historic.
And in Oxfam’s case, it is also about money. You might think the charitable world is gentle. In reality, the big charities are in a ferocious competition with each other to persuade governments and individual donors that they are the most deserving recipients.
They call themselves ‘the humanitarian community’ but they are as unscrupulous as any commercial business when it comes to competing for the public’s cash.
I got an inkling of this after a friend who ran a charity told me she had been about to sign a contract with a printing firm for thousands of leaflets, when the printer called to say that the deal was off ... because he also printed leaflets for a much larger charity in the same field, and it had told him that if he did a deal with her, then it would take its business elsewhere.
In fact, such charities often behave much worse than profit- making enterprises, because they believe that everything they do is sanctified by being in a noble cause.
This is not the only reason why I say that the revelations about Oxfam should have come as no surprise. A brave and brilliant Dutch journalist, Linda Polman, gave chapter and verse on the scandalous behaviour in aid charities, including their use of child prostitutes, in her remarkable book, War Games: The Story Of Aid And War In Modern Times, published in 2010.
Polman, who had been based in a number of African countries, wrote: ‘The humanitarian aid community that travels to war-torn crisis-riven countries feels no embarrassment about looking like an international jet-set on holiday.
‘Its Land Cruisers can be found tripleparked outside the restaurants, bars and discos of war-ravaged towns and cities every evening. Wherever aid workers go, prostitution instantly soars.
‘I’ve often seen bar stools occupied by white agronomists, millennium-objective experts or gender- studies consultants with local teenage girls in their laps.
‘I’ve known aid workers who cared for child soldiers and war orphans by day and relaxed by night in the arms of child prostitutes.’
Polman was interviewed by the Leftwing newspaper, The Observer, the year her book came out.
When its interviewer put it to her that ‘it’s neither shocking nor sinister that humanitarians are also human: they also need to relax after work, sometimes in a bar’, she retorted ferociously: ‘I think it’s shocking and sinister if aid workers engage in child prostitution... I do know of cases where aid organisations knew that employees were engaged in this and they decided to smother the case.’ This, presumably, included Oxfam. My advice to Ms Mordaunt is to use a minuscule proportion of her generous budget to pay Polman to come here to play a role in any DfID investigation.
Excesses
The Dutchwoman clearly knows more than the civil servants in Whitehall, none of whom, I’d wager, have anything like her experience of what really goes on outside the sanitised and self-serving reports of sanctimonious aid organisations.
This is a much more important matter than just the personal excesses of aid executives, who spend more in an African bar in one night than the individuals working in it could earn in a month.
If the international aid business were a fabulous success, lifting millions out of poverty and bringing peace and harmony where none existed before, then, frankly, it would deserve our indulgence. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t. Polman’s wider charge is that billions of pounds in international aid budgets have been wildly misspent, vacuumed up by government kleptocrats or local fixers in the recipient countries.
Here is what she witnessed in Liberia: ‘Medical INGOS [international nongovernment organisations] had arranged for a batch of wheelchairs to be flown in to ease the suffering of local war invalids. ‘The chairs turned up in the streets of Monrovia [the capital] modified into ice- cream carts and mobile shops. Vendors who had nothing wrong with their legs were using the chairs, while amputees and cripples were dragging themselves on their hands and knees on the filthy streets.
‘Local government workers had distributed the wheelchairs among their own kith and kin, who in turn had rented them out to small-time entrepreneurs.’
This illuminates a vital point. It is not aid that will transform the living standards of those in the most impoverished nations, but the elimination of corruption and the opening of trade with the developed world. In other words, full participation in the market economy.
It is precisely this which has already lifted billions out of poverty.
But that is the opposite of Oxfam’s philosophy. In recent years it has delivered a starkly anti- capitalist message, suggesting that all that is required is for more tax to be paid by high- earning people in this country … to be given to Oxfam to spend.
Waste
Yet the British people have already been co-opted to an extraordinary extent by the Oxfam agenda, as a result of legislation passed during the period of the previous Coalition government.
We are now committed to spending the equivalent of 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product on international aid — over and above whatever individuals choose to pay in the form of charitable donations (in which the British are already among the most generous in the world).
This commitment — which amounts now to £13.5 billion a year — actually encourages waste, as the civil servants’ principal target is not so much absolute need, but the (vast) amount to spend.
And we have hugely increased the amount going out in so-called ‘multilateral aid’ — which means our own government can’t even control how British taxpayers’ money is spent.
In September, when Hurricane Irma laid waste to British Overseas Territories such as Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands, it emerged that we couldn’t direct any of our aid budget to assisting those made homeless because international rules decreed these territories were ‘too rich’ to be allowed as recipients.
Yet still Ms Mordaunt insisted yesterday that our aid budget of £13.5 billion — and growing — can be justified in its entirety.
She told Andrew Marr that it made ‘Britain more prosperous’, and that it ‘alleviated pressure on the NHS’.
I would have thought a better way of alleviating pressure on the NHS — and on the social care budget which our oldest and most disabled depend upon — would be for that money to go directly to them.
The problem is that Ms Mordaunt has to pretend that her entire budget ‘could not be better spent in the national interest’: statute, absurdly, now decrees it would be illegal for her to reduce it below 0.7 per cent of GDP, no matter how badly it is being spent.
So don’t expect Oxfam to be detached from the taxpayers’ teat.