Looks like Hollywood doesn’t have a stranglehold on sexual-abuse scandals — the international aid community has been hit hard, too.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, announced this month that it has fired 19 employees while belatedly dealing with 24 cases of sexual abuse or harassment.
Meanwhile, news surfaced that Oxfam, the Britain-based global-food-aid charity, had buried reports — including one that referred to a “culture of impunity” — that its workers had prostituted survivors of the Darfur genocide in Chad and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Oxfam’s deputy chief executive, Penny Lawrence, resigned, saying she was “ashamed that this happened on my watch.”
As The Times of London reported, seven former Oxfam staffers who worked in Haiti faced sexual-misconduct allegations; Oxfam said it investigated the matter in 2011, firing four and seeing the three others resign. Now British politicians want a bigger investigation “across the wider aid sector.”
Bottom line: Even the most progressive do-gooders can have a horribly dark side.