A brief thought about #oxfamscandal

Posted on: February 23, 2018 | By: Tom Arcaro | Filed under: General posts on the humanitarian aid industry

A brief thought about #oxfamscandal

A moral voice for humanity?
I wrote this in a blog post over a year ago,

In Aid Worker Voices -the book based on this blog analyzing the data from over 1000 survey responses and other interviews from aid workers globally- I argue that, collectively, the global community can be viewed as having a “collective consciousness,” assuming sociologist Emile Durkheim and others are right.  Pushing this idea one step further and employing the notion of globalization –with its myriad and highly charged definitions– if humanity can be said to share a collective consciousness then the aid worker community is the conscience of that consciousness, the part that embodies both the knowledge and the judgement to speak as the moral voice for humanity.

At my university, I am teaching a class right now focusing on the aid sector.  Since our semester began, the Oxfam scandal has occupied much of our time. I have had my students look at, among other things, the long list of articles and links aggregated by professor Denskus on his blog Aidnography.  My students have been assigned various writing assignments, and one student, Jason Phillips, recently made this observation,

The aid sector obviously has the intent to bring more good to the world than bad, but the Catholic church did too, and that never stopped the ongoing worldwide priest child abuse scandal.

Excellent, perhaps even critical point, that.

Some ask, how could OXFAM, with all of the massive social capital it has built up over the years, be now found guilty of having a long standing “culture of acceptance” regarding sexual exploitation and abuse and gender based violence (SEA/GBV)?  How could a sector -and now the scandal is sector-wide- populated by so many people who chose this career because they wanted to “help others” be guilty of such egregious behavior?

The same question must be asked of the Catholic church.

And the same conclusion must be arrived at, namely that entrenched values, policy, and corporate norms (both written and unwritten) have supported and even encouraged a wide range of misdeeds, perhaps the most destructively impactful among them being SEA/GBV.  Women have always known and experienced these impacts much more acutely than males, though in the case of the Catholic church, young boys were clearly also a target of those in power.

There’s plenty of guilt to go around, but, yeah, it’s mostly men
But, of course, it is not just the Catholic church and the aid sector which have major and systemic issues with SEA/GBV.  That patriarchy and a deeply racist colonial mentality make SEA/GBV all too common in all major global institutions is a given.  The tragic fact is women have been victims of SEA/GBV throughout human history across virtually all cultures (perhaps more so in ‘modern times’).

We are all products of our culture and engage with the world as we’ve been taught. Those in positions of privilege  -male, ‘white’, from the Global North’, you name it- are especially blind to social structures and injustices from which they benefit.  I am reminded of Marx who said long ago that “The ruling ideas of any age are ever the ideas of the ruling class.”  His concept of false consciousness fits well here.  Those in power [read: men] see ‘no problem’ with treating women in a fundamentally misogynistic fashion, taking advantage of the power asymmetry woven into the social structures.  

Forward progress?
Each new age holds renewed hope for a more just world.  Perhaps now, at this moment, the blinders that have allowed endemic, culturally embedded sexism are more rapidly being removed.  Some argue that the #MeToo movement created a ferment that allowed for these aid sector scandals to now come to the surface.   I, for one, hope this episode will not wane as new issues catch our global attention.  But for this movement to be sustained and create real change it will take a great deal of work and a deep commitment to finding policy antidotes that address this cancer with more than just band-aids.  

The solution ‘smash the patriarchy‘  is, perhaps, the solution.  But the avatars of patriarchy are many, and forward action may seem a bit like a round of Whac-a-mole at times.  That said, to paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, difficulty is an excuse history seldom accepts.

As a sober note, I’ll add that I live in a nation that elected a President who by deed, word, and action endorses SEA, so my hopefulness is, to say the least, tempered by the harsh reality that deeply held beliefs likely cannot be undone quickly.

Colleagues weigh in on this post
This important point comes from a friend and aid worker in the UK who read an earlier version of this post.  She notes, “I spent time and energy over the years to clarify that international development is not religious missionary work, and I feel the parallel with the Catholic church may blur things.”  

She goes on to observe that, “I see the risk for a renewed call for “purity” and “sanctity” in int’l development. I see the rationale for it, but I disagree. Precisely because it’s a systemic issue wider than int’l dev, there is no such a thing as purity. We’d better smash the patriarchy instead!”   Agreed.

Another friend and colleague, this one in the US, weighed in.  She observed, “I think it’s a strong article, but I fear that lumping all of aid into this Oxfam scandal is misleading.  There are initiatives within the development world that TRY to directly take on gender disparities.  USAID, for example, includes in every solicitation I’ve seen in recent months/years, a whole requirement on promoting gender equality with the expectation that the awardee will be responsible for implementing a gender-diverse and promoting program.”  Again, agreed. I hazard that there are no ‘big box’ aid organizations that lack similar policies. How do we more effectively close the gap between policy and reality?

I’ll add more to this post soon, but in the meantime you can reach me here.


Post script

A minor observation
Though the saturation coverage of the #oxgfamscandal continues, and there is no lack of opinion from from all over the world, many ‘well informed’ people have no knowledge of this scandal.  When I asked a class of students (mostly first and second year) if they had heard of this story not only were they were totally unaware, many of them had no or only a vague sense of what an “OXFAM” was.  I asked several colleagues in a wide array of disciplines the same question I got the same responses.

Though I am not surprised at this ‘ignorance’, it does make me pause and re-realize that the cacophony of information that occupies major swaths of the typical person’s bandwidth can’t include everything.  We all tend to ‘put out the fire that is closest to us,’ and many here in the US are focused on all-too-frequent school shootings, partisan politics, and the NCAA basketball season, among other trivial and not-so-trivial ongoings.

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

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