To be absolutely disgusted about the OXFAM revelations?

[yolofish]

Forgive me if there is already another thread but I couldnt find one...

So Haiti: devastated by an earthquake. Head honchos come in - and they host a party in which young Haitian girls appeared wearing nothing but Oxfam tshirts - literally nothing else, according to today's Sunday Times.

Oxfam does amazing work of course. but gets £32m of tax payers' money year in year out - and this happened 7 years ago.

I am truly disgusted by these events.

To hire someone once in good faith is one thing, with the best will in the world you won't unearth all skeletons.

To rurn a blind eye to someone going against your organisation's ethics in Africa, only to let them do the same thing in Central America a few years later, is quite another thing.

To fire someone for unacceptable conduct and then re-hire them in another region two months later is incompetent at best.

Initially hiring someone who turns out to be a bad egg is forgivable. Letting them carry on, and covering your ass rather than protecting your beneficiaries, is not.

We can’t assume that these 3 cases of propositioning by the ceo (yes, the CEO of a multimillion pound global charity) of Save the Children are his only misdemeanours - there may have been many women who went along with his games in fear of losing their jobs or in hope of promotion. If you got promotion because you were a friend of the CEO you are most unlikely to report it.To pretend that he is a really good bloke who had some sort of brainstorm on only 3 occasions when he did this harassing is ridiculous.
Another older white over privileged male on the board assisted in covering this up so he could be, eventually, quietly shuffled off to another charity with no stain on his character. jeeeesh.
We have had J Saville where nhs staff stood by and did nothing, we have had scandals throughout the Catholic Church where the clergy stood by and did nothing and now we have global charities where senior staff stood by or covered things up. Disgusting cronyism and old boys networks keeping things under wraps. The charities should be closed down and rebuilt from scratch with a set of rules that they are enforced to abide by to gain their charity status.

@Morphene
Why are people more up in arms about what has/is happening in Oxfam, than what has/is happening in massive football clubs

Because our donations pay the CEOs 130,000 + a year.

People also pay money to football clubs...I don't see the difference?

Rehiring someone in an entirely different country was obviously a huge mistake, but one that I am sure the majority of multinational organisations whether charitable or not could easily have made.

We failed to prevent someone who had been fired (for incompetence) from being hired by a different department in our university...and that's only a 3000 people operation based in one city...not a confederation of 19 independent charitable organisations.

What happened was awful. Truly terrible. To decide to stop donating to Oxfam because they haven't managed to crack the practically impossible problems of avoiding hiring men who will turn out to be abusers, or making sure someone who they fire for misconduct can't get hired by a) another charity within their umbrella, b) another charity anywhere in the world, is just massively unreasonable and betrays a childlike naivete about the shit that goes on out there in the real world.

As far as I could tell they did inform several regulatory bodies of what had happened and were told they'd done what they were supposed to. If people think Oxfam is going to be the only charity that has made hiring mistakes then they have already been proved wrong, and will continue to be so day after day, week after week, as the scale of white male privilege in all walks of life slowly comes into focus in the public eye.

As I said above we've had J Saville and problems with the clergy, surely the senior staff, board of these charities can see that any suspect behaviour needs to be dealt with. It sounds as if they have covered stuff up for years.
It is worse as the money they depend on will stop being donated. So, because of their bad management/ hiding of unacceptable behaviour the charities will possibly fold.
Football clubs won't fold because of something done by staff members.

So...doesn't that mean it is more reasonable for a charity to try and keep the enevitable odd rotten apple stories out of the public eye than for a football team to hide evidence that they are facilitating paedophile left right and centre?

Again...it is the disproportionate outrage I don't get.

People aren't willing to continue donating to Oxfam in spite of the huge amount of amazing work they do, but they are happy to keep throwing money at football clubs or the catholic church even though they had far less cause to hide behaviour that was orders of magnitude worse?

Bloody hell. I wasn't surprised about the Presidents Club scandal. Bankers wankers, David Walliams, you are disgusted about that but not really baffled.
But you'd expect higher moral principles and standards of behaviour from charity workers.
I am never ever donating or bringing used clothes/books etc. to the Oxfam shop. They can honestly go and fuck themselves.

People aren't willing to continue donating to Oxfam in spite of the huge amount of amazing work they do, but they are happy to keep throwing money at football clubs or the catholic church even though they had far less cause to hide behaviour that was orders of magnitude worse?

If the amazing work is combined with handing out stuff bought for the money people donated in exchange for sexual services, I have a problem with that and the consequence will be I will stop my donations.
Exploitation of the poor and people in need is disgusting but that's precisely what they are doing and you'd expect better from them.
Btw I wouldn't donate to Catholic Church, ever. Neither would I support some football club. I like to choose local charities where I know where the money goes.

I read the interview with the very young Haitian girl involved with the Oxfam director. I really don’t know where to start. He targeted her when she was pregnant, he sent people round to her to say he wanted her, he persuaded her with milk and nappies from the goods paid for by public donations and then had sex with her 4 weeks after she had given birth. In addition, he was sleeping with other people and organising lesbian shows for himself. I cannot conceive of any legal or moral basis upon which was allowed to resign with dignity. And then for the head of Oxfam to think the public overreacted. What part of safeguarding women and treating everyone with dignity does the head of Oxfam not understand? And if he doesn’t understand that, he should resign.

Sorry

HE was allowed to resign...

Just caught up and haven't been following the news. Read Categorics post and wish I hadn't. Seriously. Bloody bloody hell!. That is harrowing. And he got to resign quietly??! With dignity?

Just reading some of the posts confirms what my oh said that people will stop donating. Who will suffer though? Not the fat cats and aid workers who were the perpetrators but the innocent who need help so badly

But aren't there other charities. Oxfam is not the only one.

Tara336 and whose fault is it? People who brought the issue up and made it public? People who stop donating? Or people who exploited the vulnerable?

Clandestino I don't know if you're a Catholic but most Catholics I know wouldn't donate to "the catholic church" in general but donate to their local parish via the weekly collection to keep it running, or to catholic charities of various sizes. I was really disappointed that one of the people who had left Oxfam under a cloud ended up in Cafod. I have been working for a Catholic charity for the last 2 years and I can assure you that the Church (especially in my diocese) has some of the most robust safeguarding procedures now of any organisation I've ever been involved in. There were unforgivable cover ups in the past but it is something that I know is not stood for today.

I can't believe the CEO of Oxfam is still in post.

People also pay money to football clubs...I don't see the difference?

People don't donate money to football clubs, except in extremely rare cases, when a club is in danger of going out of business. They pay money to purchase a product (shirts, scarves or the enjoyment of watching the match).

Very different from donating to a charity.

bad of course its different...people expect something back for they money they pay to a football club for one thing...but how does that change the level of responsibility for rogue employees? I don't see that it changes it one bit. If anything I would give a charity more leeway than a business in having internal structure issues. They are a charity! Do you really want them spending a higher proportion of the donations on layers of admin? Or would you hope more of it makes it to the people in need?

Totally hypocritical to single out Oxfam when all large organisations have exactly the same problems screening employees and often similar issues in getting rid of bad people effectively.

Totally hypocritical to single out Oxfam when all large organisations have exactly the same problems screening employees and often similar issues in getting rid of bad people effectively.

People boycott companies and organizations all the time.

Charities should be held to higher standard, though. When footballers get their salaries, the money is theirs, largely to do as they please with. It's much more of a piss take to take donations given supposedly to help poor people in developing countries, and then spend it on prostitutes.

I'm not hypocritical i don't donate to any big charity any more. And I'm not hypocritical as many posters have stated charities and those who work for them should be held to a high standard. Tbf though If these allegations came out about any company I would boycott them.

The underlying issue with big charities is how they have become an Old Boys type network for overpaid lovvies of both sexes, doesn't matter if you fuck up in Oxfam, UNICEF will employ you. Get caught harassing female staff up at UNICEF don't worry Shave the Children have deep pockets. Now it turns out it's not just useless poseurs they keep in employment it's also child and women abusers. The whataboutery of talking about football clubs is a distraction technique. We should all vote with our purses and refuse to donate our time of money.

Small charities are just as likely to encounter problems and be open to exploitation as large ones. If anything, they’re even more vulnerable as they are less likely to have the staff on board to handle misdemeanours.

I have worked with both big and small charities as a scientist and whilst there are some great small charities, many of them are not particularly vigorous in the way they validate the research that is being done with their money. Going in front of a funding panel for a large charity was much, much more intimidating (in a good way) than a small one as you knew they’d have experts in the field on the panel. This is much less likely for a small charity.

I don’t get the demonisation of large charities. They’re big organisations and with big organisations come systemic problems that can be hard to solve. This is not unique to the charity sector. Their size though, is a reflection of the work they do. You just cannot fund large scale projects (clinical trials, research institutes, large infrastructure works) through small local charities. We need big charities, whether you like them or not.

It’s not unique to the charity sector but the charity sector depends on the goodwill of the general public - so you don’t hide the sexual assault of women, not in the present climate of outing. You don’t get your CEO to resign quietly and move to another similar role if he has repeatedly harassed junior female staff. Because I know and they SHOULD have known that it will disgust many of the public and lose them donations. Senior staff out of touch and in an old boys network from the look of it. This happened on their watch, they should go.

This is a systemic problem though and by acting like only way to solve it is ask for the CEO of Oxfams head on a stick will not solve it. I work in the public sector and it’s common practice in places that I have worked that when someone has a serious accusation against them you let them resign and move on. This is because unless you have a cast iron case against them, you’ll be dragged through the courts. I’ve known of one man who threatened to sue a previous employer because information about a case against him (that was very well founded) had leaked to another workplace.

It’s a fine line to walk when someone hasn’t committed a prosecutable offence (and sexual harassment isn’t prosecutable)- do the courts protect the rights of individuals ie prevent blackballing, or the rights of companies? It’s not easy or simple but you wouldn’t know that from reading the coverage of the issues at Oxfam

So once again we accept a system that protects men and disadvantages women. If the legal system can't help and the Establishment media (BBC I am looking at you) won't help then this, social media complaints, internet forums naming and shaming is the way forward. So once again, not hypocritical.