Oxfam sexual misconduct scandal warrants 'more than apologies,' says British MP
A British lawmaker says Oxfam's top brass should resign amid allegations that some of its staff in Haiti paid for sexual services from women and girls in the earthquake-ravaged country.
Appearing before the international development committee, Oxfam Great Britain CEO Mark Goldring repeatedly apologized for a lack of transparency and urgency in handling the allegations.
Conservative MP Pauline Latham is on that committee and she says sorry is not good enough.
- AS IT HAPPENS: Oxfam responds to allegations of abuse
- Oxfam says Haiti director admitted seeing prostitutes
She spoke with As It Happens host Carol Off about the scandal that has cut to the core of one of the world's biggest disaster relief charities. Here is part of that conversation:
You heard a very contrite Oxfam chief executive, Mark Goldring, at the hearings yesterday. Do you take him at his word that his organization is now committed to rooting out sexual abuse?
No, I'm still very concerned about it. He did apologize numerous times. But it needs more than apologies. It needs people to actually get to grips with the organization. And I don't honestly think that they know how to do it.
They've apologized and said this is some bad apples and they found them and they're going to get rid of them, but it's isolated issues. What do you make of that? Do you think it's so isolated in Oxfam, or in any other agency?
No. I think there's more to this whole business than meets the eye. I do believe that it is in the minority of men who work for Oxfam, but then they employ thousands and thousands of people. So even a minority is quite a lot of people.
And, of course, the men feel that they're in positions of power. And the problem with that is they feel they can do anything they like.
And I'm concerned that Oxfam itself does not know how to tackle the problem and doesn't know how to put the right procedures in place with the current leadership in the U.K.. And that's why I think that the current leadership should go.
And this would include Mark Goldring, the man who spoke yesterday?
Absolutely. Definitely. Yes.
The original man who was at the source of this [Roland Van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam's former director in Haiti] said that he had consensual sex with somebody in Haiti. Can you have consensual sex when you're the head of a mission in a place like Haiti after an earthquake?
Well, I certainly don't think you should do. I think you should be looking out to make sure you don't.
I mean, he's also talked about buying in prostitutes. Now, these girls were not really prostitutes. They'd just had an earthquake. They were desperate. They needed aid. And he was a source to get aid.
They had to sell their bodies to make sure their families, what families they had left, could eat and have some shelter. And I think that's despicable, because you're preying on the most vulnerable people in the world.
People doing aid are supposed to be good people. But these are clearly not good people.
We've seen in other situations ... predators and abusers, they aren't just there, but they can be attracted to a place where they can get this kind of access. This is something we've seen throughout all kinds of agencies where there is a lot of trust and a lot of vulnerability. How do you prevent that from happening?
I think we need a real stringent form of register, that every person in aid registers with this central body — and I'd be very happy for it to be the Department of International Development here — and every organization around the world checks up against whether they're clear or they're not clear.
See the trouble is, they're allowed to resign before any investigation has been completed. And then they go and get a job somewhere else. Now, that has got to stop. We cannot allow that to happen. So if there's an investigation going on, we need to register investigations that haven't been completed.
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Oxfam said in the hearings that you were a part of that it's already lost thousands of donors in the United Kingdom since the scandal broke. Other countries are probably hearing the same concerns from donors. Do you think Oxfam can recover from this?
Unless they've got a clear-out at the top of the leadership, I don't think they've got any chance whatsoever. They need to move on. They need to get someone who is trusted by the world in order to run a charity like that.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.