Addressing foreign aid sexual exploitation risks
In October last year, the Department for International Development (DfID) declared that £2m worth of British aid money will be spent launching a register of sex offenders in the aid sector.
It has been announced that Britain will kick-start the register, which is intended to use Interpol’s green notice system - a system that issues international alerts over those people “considered to be a threat to public safety”. DfID will also work with the Association of Chief Police Officers Criminal Records Office (ACRO).
The Soteria programme
Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, launched the pilot on 18 October to an international summit including delegates from the United Nations, the World Bank Group and various financial research organisations, saying that there would be a “root to branch” change throughout the sector. The programme is Soteria, named after the Greek Goddess of Protection.
As part of the programme, resources and investigators are to be deployed to work in Africa and Asia with the key intention to provide support to national criminal bureaux in those host countries.
At the moment, the project is timetabled to last for five years. The first year will focus on testing an online platform. News reports suggest that a secure online profile will be provided to enable whistleblowers to upload concerns about employees – who could then be hit with travel restrictions if placed under investigation.
There are also reports that specialist investigators will be made available to help charities, particularly small charities, to strengthen their systems and processes, and a new aid worker passport system is likely to be tested. The intention is that it will act as a system for vetting, making it easier for employers to gather up to date information on applicants.
At this stage, it is difficult to say how these systems will affect charities providing aid overseas and based in the UK. All these recent developments are very positive, but it has to be recognised that in developing countries, access to data about individuals, the ability to check identity, and the reliability of information about an individual’s offending history are much less consistent.
Additional resources will improve those systems, but they will not make them equivalent to our own. These are the risks that charities have to take into account when providing aid and support overseas.
These challenges have been acknowledged. The DfID is currently working with Bond, the UK international development network, encouraging a range of British charities to work together collaboratively, sharing knowledge, best practice and expertise. Within the context of this piece of work, DfID is providing grants until 2021 to a number of organisations.
The purpose of these is to address key development challenges in priority areas including: disability, child labour, modern slavery, and global security and stability.
Small charities should not baulk too much at recent developments. Throughout 2017, DfID asked its aid partners to provide it with details of their policies and procedures and to explain how they handled incidents. Penny Mordaunt reported that “the small organisations were actually much better than the larger organisations”.
Responding to current risks
So, what should your charity be doing whilst the Soteria programme is being developed? It is clear that safeguarding is a continuing responsibility and that individual charities cannot wait until the conclusion of this five-year project. It is worth individual charities taking time to carry out a health check to ascertain what safeguarding policies they have, and whether they are up to date. That will mean they can be regularly reviewed and refresher training on them delivered.
All the policies in the world will be of little value to any organisation until, and unless, they are useable and properly disseminated. That means it is also essential that every charity has an ongoing programme of education, making sure that its staff, volunteers and service users understand the policies, how they can access them, and how they affect them on a day-to-day basis.
Project Soteria seeks to drive change in four key areas; one of those is cultural change. It is proposed that this will be incentivised through strong leadership, organisational accountability and better human resource processes. This is important, certainly for the purposes of making sure charities can complete their aims and objectives.
But also as the law changes, it becomes increasing likely that charities operating overseas with vulnerable groups might face damages claims from those who alleged that they were abused or the subject of sexual exploitation by employees of the charity.
This could be the case even where charitable work is not the core business of the organisation providing aid – see for example the widely publicised claims against British Airways after one of its pilots was accused of sexually assaulting children during voluntary work for the airline on stopovers.
UK law has changed recently, meaning that most organisations working with vulnerable groups and which are exposed to claims in the jurisdiction will, however robust their recruitment, selection and monitoring procedures, be liable for the sexual misconduct and abuse perpetrated by their employees.
Dealing with the past
Furthermore, employees who have been exploiting their positions for some time may have been in contact with an enormous number of individuals who wish to bring claims. Your charity could be facing today dozens of claims that arise out of alleged events decades ago.
Responding in the right way to allegations of abuse, assault or harassment poses an enormous challenge to any organization, let alone a charity. The reputational impact can be very damaging indeed, with the potential to affect all aspects of a charity’s operation.
One of the smorgasbord of appropriate responses will, in some cases, be a redress scheme. These schemes are increasingly common and are much easier to navigate than international litigation. Different scenarios require different redress schemes but, if and when they are appropriate, they should be designed with the victim in mind. Many precedents are now available.
Furthermore, there is nothing to stop you and your advisers designing your own to make sure that awards and resources that are made available to applicants reflect local legal and economic circumstances.
The scheme that might be right for your charity would depend on the jurisdiction across which implementation is likely to take place, what budget your charity can afford and, most importantly, what is likely to benefit the victims most quickly.
