MOSCOW (Sputnik), Sofya Grebenkina - Aid organizations should focus on establishing new safeguards that are both internal — such as training and accountability of senior-level staff members — and external — such as defunding — since current mechanisms are not enough to prevent cases of sexual misconduct and fight culture of sexual harassment that is prevalent in the non-profit sector, activists told Sputnik amid a scandal involving UK charity Oxfam.
READ MORE: Oxfam Told of Aid Workers Abusing Children in Haiti Decade Ago - Reports
Oxfam said on Thursday it hired another man to work in Ethiopia a few months after he had been dismissed for misconduct in Haiti.
Aid Organizations Need Internal Safeguards
On February 9, The Times reported the claim that Oxfam had covered up allegations of the use of prostitutes by its aid workers in Haiti. Back then, a number of senior aid workers and the country director at the time, Belgian national Roland van Hauwermeiren, hired prostitutes, whom they allegedly invited to a warehouse rented out by Oxfam. In 2011, those involved were dismissed, while Hauwermeiren was allowed to resign, and the charity provided no public statement that an incident involving sexual exploitation had occurred. The charity was also accused of a failure to adequately respond to past allegation of sexual misconduct by some staff in Chad in 2006, as well as several cases of sexual abuse.
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— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) February 17, 2018
"Now it's time to act.
I'm saying to those who were abused: come forward. We will do justice.
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Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam apologized on Friday, for how the incidents of sexual misconduct in Chad and Haiti were handled, and said that the aid organization would be introducing a number of reforms to tackle incidents of sexual harassment in the future.
READ MORE: Aid Sector Sex Scandal: 'What About the Victims?', Charity Tells Sputnik
These reforms will include the setting up of a high-level independent commission that can investigate past and current claims of sexual exploitation, as well as looking into practices at the company. Oxfam will also triple the budget for the charity’s safeguarding team, double the safeguarding team’s staff, and set up a global database of accredited referees to prevent sex offenders from joining other aid organizations in the future.
Rosalyn Park, the director of the Women’s Human Rights Program at The Advocates for Human Rights organization, stated that there are other safeguards — such as compulsory training — that an organization can take in order to ensure that sexual harassment by its workers is properly monitored and sanctioned.
"We need safeguards to prohibit and prevent it from happening in the first place. This requires organizations to adopt a clear, transparent and accessible policy on sexual harassment and exploitation. They must require ongoing and mandatory training for all aid workers on these policies, gender equality, sexual exploitation and abuse, and intersectionality," Park said.
Park also stated that senior staff members must lead by example when it comes to ensuring that sexual abuse cases are treated with the proper gravity at aid organizations.
"Senior-level staff must be leaders on this issue, and this means not only undergoing training and visibly demonstrating commitment to gender equality and human rights, but also ensuring their own performance evaluations includes an assessment of how they have addressed these issues," Park said.
The Oxfam sex scandal has led a number of senior-level staff members of the NGO to accept responsibility for how the sexual misconduct case was handled. Apart from the statements made by Byanyima, Deputy Chief Executive of Oxfam Penny Lawrence, resigned on February 12, stating that she accepted full responsibility for the incident.
According to local media, Priti Patel, the former international secretary for development, has urged Oxfam’s Chief Executive Mark Goldring to also resign on Wednesday.
READ MORE: Oxfam Deputy CEO Quits Over Concerns of Past Staff Behaviour in Chad, Haiti
However Andrew MacLeod, former chief of operations of the UN's Emergency Coordination Centre and Red Cross, concurred with Park that there are other safeguards that Oxfam could take, including involving the police when necessary.
"So the way I look at it, is the accusation of prostitution by Oxfam in Haiti, is still questionable as to whether it involved children. So if Oxfam were taking this seriously, given that they’re based in Great Britain, and the man is a Belgian, they should be taking this off to Scotland Yard and the Belgian police… And until such time that Oxfam takes their dossiers down to the police and asks for the investigators, then they still don’t get," MacLeod said.
The charity made a statement on February 9 that allegations claiming underage girls were involved in the 2011 incident in Haiti were not proven.
Need for Intensified Whistleblower Protection
One other area in which aid organizations can establish safeguards is to ensure that whistleblowers can report incidents without facing repercussions.
In its Friday statement, Oxfam that it will ensure to have an effective whistleblower system that can be easily used by staff, volunteers and people external to the charity.
MacLeod noted that making sure that whistleblowers are protected from being fired is an important part of preventing sex misconduct.
"Still, there is no system in place to protect whistleblowers. And there is a long history in the aid industry, over 20-30 years, if you blow the whistle, you’ll be driven out, you’ll be beaten, you’ll be chastised, and you’ll lose your job," MacLeod said.
READ MORE: Guatemalan Authorities Detain Oxfam International Chairman - Reports
Helen Evans, the former global head of safeguarding for Oxfam during 2012-2015, released a statement on her Twitter account stating that she left the organization after feeling that her concerns over claims of sexual abuse both in Oxfam charity shops and of sexual exploitation abroad had not been addressed with due diligence internally.
Park said that clear whistleblowing protocols should be in place to ensure that there is necessary confidentiality to encourage timely reporting of misconduct.
"There needs to be transparent and clear protocols that outline procedures to respond to allegations of abuse; these protocols, at a minimum, should guarantee the safety of the complainant, provide for clear timeframes by which to address the accusations, and provide a confidential and secure means of documenting a record of the incident," Park said.
MacLeod has himself proposed to then UK Secretary for International Development Priti Patel in July 2017 a new international whistleblowing mechanism. During a speech that Patel made on September 20, she announced that the United Kingdom would be holding an international conference at the beginning of 2018 in order to gauge interest and launch the whistleblowing mechanism.
External Regulations Also Necessary
Not only internal regulations within aid organizations should be necessary, but governments and regulatory bodies should also hold NGOs accountable for how they handle sexual harassment and abuse cases, experts agree.
On February 12, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) issued a statement by Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, in which it stated that the DFID had not been informed by Oxfam of sexual exploitation cases at the time when they were investigated by the charity.
We are committed to fixing the things we got wrong so we can better protect the people we serve - and continue to fight poverty & injustice, wherever they exist.
— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) February 18, 2018
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The DFID is a strategic partner of Oxfam, providing funding to the organization. In a speech made at the End Violence Solutions Summit in Stockholm on Wednesday, Mordaunt said that aid organizations would have to show moral leadership and show changes in how they handle abuse cases, or the Department could revoke their funding.
MacLeod stated that the DFID should be prepared to take the step of removing funding of the organizations that fail to set out assurances about their safeguarding procedures.
"As a whole, you shouldn’t cut entire budgets. But looking at individual agencies, if one agency cannot demonstrate that they’re taking it seriously, absolutely cut that agency’s budget and re-allocate that funding to someone else," MacLeod said.
Park agreed that defunding is an option that partners of aid organizations can consider, adding that tying compliance with human rights standards to funding was essential.
"Externally, these organizations should invite ongoing, independent monitoring of their compliance with gender equality and human rights standards with a view to making recommendations. Such monitoring reports should be made public. Tying compliance with international human rights standards to funding is one means of ensuring such recommendations have teeth and are implemented," Park said.
Mordaunt, in the February 12 statement, said that the DFID had created a new unit to review the safeguards across the aid sector to ensure more comprehensive protection against sexual exploitation and abuse. The unit will also consider starting a global register of development workers so that workers convicted of abuses would not be able to be rehired at other organizations without a full knowledge of their record.
Aid Organizations Sexual Harassment Culture
In the statement that she posted, Evans noted that Oxfam is not the only organization within the aid sector that is involved in the culture of sexual misconduct that seems pervasive across organizations.
On Wednesday, the Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) international aid group reported that it had dealt with 24 cases of sexual harassment among its staff in 2017, as a result of which, 19 of the organization’s members were dismissed.
Park agrees that there is a culture of sexual harassment that is prevalent in the entire non-profit sector, and that it is fostered within the organizations themselves because there are no mechanisms in place to effectively sanction the offenders, or protect those that report against them, or there is a poor external framework that deals with sexual abuse behavior.
"There is a longstanding climate of impunity that allows these offenders to exploit the most vulnerable persons. There are several factors that can foster this impunity. Aid organizations may lack an effective policy prohibiting and sanctioning such behavior, reporting mechanisms may not be available, inaccessible, or safe to use, domestic laws in these countries may be ineffective in holding and punishing offenders," Park said.
The United Nations has also acknowledged that there are ways in which it can improve their sexual harassment policy. Jan Beagle, the UN under-secretary-general for management, wrote a letter on January 21 saying that there were gender and power imbalances that the organization was tackling to prevent an environment that enables harassment.
MacLeod said that the culture of sexual abuse perpetrated by charity workers in vulnerable areas or conflict zones may be fueled by stress.
"I think there are a lot of competing criteria there... There is a small number of people that were bad before they came into the industry, the other part is people who are responding to a very stressful environment in a way that would be extremely inappropriate in a relaxed city or town back home," MacLeod said.
Whatever the cause of the pervasive problem of the culture of sexual harassment, MacLeod is certain that this is only the tip of the iceberg that is being reported, and there are many other cases that go under the radar.
The views and opinions expressed by the experts in this article and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
