Abuse allegations reported to Charity Commission soar after Oxfam scandal

The number of sexual abuse and harassment allegations reported to the Charity Commission have tripled since the Oxfam scandal.

The commission said it had received 532 new reports of serious safeguarding incidents across the sector in February and March this year, up from 176 in the same period last year. The number of reports in the whole of 2016-2017 were 1,210.

The watchdog said that 219 of the allegations came from aid groups funded by the Department for International Development (DfID). Ninety-two of the allegations relate to incidents that had taken place over the last year, while 127 are historical.

The reports covered a wide spectrum of incidents and some related to risks of harm, rather than actual harm, the commission said. It could give no further details of the new allegations reported, or whether any of them involved criminal behaviour.

In March, the commission said some of the 80 reports submitted the previous month included allegations of sexual abuse of children and rape of volunteers abroad.

The commission refused to identify the charities involved as they were still under investigation.

Earlier this month, the commission announced a formal inquiry into Save the Children, the global charity hit by allegations that it failed to investigate sexual abuse and inappropriate behaviour by staff. The watchdog also began a formal inquiry into Oxfam in February, over its handling of the allegations of misconduct by staff in Haiti in 2011.

A safeguarding taskforce, set up by the commission in February to deal with the increase in reports and to review historic safeguarding, has now re-analysed half of all 5,500 serious incidents as far back as April 2014. It found that one, out of the 2,000 involving allegations of potentially criminal behaviour, had not been reported to the police at the time.

It has now been reported to the authorities, it said.

Last month, Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, said that DfID-funded charities had reported 80 safeguarding incidents to the commission.

Mordaunt wrote to 179 aid charities and organisations after it emerged there were widespread concerns about the behaviour of aid workers and the way those concerns were being dealt with.

The commission said it had seen a marked increase in reporting of serious incidents across all charities since early February, when allegations of sexual misconduct by Oxfam staff in Haiti first emerged in the Times.

The commission reported 532 new allegations of serious incidents on safeguarding, across all charities, were received in February and March this year, compared with 176 during the same period in 2017.