Aid sector ‘almost complicit’ in abuse scandal

The aid sector is guilty of “complacency verging on complicity” over an “endemic” sex abuse scandal, a damning report from MPs has said.

Stephen Twigg, chairman of the international development committee, said charities were “more concerned to protect their own reputation”. The committee’s inquiry was launched in light of revelations that senior Oxfam staff paid survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake for sex.

Charities welcomed the MPs’ report.

Oxfam Trustees chairwoman Caroline Thomson said the committee had been right to challenge the charity sector and recognised “we have further to go”. The Oxfam scandal, revealed in February, led to further allegations about UK-based charities.

The report, which looked at allegations dating back to 2001, says the delivery of aid to people had been subverted by sexual predators. “So much more” could have been done to tackle the “open secret” of people working in the aid sector committing such acts, the MPs added.

Despite the charities knowing about the problem, the committee said there had been a “collective failure of leadership”, with action only when there was a crisis.

The report also said leaders were “self-deluded” in thinking they had addressed problems before they became public.

What needs to be done? MPs insisted more resources were needed to tackle the issue - and said victims had to be at the “heart of solutions”, or the response could be “harmful”. Mr Twigg suggested something akin to DBS checks, the criminal records check system used in the UK, could be adopted internationally, to provide details of past allegations to prospective employers. “That won’t cure this but it’s one of the ways in which we can try to ensure this won’t happen again,” he said. The MPs also want an independent aid ombudsman to be introduced.

The committee also suggested: Ensuring the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid have knowledge of and confidence in their rights. A zero-tolerance culture on sexual exploitation and abuse is the least that victims should expect

Reports of wrongdoing should be proactively sought and responded to robustly, with feedback to victims and survivors. Known perpetrators of sexual exploitation and abuse should be identified through improved reporting and accountability, and prevented from moving into new positions. What did aid workers do?: The report looked at allegations of sex abuse and child abuse by aid workers, dating back to 2001.

In a 2008 Save the Children report seen by MPs, author Corinna Csaky recalls how a young boy in Haiti described the rape of a girl by an NGO worker in 2007. “He gave her one American dollar and the little girl was happy to see the money. It was two in the morning. The man took her and raped her. In the morning the little girl could not walk.” Asmita Naik, who wrote a 2002 UNHCR and Save the Children report, said it was mainly men who had abused people in the communities they were providing aid to. In her research of refugee camps in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2001, she found that humanitarian workers extorted “sex in exchange for desperately needed aid supplies (biscuits, soap, medicines, plastic sheeting etc)”.