When Alexia Pepper de Caires walked on stage to confront a government minister in front of 500 people, she thought she was probably going to get arrested.
Pepper de Caires, a whistleblower and founder of NGO Safe Space, had spent 30 minutes sitting in the audience of the International Safeguarding Summit, held two weeks ago in London, deciding whether to intervene as Penny Mordaunt, the UK Secretary of State for International Development, set out to introduce the government’s new £10 million plan to create an international criminal database to prevent “sexual predators” entering the aid sector.
The summit had been called in response to revelations of sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment in the aid industry that became international news in February this year following allegations of sexual misconduct by Oxfam staff in Haiti. A string of allegations against other NGOs such as Save the Children followed triggering the start of what has come to be known as the #AidToo Movement.
The new database, supported by the UK government and Interpol, will act as a global register of people deemed to be a “threat to public safety” and is intended to prevent perpetrators from entering and moving around the international aid sector.
After weighing her options, Pepper de Caires decided to take the stage. Why? Because that morning, she had learned that Save the Children, the charity on which she had blown the whistle for fostering a culture of bullying and sexual harassment, and which remains under investigation for its handling of those claims, had been given a spot on the advisory board of the criminal database scheme Mordaunt was launching.
When she heard the news, Pepper de Caires said, “I felt physically sick.” Only months earlier, she had walked into Save the Children’s boardroom to demand the board take action over the culture of intimidation and harassment she had witnessed while working at the charity. Now that same organization was being given a role in safeguarding against abuse across the sector.
And so she found herself confronting the minister on stage. To her surprise, far from being arrested, she was given a chance to address the summit. Mordaunt ceded her remaining time to Pepper de Caires, along with lawyer Lesley Agams and U.N. whistleblower Caroline Hunt-Matthes.
Pepper de Caires described Mordaunt’s on-the-spot response as “amazing,” and complimented her not just for giving up her slot, but also for staying to listen to the addresses, and checking in on the speakers afterward to make sure they were feeling okay. Both Mordaunt and Pepper de Caires have been praised for how they handled what could have been a disastrous public relations situation.
But as the controversy over the event fades, serious questions remain. Namely, why would the U.K. government choose Save the Children — an organization that has withdrawn from bidding for any public funding until the Charity Commission’s investigation is complete — to have such a prominent role in its response to the #AidToo movement?
For its part, Save the Children says there is no conflict between the ongoing investigation and its role in the new initiative.
A spokesperson for Save the Children, Ruairidh Villar, said the charity had been working on the government’s new initiative alongside Interpol and the criminal records office “for many months,” and was “delighted” that the department had decided to back their scheme.
“We are not applying for new funding from the Department for International Development while the Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry is underway,” Villar wrote in an email. “However, we have not withdrawn — and will not withdraw — from our commitment to the most vulnerable children. We have therefore continued to lend our expertise on the Interpol initiative.”
And while campaigners for reform in the aid industry say they are disheartened by the appointment of Save the Children, they are not surprised.
“I wasn’t surprised,” said Shaista Aziz, a journalist, former aid worker, and a colleague of Pepper de Caires’. “The aid system is broken. I don’t want to say there’s zero accountability, but there’s close to zero accountability.”
SSave the Children has long had a close relationship with the machinery of power in the UK. In May of this year, Jonathan Glennie, a former manager at Save the Children U.K., wrote that the charity’s leadership suffered from “an exaggerated desire for ‘influence’ — meaning closeness to power.” The cost of that desire, he argued, was “a woman’s right to work in a safe environment.”
Both Justin Forsyth, the organization’s former U.K. CEO who has been accused of harassment by three women, and Brendan Cox, its former policy director who was investigated for a complaint of sexual assault, had served as advisors to Prime Minister Gordon Brown before working at Save the Children. Forsyth and Cox say they take responsibility for their behavior at the charity, though both have disputed some of the allegations made against them.
Sir Alan Parker, the Chair of Save the Children International at the time of the allegations against Forsyth and Cox, had strong connections to both Brown — who is godfather to Parker’s youngest son — and David Cameron, who briefly stayed in Parker’s West London home after resigning as Prime Minister in 2016. The current CEO of Save the Children International is Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, who is married to Stephen Kinnock, a Labor MP.
This is all part of what Aziz describes as the “revolving door” between NGOs and politics in the UK — two spheres she says share a culture of bullying and intimidation. A recent inquiry into abuse and harassment in the UK parliament found “abusive conduct” was “pervasive” and “disturbing”.
AAside from Save the Children’s involvement, skepticism reigns over the government’s plan to stamp out abuse in the aid sector. Some critics, such as Asmita Naik, who co-authored a report on sexual exploitation in West Africa in 2002, have pointed to the fact that many abusers avoid prosecution entirely, and as a result would not appear on the criminal database in the first place.
A broader critique holds that abuse, harassment, and exploitation are systemic issues that can only be addressed through wholesale sector reform, not technocratic interventions. In an op-ed published earlier this month, Angela Bruce-Raeburn of the Global Health Advocacy Incubator warned that the idea of safeguarding itself was at risk of becoming a “fig leaf,” when what is really needed is a shift from the powerful — governments and international organizations — to the powerless — local and national staff of aid organizations and aid recipients. She called for a new “culture of care” that “puts the development of protection standards into the hands of those who do not hold the power.”
Pepper de Caires says that in the coming months, her organization NGO Safe Space will advocate for stronger measures than government’s database, including the establishment of an independent legal fund to help survivors and whistleblowers who come forward about misconduct. In its submission to a parliamentary inquiry into sexual harassment in the workplace, the organization also recommends the establishment of a fully independent body to investigate harassment and abuse in the aid sector.
Pepper de Caires used part of her speaking time at the safeguarding summit to call for “feminist leadership” in the aid sector, a sentiment that Aziz echoed when I spoke with her recently. “I do believe that there is a window of opportunity, and moment of reckoning, where women, in particular, are coming forward — because they’ve had enough.”
The Department for International Development did not respond to a request for comment.
