{"id":7706,"date":"2018-02-16T12:01:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-16T12:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=7706"},"modified":"2018-02-16T12:01:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-16T12:01:46","slug":"the-oxfam-case-why-are-we-so-outraged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/society-politics\/the-oxfam-case-why-are-we-so-outraged\/","title":{"rendered":"The Oxfam Case: Why are we so outraged?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As headlines persist in the controversy surrounding Oxfam,\u00a0Professor Helen Yanacopulos<\/a><\/em>
\n Director, Development Policy and Practice<\/a>, takes a candid and honest look at what has prompted the ongoing furore.<\/em><\/p>\n

“The last thing I want is to be an apologist for badly behaved people exploiting others,” said Professor Yanacopulos, “but I have to admit I\u2019m surprised that the Oxfam case is continuing to evoke such a dramatic reaction from both the media and the public. That this kind of behaviour is wrong, is undeniable. However \u2013 and again, without wishing to excuse it in any way \u2013 it happens all the time.”<\/p>\n

A persistent issue<\/h2>\n

“Anyone who has ever worked in the development and humanitarian sector, or who simply teaches about the sector, knows how extensive it is. In short, such behaviour happens just about everywhere; that includes within the corporate sector as well as the UN.<\/p>\n

“As ex-International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell<\/a> noted recently in a BBC interview<\/a>, that he had a problem recalling the Oxfam specific case, although he did recall that these cases happened frequently. Indeed, it\u2019s happened so often with UN peacekeeping forces, for example, that a colleague and I were asked to write a course that could be used during ‘Blue Helmet’ training to outline how and why things were going wrong and to try to prevent it.”<\/p>\n

“Being leaders in the international development field comes at a price”<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“Oxfam continues to make the headlines after more than a week with little sign that the outrage is dying down; despite the fact that these \u2018indiscretions\u2019 don\u2019t just happen within the humanitarian and international development sector. As we have seen all too clearly with the \u2018Me too\u2019 movement, they happen anywhere that men are in positions of power and where inequalities exist. But the Oxfam case does serve to bring up key issues about how such behaviour plays out within its specific field.<\/p>\n

“There are potentially many reasons why the Oxfam case is grabbing the public\u2019s attention in the way that it is. One possible explanation is that international NGOs such as Oxfam are value-driven organisations that operate in moral spaces. I contribute financially to Oxfam because they \u2018do good\u2019. They also possess a moral authority and are leaders in the international development field. Although, as we have seen, this comes at a price: they have higher heights from which to fall from grace and sector-wide (and appalling) behaviour will evoke formidable moral outrage.”<\/p>\n

Why international NGOs steer clear of publicising their failures<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“The second reason why the name \u2018Oxfam\u2019 has become synonymous with \u2018indiscretions\u2019 over the last weeks is because international NGOs are not good at publicising their failures;<\/p>\n

The main reason neither individual NGOs nor the sector are good at talking about their failures is because any failure can be catastrophic to their business model.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Oxfam UK, for example, only gets a percentage of its income from government funding; the majority of its income comes from individuals, like myself, who give monthly donations or donations around emergency appeals. It is this that makes these organisations so vulnerable to bad publicity. The catastrophic effect it can have on their ability to operate is what leads to the impulse to try to make bad things \u2018go away\u2019.”<\/p>\n

“The Oxfam outrage is the result of collective denial”<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“Finally, I would argue, the Oxfam outrage is the result of collective denial. In the words of Stanley Cohen in States of Denial<\/a>, whose classic study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded, it is an example of \u2018knowing and not knowing\u2019.<\/p>\n

“Cohen argues that denial can exist at many levels: the individual, the organisational or the societal. Many individuals within the sector, then, weren\u2019t surprised by revelations of the behaviour of the small number of people working with Oxfam. While this isn\u2019t to say that everyone who\u2019s an aid or development worker engages in such behaviour, the fact that these things happen in the field is a badly kept secret. In other words, many people both knew and didn\u2019t know. Within the development sector as a whole, these states of denial are evident in the many interviews with both Oxfam and non-Oxfam staff who claim that they didn\u2019t know what was going on.<\/p>\n

“I would argue that our \u2013 the public \u2013 being so morally outraged by the Oxfam case (as well as by all the other revelations emanating from the creative industry sector, and even from within my own sector, academia) is a further illustration of this collective sense of denial. We know, but we don\u2019t know. The good thing about denial, however, is that once we do \u2018know\u2019, it becomes difficult to return to \u2018not knowing\u2019.”<\/p>\n

The causes should be our focus<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“The Oxfam case, as shocking as it is, will blow over. I hope that Oxfam will survive and that they will continue with their critical \u2013 and, in my view, more shocking \u2013 recent work around the injustice of inequality (see, for example, their announcement at Davos<\/a>\u00a0last month that 82% of the new wealth created around the world has gone to the richest 1%, while exactly 0% has gone to the poorest 50%).<\/p>\n

“Now that we \u2018know\u2019 about these sexual \u2018indiscretions\u2019, perhaps we can focus our moral outrage on what causes (and allows) such outrageous behaviour to happen.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As headlines persist in the controversy surrounding Oxfam,\u00a0Professor Helen Yanacopulos Director, Development Policy and Practice, takes a candid and honest look at what has prompted the ongoing furore. “The last thing I want is to be an apologist for badly behaved people exploiting others,” said Professor Yanacopulos, “but I have to admit I\u2019m surprised that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[417,1158,1160,1655],"class_list":["post-7706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-politics","tag-charity","tag-international-aid","tag-international-development","tag-oxfam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}