I’ve spoken a lot in the media these past few days because there’s a lot I wanted to say about aid and development. Most of you know that I was an aid worker myself for almost a decade, and then completed a doctorate on development at Sussex University. It’s something a care a lot about.
From my experience the vast majority of frontline aid workers are extraordinarily professional and caring, choosing to put their expertise and experience to use in the most difficult situations. Please, don’t ever forget that.
There’s another side that I saw too though. In some truly extreme situations, such as in sudden refugee crises, humanitarian disasters or areas of conflict and war, there is chaos, stress and lawlessness that is really hard to imagine if you’ve not experienced it. Our job as aid workers was to bring stability and security to people who had lost everything, including their human dignity.
A small number of dysfunctional people, who probably could never really survive a steady job back home, seem to thrive amid the chaos and dysfunction of a disaster. I noticed some of them travelled from one disaster to another and rose quite high in the ranks. They were a nightmare to deal with, unreliable and made very poor decisions.
I remember a doctor for a well-known large charity coming up to the small team I was with, wearing a bloodstained doctor’s uniform, and said: “It’s boring here you’ll hate it. You should get over to Asia. That’s where the blood and guts are.”
We were standing in a refugee camp with over a thousand destitute women and children, many with gynaecological problems caused by the rape and abuse they experienced as they fled (rape was used as a weapon during the Balkan war) and very few knew if their husbands and adult male children were alive or dead as they had either been detained or remained to fight.
We stood there stunned at the sight and words of this grotesque man. I would never want someone I loved being seen by him so why should people who were among the world’s most vulnerable have to turn to him? They deserved the best not this horrid little man.
People like him should never be working with vulnerable people and aid agencies need to get better at weeding them out and getting better-suited people in. It’s tough. In this country we struggle to get great maths teachers into challenging schools so imagine the difficulty of getting brilliant doctors, who might have families and dependents of their own, to go to extremely dangerous and life-threatening places to practise medicine.
There’s another issue I want to mention. The aid industry has become extraordinarily competitive. It has driven some to become territorial and secretive in order to fight off challenges to its work and funding.
A team I was with once took an incredible unit into a refugee camp that could shower 1,000 people twice a week in privacy. Imagine how important that is to life in a camp with no running water. When we arrived a director of a famous charity came running over and said: “You can’t have that here. Take it away. We are the lead charity in this camp and we won’t have something with your logo on it in case TV crews film here.”
I promise you, this is true. So I explained we didn’t care about logos, we cared about helping people and suggested he put his organisation’s logos on instead. Out came a satellite phone, a call to head office and we got the ok to plaster our amazing shower unit with their logos.
I still can’t imagine what would posses someone to stand amid a refugee camp full of desperate, lonely and scared people and seek to deny them health and hygiene because of a bloody logo. Things were getting out of hand. Some had lost sight of their true humanitarian purpose.
There’s a lot more I could say but you get the picture. I never became cynical because I saw so many lives transformed and I saw first hand just what can be achieved through sensitive and professional aid work. Because of Britain’s aid and disaster support there are thousands and thousands of people alive and prospering who would otherwise be impoverished or dead so please don’t become cynical either.
In all my time I never saw or heard rumours about the criminal activity being uncovered today. It disgusts me to hear it though.
Heartbreakingly, sexual exploitation and rape of children can exist in any organisation if we do not proactively protect young people and have proper systems and procedures in place. Jimmy Savile taught us that. So if it happens here where we have a mature civil society and a world-class police force, imagine how difficult it is to get this right in a war zone or disaster area.
But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen.
Aid agencies and government must work to change culture to become more open, co-operative and sharing of best practice. What is tragic about Oxfam’s failure to act is that as well as the tragedy of already vulnerable people becoming victims, predators and corrupt people have escaped justice. And also, keeping it hushed up has denied other organisation the opportunity to learn from the mistakes that led to this happening.
I fear that threats to cut Oxfam’s funding will only exacerbate this. The message to other organisations is: “If you have this problem and make it public, we will cut your funding.” And the people who will suffer most from funding cuts are already-damaged communities being supported by the good work being done.
Government much act as a mature partner. We need to know everything and we need to learn from it. In the future I believe the public will forgive organisations who own up to mistakes, providing they are open and honest and prove they have learned from them. But they will not forgive cover-ups and hiding the truth.
Aid does work. It really does. Tonight I did a TV debate with a UKIP assembly member who thinks we should stop aid. I simply pointed out that his world view of “stop engaging with the world” is dangerous and costly. If we don’t try to help solve problems where they exist, believe me in time they will land on our own shores and cost us even more.
Thanks in large part to Britain, 8 out of the 15 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. Also in Africa, deaths from malaria and communicable diseases are plummeting, as is infant mortality and death from famine and war. Education, life expectancy and economic prosperity are all rising. Britain hasn’t had to intervene with our military in Africa since Sierra Leone. And the Balkans, where I spent a lot of time, is now unrecognisable to how I remember it as war ravaged and desperate.
I will be pushing as hard as I can for reform of our large aid agencies but I will defend what they do and the work of all decent aid workers with everything I’ve got. Former aid workers like me and many hundreds of brilliant ones out there now in the front line have been bitterly let down. For them and the thousands of desperately vulnerable people who look to us for help, we must get this right. And we will.
Peter Kyle is the Labour MP for Hove and a former aid worker.
This article first appeared on Peter Kyle’s Facebook page late last night (Monday 12 February).
Peter, Peter, Peter!!!! This needs to be a speech in Parliament that names names. NAMES Peter!! You tell a compelling tale about a shower unit but the two organisations are not named and it is unfair not to do so.
But if it needs Parliamentary Privilege to get it out, so be it.
As for that doctor…he’ll have been a surgeon, I am betting. The wilder temperaments and attitudes seem to gravitate to tha side of medicine.
Thanks for this well balanced article Peter well written from your personal experiences on the ground. I was also working in community development across Africa for over 15 years and whilst not in disaster scenarios have many stories of things that need to be be changed. Poverty can easily become an industry with organisations needing to be needed with stories of helplessness raising funds.
There’s a simple solution to this.
Hand over Oxfam’s funding to the myriad other aid organisations hinted at in the article.
Problem solved.
try this version = http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-problem-with-oxfam-isnt-just-a-few-dirty-men/21113#.WoNDFqhl_cs
So rather than punishing organizations that permit these horrors you propose teaching the rest that they can get away with rape without financial consequences?
Now there are the words. of a man that knows a thing to two. about a humanitarian crisis. He now has Parliamentary privilege. Let him speak out. and name names. ,DO NOT punish the victims by withdrawing funding, PUNISH THE WRONGDOERS and greedy. How can they claim salaries of £200K. – £500K plus for doing humanitarian work?.
Peter,
SEVERE PENALTIES FOR ALL ABUSERS OF TRUST?
With your practical and academic background, you are the ideal person to join the dots and reveal the full national picture. With collaboration from other MPs., you could deliver a straightforward solution, for the worst of the problem.
The fact that it has never been done and is still nowhere in sight, makes MPs starkly culpable for the continuing British subculture of abuse and impunity and its spread abroad. MPs must urgently deliver what can easily be achieved, without climbing on the same worn-out merry-go-round of endless and unproductive talking. Once done, they can then see what is left and how to deal with that, if possible.
Whenever and wherever anyone of any age is abused, by one or more individuals in paid and unpaid positions of trust, there must be severe penalties. Those would provide a desperately needed and robust deterrent. The answer is to ensure all abusers of trust, know they would face removals of all property, salaries, wages and pension rights and a lifetime ban on direct and indirect work with people in situations of vulnerability. The same must apply to managers who fail to stop known abuse.
It is unbelievably shocking, that the worst abuses of trust, are in our own police forces. Those are the worst, because we turn to the police to protect us, when we are being threatened by other services and individuals. We have nowhere else to turn. To-date, those abuses of trust haven’t been shocking enough, to stop MPs sitting on their hands and looking the other way.
At the time of the Haiti emergency, a UK iinvestigation had started into the sexual abuse and exploitation of vulnerable people – mostly women – by literally “hundreds” of police officers.
In 2016 Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Mike Cunningham reported that sexual abuse by police officers is, “the most serious form of corruption. It is an exploitation of power where the guardian becomes an abuser. There can be no greater violation of public trust.”
Equally shocking was that despite a number of formal public reports, many senior police managers have failed to put an abrupt stop to the issue, effectively condoning abuse, exploitation and a culture of impunity.
A feeble report in October 2017 by HMIC., states that police forces had made “insufficient progress” and now have “another opportunity” to decide, what if anything they intend to do and when.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said: “there is no place in the police for anyone guilty of this sort of abuse” but any Minister who lacks the competence to stop that abruptly, must without hesitation, be shown the door.
Oxfam and other aid organisations, must never copy our government’s response to that horrendous issue.
Funding will be cut from charities which fail to prevent and stamp out abuse, so why hasn’t the same already happened, with numerous police forces which have failed to stamp out, “the most serious form of corruption” by “hundreds” of police officers?
Will MPs remain culpable or urgently get down to imposing a legal solution, to protect us in all situations where we are vulnerable and have to trust the police and other public servants?
The abuse of vulnerable people is not confined to Oxfam workers, who gratified their sexual proclivities by exploiting desperate Haitians.
As John Bradfield has pointed out, on 18 February 2018, it has long been known that “hundreds” of members of police forces in the UK have been abusing their powers for sexual gratification. That is actually more shocking as they are supposed to represent the forces of law and order. Of all people, they should be above reproach.
Obviously, the proposed deterrent and penalty set out by John Bradfield is for the very worst cases.
As draconian as it may seem In terms of property and money, it is, after all, little different to what happens to people forced into bankruptcies, often through no fault of their own.
Consequently, the proposal should be accepted by MPs as other deterrents have never had the necessary impact.