How the Aid and Development Industry Enables Sexual Abusers
Something’s rotten. The aid and development industry’s lax background checks allow sexual abusers to move across charities and projects with ease.
Photo: Miguel Alcantara/Unsplash
Without warning, without provocation, and less than ten minutes into our work-centric conversation, Dillon Case, the American executive producer of the political satire TV show, where I worked as a writer, propositioned me for sex with the casual, confident tone of a diner ordering a familiar meal at a familiar restaurant. His demand was shocking as it was incongruous and would certainly have initiated a severe case of cognitive dissonance in a more conscientious person because only seconds before, he had christened himself a feminist for seemingly pushing the show’s Nigerian broadcasters to hire more women into the male-dominated writers’ room.
When it dawned on him that whatever fantasies regarding my body he’d cooked up in his head would not materialise, his confusion curdled to irritation and then disdain. And though it took him a while to reach that conclusion, to experience the same range of emotions I did in the few seconds of him uttering those insulting, incendiary words, at least, he was finally on the same plane as me. Except, he now saw a need to control the narrative, one that required erasing the blob of guilt on his tattered conscience and patching his perforated ego. So he warned me not to breathe a word of his sexual misconduct to anyone and not to contact him, an odd demand considering it was he who had gone out of his way to harass me on separate days. In a way, his utterance mirrored the pathetic attempts of an upset cat-caller trying to convince a woman she’s ugly after trying but failing to get her attention, all in a bid to cover for his lack of self-respect and public humiliation.
Case’s stratagem, clearly, was to silence and disappear me, a trick to delude himself into thinking that I didn’t exist since it’s impossible to sexually harass a ghost. In other words, he needed to believe he wasn’t a sexual predator.
And for a while he seemed to have convinced himself of my non-existence because in 2020, three years after cornering me for sex and two years after I wrote about the sexism I witnessed on the deservedly defunct TV show he executive produced, Case penned a report for the Centre for International Media Assistance (CIMA) in which he glibly asserted that “efforts should be made for greater gender balance and representation” in the male-dominated satirical comedy space. Given the author’s own sordid contribution to the disparagement of women in the aforementioned field, the piece unsurprisingly elided the reasons for said gender imbalance, neither did it propose solutions to improve women’s participation.
Case’s duplicitous espousal of women’s rights, coupled with his wilful refusal to see how the actions of sexual abusers like himself reinforce gender inequality, aligns perfectly with the ethos of the male-dominated aid and development industry he inhabits, an industry that purports to cater to the world’s vulnerable but continues to attract and shield sexual predators from accountability.
For instance, a 2018 investigation by Britain’s The Times newspaper revealed that the charity Oxfam covered up claims of sexual misconduct levelled at its employees who worked in Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. One of the men involved in the sexual exploitation scandal previously worked for the charity Merlin in Liberia, where he was forced out over similar allegations involving sex workers. Incidentally, in 2010, Oxfam fired its Nigeria country manager who accused a senior colleague of attempted rape in a case that was later discovered the charity grossly mishandled.
Similarly, a joint investigation by Al Jazeera and The New Humanitarian into rampant sexual misconduct among local staff of various international NGOs operating in a refugee camp in South Sudan makes for a sobering read. Published in September, the report uncovered several instances of abuse in which employees of the United Nations and other NGOs rented houses in the camp to have sex with female refugees. On one occasion, a Medicins Sans Frontieres staff security guard dragged a girl to his house with the intention of raping her before his wife intervened, saving the teenager. More troubling is the fact that little has been done to quell such abuses, which have only increased since they were first recorded in 2015.
This lack of accountability not only allows sexual abusers to carry on with their vile deeds but permits them to move on to other jobs in the industry untrammelled and undetected, an egregious breach of fiduciary duties that no organisation should tolerate, let alone those in the business of aiding the world’s vulnerable.
Given Case’s work history includes stints with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UN’s immigration organisation (IOM) in Sudan, I emailed both NGOs to warn them about his behaviour. I also contacted CIMA, Open Society in West Africa (OSIWA) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)—formerly known as The Department of Foreign International Development—the latter two being sponsors of the satire programme he executive produced in Nigeria. All NGOs responded with varying levels of indifference.
On the eve of the online event CIMA organised to discuss Case’s report on satire, its then senior director, Mark Nelson, took great pains to inform me during a phone conversation that Case was contrite before arguing there wouldn’t be sufficient time for Case to talk about his history of sexual misconduct and whatever policies his production company had implemented to prevent recidivism. For my part, I replied he could do it in five minutes, and CIMA ended the call with a tacit agreement to broach the matter during the event. CIMA, of course, never did, a fact Nelson subsequently tried to pin on Case, who he claimed had promised to address the issue in his remarks but reneged.
“Certainly, we never will engage in any business of any nature with Dillon [Case] going forward,” he wrote at the end of his July 2021 email.
Whether he communicated that information to CIMA and its network, and it was ignored remains unclear. But the following year, the National Endowment for Democracy—CIMA’s parent entity—sponsored a political satire show in Kenya co-produced by Case’s company, Pilot Media Initiatives.
As for OSIWA, its ombudsman for Africa who was investigating my claim passed away in 2021, news that only came to my knowledge upon enquiring about the resolution one year after my initial email. And although the charity’s executive director Ibrahima Aidara replied that its human resources department would take up the mantle in the interim, there’s been no update on the investigation from the organisation despite repeated requests for feedback, meaning the case is now stuck in limbo. Similarly, OSIWA’s co-sponsoring partner FCDO ostensibly couldn’t launch its own independent investigation on the premise that OSIWA and Case’s production company were downstream partners, and the onus therefore lay with the project’s primary grantor, OSIWA. (At the time of publication, Open Society still had no ombudsman for Africa, two years after the death of the previous one.)
This reluctance to tackle reports of sexual abuse with the seriousness they merit explains how and why the aid and development business is an attractive environment for sexual predators, who know they can take advantage of the industry’s opaque and byzantine investigative procedures, its lack of follow up with complainants and general nonchalant disposition towards incidents of sexual misconduct to perpetrate and perpetuate their nefarious activities unimpeded. That large international NGOs have yet to create a centralised database of sexual abusers to strengthen background checks and curb the sort of abuses publicised by the #MeToo and #AidToo movements, underscores the sector’s lackadaisical stance on the issue and its unwillingness to self-regulate.
Given the large footprints of these charities in vulnerable corners of the world including Africa, it’s time that governments in these regions stepped in and protected citizens from the menace of sexpatriates and deviant “humanitarians.” For starters, they could borrow a leaf from the United States’ laboriously intrusive visa application form, posing, for instance, the following questions once it’s been ascertained the applicant is an aid/development worker:
Have you ever raped, sexually assaulted or harassed anyone while on deployment?
If yes, list the ten most recent countries where you committed these transgressions along with the year and corresponding non-governmental organisations that deployed you.
Do you intend to commit rape, sexual assault or harassment during your mission?
Of course one can always lie on these forms. However, the threat of getting caught in our social-media connected world along with the fear of imminent exposure would, at least, frighten some of these predators enough to remain home, far away from populations that international NGOs have continuously and decidedly failed to protect.
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