The area I want to change is the field of charity and it’s about the abnormal relationship between aid provider and recipient. The change I plan to introduce is a wider approach of safeguarding from predators. The predators here mean the aid workers and the local charity staff. I want to see the recipient won’t need to trade anything in any situation off against the help they need. In terms of the stakeholder are the victims vulnerable and people in need, these include children women and girls, and sexual and gender minorities.
The reason I want to look into this area is because my box of uncertainties is about the field in charity and philanthropy, to discover if there’s hypocrisy behind the kind act. But from time to time, the more I dug into the field, I found the dark sides of the aid organization, such as Oxfam and Save the Children was also a big issue. I’ve read some journal article on the Guardian, and there one article draws my attention the most. It’s an investigation from a whistle-blower in 2018 to reveal the allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct towards the aid workers of Oxfam after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. I found that the power imbalance between aid worker and the victim can lead to increased vulnerability to sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment.
After the allegation of sexual abuse of Oxfam and Safe the Children in 2018, the UK government hosted a safeguarding summit to improve accountability later in the same year. According to the summit, the UK approach will work and develop appropriate reporting, complaints and whistle-blowing mechanism. And they will take a zero tolerance approach to ignoring, covering up or mishandling cases. In last October, the UK government issued a new follow up after the summit in 2018. It points out the main challenge is the lack of data on sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment across the aid sector. They will work with its partners in 2021 to explore ways to improve data collection, data management and reporting systems, with the aim of improving coherence, transparency and accountability in tackling the issues and supporting victims and survivors. But in this case, they didn’t point out how they are going to improve it.