Annie Gunner Logan takes aim at charities’ desperate scrabbling to save their reputations in light of appalling abuse

Reputation, according to Shakespeare, “is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.”

Far be it from me to argue with the Bard, but I don’t think anyone who has read the Charity Commission’s Oxfam report could possibly conclude that the agency’s reputation has been lost entirely without deserving.

The report sets out in painful detail how Oxfam’s senior management took the decision to downplay what was going on in Haiti and elsewhere precisely because of the reputational damage it might cause. Yet the damage now inflicted is infinitely worse than might have been the case if Oxfam had been open about it from the start, and as a consequence there are sobering repercussions not just for the organisation itself, but for the broader charity sector.

But here’s the thing. The sector’s reaction to the Charity Commission report is, to my mind, as disappointingly self-absorbed as it was when the story first broke, because yet again, everyone is obsessing over reputational damage, potential loss of funding and so on, as if these were the key issues at stake. What we should be most concerned about, surely, is how – yet again – men appointed to senior positions of power and authority have been found to be abusing those positions in the most appalling manner. Never mind the damage to some or other organisation’s reputation, what about the damage to real women, and real children?

I cannot, in truth, bring myself to wring my hands over Oxfam’s plight, nor that of any other organisation in our sector that has allowed such behaviour to go unchecked and unpunished, any more than I can for the Catholic Church, the movie industry or the Palace of Westminster. Why would we assume that powerful men in our sector will, or ought to, behave any differently to equally powerful priests, producers or politicians?

In this respect, the most important part of the Charity Commission’s report is in the chair’s foreword, where Tina Stowell makes it quite clear that “injustices are not the exclusive preserve of the unjust… being on the side of good is... no guarantee.”
Quite. And if any organisation, in our sector or otherwise, cannot figure out a way to stop its male employees from abusing women and children, then it will richly deserve to lose its reputation, its income, and much else besides.

And before someone comes along to #notallmen me, or to tell me that women can also be abusers, allow me to direct you to page 23 of the report which directly quotes the findings of the Independent Review Team’s analysis of 146 incidents at Oxfam that took place between 2011 and 2018 and which the team considered to meet the commission’s serious incident reporting criteria: “the most common allegations contained a sexual element. Unsurprisingly the vast majority of victims were female and the majority of subjects of concern were male.”

But back to reputational damage. We hear a lot about people no longer wanting to donate to charity because of something that has disturbed them, from downright fraud and embezzlement to slightly higher than average admin costs. And you know what? Mostly, these are people who wouldn’t donate anyway, however angelically we might conduct ourselves.

I am fairly confident that if people believe in a cause, consider it to be righteous and want to give it their support, then they’ll donate their cash with little regard for allegations of abuse or anything else. I mean, it took Alex Salmond little more than 48 hours to crowdfund the cost of his legal fees.

I rest my case.

Annie Gunner Logan has been working in and around the Scottish voluntary sector for longer than she cares to remember. Currently director of CCPS (Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland) with various non-exec roles thrown in.

@ccpscotland