Response to a scandal: sex work, race, and the development sector in Haiti

ABSTRACT

In 2018, a global media scandal erupted, in which Oxfam, one of the largest and most respected international development non-government organizations, was accused of covering up incidents of its staff engaging sex workers in Haiti following the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. The scandal sparked widespread public condemnation of the development and humanitarian sectors for their complicity in the sexual exploitation and abuse of Haitian sex workers. In the aftermath of the scandal, the sector scrambled to restore its damaged reputation, in part by positioning its care for vulnerable women as central to its work. In its responses, however, the sector did not position Haitian sex workers as active subjects of the controversy, but as figures of suffering through whom development organizations might atone for their alleged transgressions. This article reflects on how development and humanitarian representations of Haitian sex workers, and sex work in general, as expressed in Oxfam’s responses to the scandal, exposed the sector’s colonial and racialized approaches to gender, sexuality, and sex work.

KEYWORDS:

• Oxfam
• Haiti
• sex work
• gender and development
• race and development

Introduction

“It was like a Caligula orgy with prostitutes in Oxfam T-shirts.” This was the headline that “broke” the story of an investigation by United Kingdom (UK) newspaper the Times into an alleged Oxfam cover-up in Haiti (O’Neill 2018). The story rocked the international development sector, prompting shame and indignation among supporters of foreign aid, non-government organization (NGO) donors, feminists, activist groups, and academics. The Times claimed that Oxfam had covered up incidents of sexual misconduct by its staff in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. For several weeks, media-driven outrage was unrelenting in the reportage of videos of an “orgy” inside an Oxfam house near Port-au-Prince and the “horrific behaviour” of Oxfam staff, which included naming the guesthouse “the whorehouse,” where Oxfam staff “were throwing big parties with prostitutes” (O’Neill 2018). The phrase “using prostitutes” – a stigmatizing description of sex workers as passive objects to be had, purchased, or possessed – was widely used during the media tumult and, somewhat surprisingly, was also deployed by the development sector.

The public outrage sparked by the Times was fueled by depictions of poor, vulnerable, non-white cisgender Haitian women being harassed, exploited, and abused by powerful white humanitarian men, employees of Oxfam and other NGOs, responding to the devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of 200,000 Haitians, injured more than 300,000, and left 1.5 million people homeless. Oxfam UK responded swiftly to the media scandal, attempting at first to set the record straight, assuring the public that it had investigated the events, dismissed the relevant staff, and upgraded its safeguarding programs. Oxfam described the activities of these staff members in Haiti as “totally unacceptable, contrary to our values and the high standards we expect of our staff” (Oxfam GB 2018a). Oxfam International’s media statement of the same date was more apologetic about the staff’s “reprehensible behaviour,” pledging to stand “firmly against the exploitation and abuse of women and girls” (Oxfam International 2018a). Yielding to the media’s incendiary tone, Oxfam’s media reports became increasingly remorseful, expressing “anger and shame” and insisting that it puts “women at the heart of everything” that it does to “make life better for poor and vulnerable people” (Oxfam GB 2018b).

We begin our article by outlining the media coverage of the events to provide insight into its frenzied tenor and its consequences. It is not our purpose to investigate the details of the events in Haiti as reported in the media. Oxfam has already investigated the events, made the report public, and acted on its findings (see Oxfam International 2011, 2018b; Oxfam GB 2018c). Two subsequent investigations into the events, one of which found media claims of an Oxfam cover-up to be unsubstantiated, are discussed later in the article. We focus instead on how the development and humanitarian sectors responded to the scandal. Oxfam and the sector opted not to challenge the media representations of the events and the main actors, submitting instead to the highly charged media sentiment and representations of Haitian sex workers, and sex work in general, that the media generated. Oxfam’s response not only reinforced the media narrative, but also revealed the sector’s ongoing implication in its colonial and heteronormative origins, structured through the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and sex work. As the sector scrambled to restore its damaged reputation in the aftermath of the scandal, Haitians were central but marginal. Ultimately, the sector positioned Haitian sex workers not as active subjects of the controversy, but as objects of suffering to be aided and through whom development organizations might atone for their own alleged wrongdoings. In this sense, the Haitian sex workers were produced by the sector not only as victim-subjects (Kapur 2002), but as their victim-subjects, laying bare the racialized positioning of non-white, sexed subjects in development as subjectivities produced for specific political purposes. Notably, the response positioned the Haitian sex workers as cisfemale, authorizing all subsequent representations of them to default to racialized and gendered stereotypes, according to which differences among them in terms of gender identity or the forms of sex work in which they engaged could not be countenanced. Such restrictive assumptions meant that sex work was characterized exclusively and erroneously as the exploitation of women by men. Moreover, as we discuss, such heteronormative representations of the Haitian sex workers rested on the deep-seated racialized and gendered imaginaries of development and humanitarianism.

The similarities between the sector’s response and the long history of colonial representations of gender, sex, and race resonate with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) account of how Hindu women were represented as political justification for British colonialism’s civilizing mission in India. The abolition of sati,¹ for example, promoted the necessity of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1988, 92), whereas Hindu men represented sati as a “courageous” act of widowed Hindu women. According to Spivak, women are caught between these representations, unable to speak. Mohanty (1988) also critiques the discursive colonialism of Western feminist representations of the average “Third World Woman” as “other” to the modern, sexually free Western woman. She argues that “Third World Women” are represented in contrasting terms as perpetual victims of male violence, and such representations amount to a “political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (Mohanty 1988, 61). Similar representations are deployed in current times to call Western audiences to “turn oppression into opportunity” for the purpose of saving the world “one woman at a time” (Kristof and WuDunn 2010, 2). This ongoing production of victim subjects is, for legal scholar Ratna Kapur (2002), a continual Western feminist production of the Third World as “abject,” used repeatedly to justify imperialistic intrusions, whether in the form of military or humanitarian interventions (Kapur 2002, 5). Kapur acknowledges the beneficial effects of productions of the female victim subject as a shared location from which all women can speak, but she contends that it relies on a universal and uncomplicated subject: “It is a subject that cannot accommodate a multi-layered experience” (Kapur 2002, 5).

The development sector, and Oxfam in particular, were, to be sure, blindsided by the severity of the media offensive. Nonetheless, their response did not question the salacious and racialized media framings of the scandal, which produced the Haitian sex workers as unspeaking, sexually abused victims, openly being spoken about and for. The “victim-subject” (Kapur 2002), the victim stereotype of the “Third World Woman” (Mohanty 1988), the muting and marginalization of the female “subaltern” (Spivak 1988), and the self-assigned role of “speaking for” by “speaking about” the women (Kapoor 2004) governed the sector’s response. Furthermore, the racialization of gender automatically defaults to heteronormative assumptions about sex and sexuality, which has implications for how sex work is understood and misunderstood as exploitation of women by men.

We position our examination of the sector’s response in three fields: (1) sex, sexuality, and development; (2) contemporary international research with sex workers; and (3) postcolonial critiques of development practice and development scholarship. First, we retrace development approaches to sex and sexuality to illustrate the paradoxical absence and centrality of sex and sexuality in development, which are most salient in the connections between race and sex work. Second, we examine the sector’s response to the media scandal through a close reading of media responses, media appearances, and investigation reports. Third, we show how contemporary scholarly research with sex workers weakens claims that sex workers are always and only victims. We conclude, through the work of Ilan Kapoor (2004), by considering the shared complicity of academics with the development sector’s representational strategies that continue to silence and damage sex workers. While we call for greater attention to the stigmatizing effects of speech about and for sex workers, we reconsider the space from which “Third World Women” (Mohanty 1988) can or cannot speak to and through development.

Sex, sexuality, and sex work in development

For a sector whose core business is to tackle severe poverty and social suffering, matters of sex and sexuality have long been considered as marginal or minor, as topics of deep “silence” (Cornwall and Jolly 2006), as “neglected” (Pigg and Adams 2005) or “rarely addressed” (Harcourt 2009, 2), and as international development’s “missing dimension” (Runeborg 2008, 39). Andil Gosine (2009) argues, however, that sex and sexuality are at the very heart of development’s regulatory power, as is evident in three of development’s principal normative frames: heteronormativity, sex as risk and danger, and colonial heteronationalism.

Development has always intervened on matters of sex, particularly at its intersections with public health, where sexual and reproductive health have been at the forefront of joint programs. From the 1950s until the 1980s, family planning, population control, and maternal and child health programs flourished, although they tended to focus on women’s reproductive capacity and maternal well-being to the exclusion of other sexual matters. For example, female sex workers and male homosexuals were often denied service from these programs (Corrêa and Jolly 2008, 25). From the 1980s, a new language of sex and sexuality emerged as the concepts of “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” began to replace the previous family and population approaches. In 1994, the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo captured this new approach, asserting that reproductive health meant “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes” (United Nations 1995). The language of reproductive health, gender, and sexuality, which had until this time been the idiom of activists and academics, was adopted by international organizations beyond the ICPD, including the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995) and the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995). The meaning of “reproductive health,” however, remained contested by feminists and development practitioners, and an unclear relationship existed between reproductive rights and sexual rights (Corrêa 1997).

“Sexual health,” as a compromise term, was acceptable to global institutions, especially during the global human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic of the 1980s. “Sexual rights,” by contrast, emerged from the more radical roots of feminist and gay liberation and was often deployed in opposition to institutional approaches to sexual health (Corrêa 1997, 108–110). The distinction and relationship between sexual health and sexual rights continued to trouble the delivery of development programs and often resulted in failures to provide access to safe and legal abortion, contraception for unmarried women, and support for sex workers.

Institutional, state, and political support for women’s rights to bodily autonomy and sexual health marked a significant transformation of the field, but development’s heteronormativity persistently linked women’s empowerment to their protection from, and resistance to, unwanted sex or unwanted risks associated with sex (Jolly 2006). The assumption that sex is dangerous and risky for women generated programs to prevent rape, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections, reinforcing claims that sex in international development is predominantly understood in relation to deviance, oppression, and coercion (Harcourt 2009, 2). Indeed, HIV discourse and planning interventions, while giving rise to a new global focus on the rights of gay, lesbian, and queer people, have also been shaped primarily by tropes of men’s sexual irresponsibility, particularly men who have sex with men, and women’s vulnerability. These gendered stereotypes of predatory men and victimized women have dominated development programming (Cornwall and Jolly 2009, 8). Moreover, development’s heteronormativity has excluded non-normative sexual and gender identities including sex workers, such that the invisibility of these individuals or groups in policies and programs “translates into myriad forms of symbolic and material violence against them” (Lind 2009, 35).

The racial and sexual politics that powered the Haiti scandal restated the development sector’s uncomfortable history on matters of sex and sexuality. In 2007, gender, sexuality, and development scholar and consultant Susie Jolly wrote a report entitled Why the Development Industry Should Get Over Its Obsession with Bad Sex and Start to Think about Pleasure. She claims that “development representations of the dangers of sexuality have combined with stereotypical representations of gender with very problematic results” (Jolly 2007, 9), and she calls upon the sector to stop focusing on women as victims and men as perpetrators while also excluding queer and trans people. Development’s “danger approach” to sex work materialized alongside what is commonly referred to as the “feminist sex wars” of the 1980s, in which feminists divided over matters of sex and sexuality and their relationship to women’s domination or liberation. Pornography and prostitution were and continue to be a central focus of these wars, which broadly pit sex work abolitionists against sex worker rights advocates.

For abolitionists, prostitution is the quintessential expression of patriarchal oppression. It is a form of violence against women and an abuse of human rights (Barry 1995; Jeffreys 1997; Raymond 1998). Sex worker rights advocates oppose the abolitionists in favor of decriminalizing sex work and support enabling sex workers to organize unions and advocacy groups and devise ways of supporting each other’s safety and well-being (Agustín 2007; Chapkis 2013; Doezema 2001; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Murray 1998). With some resemblances to Spivak’s (1988) argument about the silencing of the subaltern woman, Laura Agustín contends that neither position accommodates the diversity of the global sex industry and sex worker experiences, arguing that sex workers are ensnared by such binary representations. Her focus is not on whether sex work is morally right or feminist but that “women everywhere have limited job options, and, when they are not well-educated or connected socially, those options generally reduce to low-paying, low-prestige work: street vending, home sewing, caring, cleaning, retail jobs, sweatshop labour, and selling sex” (Agustín 2017).

More recently, “modern-day abolitionists” (Bernstein 2018, 68, 95), a peculiar coalition of secular feminists and conservative Christians opposing “sexual trafficking” and “modern-day slavery,” have sought to remove any suggestion that sex workers might have autonomy. The consequent strengthening of national and international laws on trafficking, shaped by the United Nations (UN) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (United Nations 2000), has muddied the policy field of sex work in development. A discursive and legal conflation of slavery, migration, and trafficking, and a tendency to represent all sex work as forced or non-consensual, has emerged (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). Moreover, this emphasis on the victimized or “trafficked” prostitute in development establishes a false dichotomy between “western ‘whores’ who are free to choose their professions, and … forced, trafficked Third World victims” (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, 2). The majority of anti-trafficking and slavery campaigns are founded by and directed primarily from within the “developed” world mostly by white women and men (Agustín 2012; Bernstein 2018; Kempadoo 2015). These racialized dynamics are reminiscent of Jo Doezema’s earlier formulation of Western feminists’ “wounded attachment” (Doezema 2001, 16) to the injured body of the victimized Third World prostitute, where the non-white woman serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain Western interests, which are assumed, erroneously, to be the interests of the Third World sex workers (Doezema 2001). The language of trafficking, modern-day slavery, abuse, and exploitation adopted in initiatives by some development programs focuses on the need to “uplift” women and “rescue” them from sex work to overcome the “constraints” that “limit” the “realization” of sexual and gender rights (Basu and Dutta 2010; Cornwall 2017; Oosterhoff and Sweetman 2018).

This is not to say that the development sector does not support sex worker communities and organizations. Some development agencies fund sex worker rights organizations, legal services, health information, and support programs (see Dorf 2006). Most of this has been linked to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with sex workers taking up opportunities to organize and support each other with safe-sex messaging and legal and health support. Funding streams from the World Health Organization to national governments and international NGOs enabled support for sex workers during these times, some of which continues today. More significantly, Oxfam and Amnesty International have been at the forefront of recent policy shifts in the sector that seek to incorporate recognition of sexual rights and diverse sexual and gender identities in all of their programs. In 2016, Oxfam and Amnesty International both announced policies that included sex work and sex workers. Oxfam’s new policies on gender, expressed in its Sexual Diversity and Gender Identity Rights Policy, specify in relation to sex work that “we need to pay attention to the need to decriminalize consensual sex work … in order to ensure sex workers are not discriminated [against] and their fundamental rights are protected” (Oxfam 2016, 2). Similarly, Amnesty International, after consulting its broad membership on the contents of its report On State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers, formally adopted its policy calling for the decriminalization of adult sex work and the repeal of most prostitution laws. This policy on the Human Rights of Sex Workers (Amnesty International 2016) argues that these laws heighten the risk of human rights abuses of sex workers, which include rape, violence, extortion, and discrimination, with little protection or redress under existing laws. The policy calls on governments to do more to protect sex workers from violations and abuse, stating: “It is necessary to avoid the stereotyping of all sex workers as lacking in agency or capacity as this is harmful and disempowering, and not reflective of evidence regarding the situations and experiences of sex workers globally” (Amnesty International 2016, 9). Curiously, however, these policies neither framed nor informed the sector’s responses to the ferocious media offensive against Oxfam and the development and aid sectors generally.

Feminist scholars and activists have long urged the development sector to confront its problems with sex (Jolly 2006; Cornwall and Jolly 2009; Lind 2010). As outlined above, development’s earliest interventions in population and family planning hardly mention sex, but a shift toward reproductive health and rights opened up the space for greater focus on sexuality and sexual rights. However, sexual health became the compromise and restricted a more expansive focus on sex and sexuality. Sexual rights have remained marginal to mainstream development, although Oxfam’s significant and impressive policies on sexual diversity and gender rights (Oxfam 2016) and the uptake of programs by several NGOs and donors to recognize sexual orientation and gender identity mark another considerable shift. These changes, however, have not been matched by the resources and energy now devoted to trafficking and modern-day slavery campaigns, which have veered away from sex and sexuality rights once more. It is significant that Haitian sex workers at the center of the scandal were not addressed in terms of their rights and interests but as victims of exploitation and abuse, mirroring the language and tone of anti-trafficking campaigns. In the next section, we show how the development sector drew on a racialized depiction of Haitian sex workers as “victim-subjects” (Kapur 2002, 2) to express remorse and rehabilitate its own practices and reputation.

Response to the scandal

This section analyzes the development sector’s response to the scandal through a close reading of the content of media releases, media appearances, and rejoinders to media coverage and commentary by development agencies, principally by Oxfam. To examine the content of these releases, articles, and reports, we constructed an archive covering two periods: the month following the first media report (February–March 2018) and a second period following the release of two investigation reports into the scandal (June–August 2019). To ensure reliability, we read all of the media releases from Oxfam GB, Oxfam International, and Oxfam Australia that were published during these two periods. We also included in our archive relevant commentary and media releases from other key development agencies and actors. We read all of the major newspapers and online media in the UK and Australia during this period and included media from Europe and North America where relevant. We sought to examine the semantic representations of Haitian women, sex workers, sex work, sex, and gender in the documents alongside the sector’s articulation of its relationship to the Haitian sex workers.

In its press statement issued on February 9, 2018, the day that the Times news story broke, Oxfam UK responded with “facts” seeking to reassure the public that it was aware of the events in Haiti and had investigated them, dismissed the errant staff members, and upgraded its safeguarding procedures (Oxfam GB 2018a). On the same day, Oxfam International responded in a somewhat different tone, conceding that its staff in Haiti had “acted in a way that was totally unacceptable and is the most appalling mark against the high values we set ourselves at Oxfam” (Oxfam International 2018a). It pledged to “stand fully by the survivors of such reprehensible behaviour … against the exploitation and abuse of women and girls” (Oxfam International 2018a). The next day, February 10, Oxfam issued a follow-up statement expressing dismay that several of its staff who were accused of “sexual exploitation and abuse in Haiti” had been subsequently employed by other NGOs. It specified that those displaying such “reprehensible behaviour” should be barred from working with “vulnerable communities.” The statement also committed Oxfam to do more to prevent “harassment, abuse, exploitation” (Oxfam International 2018c).

The original Haiti news story was followed two days later by another set of accusations about Oxfam employees engaging sex workers in Chad in 2006 (Oxfam International 2018d). Oxfam stated that it was “deeply hurt by these abuses” and would continue to change the way in which it manages “cases of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.” In rebuking its staff in Haiti as “privileged men abusing those they were meant to protect,” Oxfam underscored its “priority to stand with the women and girls who experienced this exploitation” by ensuring that “sexual misconduct” is “rooted out” of the organization (Oxfam International 2018d). On the following day, February 12, Oxfam’s Deputy Chief Executive, Penny Lawrence, announced her resignation, confirming the allegations of the “use of prostitutes.” She said that she was “desperately sorry for the harm and distress … caused to Oxfam’s supporters, the wider development sector and most of all the vulnerable people who trusted us” (Oxfam GB 2018d). Celebrities began to withdraw their support for Oxfam. The actor Minnie Driver said that she was “devastated” and “nothing short of horrified” by the Oxfam allegations (Slawson 2018). Bishop Desmond Tutu resigned, expressing deep disappointment at “allegations of immorality and possible criminality involving humanitarian workers linked to the charity” (Beaumont 2018).

Following the Times story, Oxfam was besieged by further media attacks, public scorn, and disapproval. Supporters declared their intentions to withdraw funding (Marsh 2018), resulting in a loss of 7,000 donors in a matter of days (Elgot and McVeigh 2018). The NGO had the unenviable task of managing multiple audiences, each serving a distinct purpose for the organization and the sector. On February 16, the UK government announced that Oxfam had agreed to withdraw from bidding for any new funding until it could satisfy ministers that it could meet the high standards that government expected of its partners (DFID 2018). In the previous year, Oxfam received close to €40 million in government funding.

In the first days of the media offensive, Oxfam GB Chief Executive Officer Mark Goldring attempted to cool the febrile public mood by addressing the specifics of the events, highlighting the internal investigation and subsequent disciplinary actions, and remarking on the outstanding reputation of Oxfam’s safeguarding program (Mazurana and Donnelly 2017). He expressed his despair that the media was winning the media war and not only that Oxfam’s responses were being manipulated, but also that they “failed in the court of public opinion. We’ve been savaged” (Aitkenhead 2018). He went on to apologize for the actions of the staff in Haiti and the damage that they had caused, but he also attempted to hold his ground by emphasizing the appropriateness of Oxfam’s 2011 investigation and subsequent actions. He expressed his incredulity at the scale and intensity of the attacks, suggesting that they were out of proportion to the organization’s level of culpability, and he questioned the motives of the critics (BBC News 2018). Meanwhile, Oxfam International Executive Director Winnie Byanyima insisted again that Oxfam remained “sorry” and “ashamed” and that it would work with local authorities in Haiti to achieve justice for women who were “abused” by the staffers. She is reported as saying: “For [some] victims, that might mean helping them find better jobs, or helping them find markets [where they can sell goods]” with the ultimate purpose of “restoring dignity” (Gharib 2018).

By the end of the first week after the Times story was published, Oxfam had lost the confidence of the UK government, was prevented from applying for government funds, and was suspended from working in Haiti. Oxfam also announced its own high-level inquiry into sexual misconduct and culture change, which would be conducted in parallel with the Charity Commission for England and Wales Inquiry into Oxfam. Announcing the inquiry, Byanyima said: “What happened in Haiti and afterwards is a stain on Oxfam that will shame us for years, and rightly so. In my language ‘Okuruga ahamutima gwangye, mutusaasire.’ It means, ‘From the bottom of my heart I am asking for forgiveness’” (Oxfam International 2018e). Oxfam pledged once more to continue supporting “the millions of vulnerable people we work with around the world … to make sure abuse and exploitation does not happen again … [and committing] to ensuring justice for survivors of abuse” (Oxfam International 2018e).

The responses by Oxfam and the sector in the month following the first media story contained three main descriptors of the events: “sexual abuse,” “sexual harassment,” and “exploitation.” The most frequently uttered affective expressions were “reprehensible,” “devastating,” “appalling,” “shame,” and “distress.” The women in Haiti were described as “survivors,” “victims,” “vulnerable people,” “prostitutes,” “women who were used,” and “women who were abused.” Media reports and Oxfam responses bundled rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, harassment, and exploitation together with sex work, coercive sex, transactional sex, and purchasing sexual services. These terms were neither disaggregated nor differentiated, which effectively enabled the situation in Haiti to become a portal for publicly accounting and apologizing for a range of dissimilar issues known to have bedeviled the development aid and humanitarian sectors for some time. On this occasion, development’s problems with sex prompted equivalences between sex work and rape, and sexual abuse and commercial sex.

In June 2019, the findings of the two formal investigations were released. The first investigation, a 12-month inquiry by the Charity Commission for England and Wales Inquiry into Oxfam, examined 7,000 documents (Charity Commission for England and Wales 2019). The second, established by Oxfam, was the High Level Commission on Safeguarding, Sexual Misconduct and Culture Change at Oxfam. The Oxfam investigation was based on interviews with more than 500 current and former Oxfam staff and an analysis of its safeguarding programs in three countries. The Charity Commission report restates the actions and events investigated and finds that Oxfam did not engage in a cover-up of its investigation, although it could have disclosed some matters more clearly. The Commission found:

• The misconduct being investigated involved the “use of prostitutes.”

• The allegation that the misconduct included minors was not substantiated, but it could not be ruled out.

• The incidents raise “criminal matters” that may have been reportable to the Haitian police.

• The breaches involving the “use of prostitutes” took place at a residence provided by Oxfam GB.²

Oxfam responded to the inquiry’s findings with expressions of deep sorrow for its “failure to prevent sexual abuse” and admiration for the “courage of survivors” (Oxfam GB 2019). Oxfam International Executive Director Byanyima declared: “When good journalists in February 2018 exposed the appalling behaviour – let’s call it what it is: sexual abuse … I wanted the hard truth because women’s safety, rights and dignity were at stake.” She concluded with an unequivocal “I mean zero tolerance when I say it” (Byanyima 2019).

Oxfam’s commissioned report, Committing to Change, Protecting People: Towards a More Accountable Oxfam, was also released in June 2019 (Independent Commission 2019). Details of the events in Haiti were condensed in favor of a focus on “sexual misconduct” within the organization. The representational triptych of exploitation, harassment, and abuse persisted. The report reframed the Haiti crisis as a “safeguarding crisis” and recommended cultural change that also included processes to “sanction perpetrators and support survivors” and improve complaint mechanisms and a directive to “take aggressive steps to realize its organizational values in all areas of its work” (Independent Commission 2019, 6–16). Oxfam responded to the report with a willingness to change, reiterating its mood of shock and regret. An article authored by Byanyima from June 14, 2019, reminded readers that the findings of “shocking levels of sexual abuse” in two locations (Haiti and Chad) had instilled in Oxfam a “duty to act” (Byanyima 2019).

Oxfam has repeatedly apologized for its involvement in sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual exploitation. While the figure of the Haitian sex worker has been the object of these apologies, her location as a subject has been largely invisible, and her voice has been drowned out by those of media, governments, donors, celebrities, and the general public. The image of the vulnerable, violated, and abused victim has persisted. The conflation of sex work with sexual abuse has occurred without explanation or problematization, effectively eroding the distinct experiences of sex workers and survivors of sexual abuse. Sex workers are treated poorly by the public and they do experience violence, abuse, and exploitation by clients, intermediaries, and the police. However, sex work itself – that is, engaging in commercial sex – is not sexual abuse. The Haitian sex worker has been deployed figuratively as the desolate victim that Oxfam and the development sector can serve and rescue. This figure of the Haitian sex worker rehabilitates the tarnished reputation of the development sector as it redoubles efforts to protect and safeguard the vulnerable. In this sense, and for its own survival, it became implausible for the development sector to represent these Haitian women in terms other than the media representation of them as abused victims.

Commercial sex was assembled as the harm of the event. Yet, the voices of those who were allegedly harmed, the sex workers, have been largely absent from the media reports and from the development sector’s responses. The restricted representation of them as victimized and abused does not tally with the multifaceted experiences of sex work that have emerged from sex worker organizations and in scholarly research. The development sector omitted this knowledge in its responses, refusing to engage with the multiple dimensions of sex work and the complicated lives and experiences of sex workers themselves. The research highlighted in the following section brings this multiplicity to the fore and contrasts this knowledge with the representations of sex work and sex workers in the media and the development sector.

Sex work and sex workers: the evidence

The singular representation of sex workers throughout the Haiti scandal as victims of abuse and exploitation is not borne out in research, which in recent decades has illustrated the multilayered experiences and contexts of sex work. Ethnographic research with sex workers shows them to be as pragmatic as they are philosophical about their predicaments. In this section, we present only a small selection of an extensive body of ethnographic and qualitative research, most of which destabilizes the trope of the abused sex worker, showing instead the flux of concerns and conditions that converge in the lives and spaces of sex workers. A limitation of this research is that it focuses predominantly on cisfemale sex workers. We selected these studies to challenge the repeated declarations of Oxfam and the sector that sex workers in Haiti, represented solely as impoverished cisfemale sex workers, are forced to work under conditions of constant harassment and exploitation. Therefore, the research and, by implication, this article inadequately address the gender diversity of sex workers. Conceding these limitations, the research convincingly establishes that sex work is not only or always about economic transaction, but involves the interconnectedness of money, friendship, and intimacy, thereby providing a powerful counterpoint to the claims advanced by Oxfam and the sector. Coercion, choice, survival, strategy, and autonomy coalesce in sex work, and experiences increasingly reflect diverse and stratified forms of work both locally and globally as new economies of sex and mobility continually emerge (see also Bernstein 2010; Brennan 2004; Garza 2019; Hoang 2015; Koch 2020; Mai 2018; Shah 2014; Ślęzak 2019).

In her long-term research with sex workers in the Dominican Republic, Amalia Cabezas (2009) challenges the view that sex work can be defined in singular terms as “sex in exchange for money,” where abuse and exploitation are inevitable. She shows that the work is embedded in a global economy of sex, gender, money, and mobility in which new configurations of inequality and opportunity emerge. A range of relationships are now covered by the term “sex work,” including one-off sexual encounters, ongoing transactional relations, and dating relationships, where money and goods are gifted over short or long periods. Cabezas illustrates women’s strategizing capacities when they engage in ongoing transnational relations with wealthy foreign men because they may lead to opportunities for future remittances and migration (see also Brennan 2004).

Research with sex workers in Haiti accords with Cabezas’ (2009) mix of affective and economic rationales for engaging in sex work. In a study of 229 women and two men who had sex with UN peacekeepers in Haiti, Athena Kolbe (2015) provides details of the contradictory motivations, costs, and rewards for Haitian sex workers and experiences that vary according to age, class, and rural/urban divides. For example, an urban 19-year-old Haitian woman described one of her encounters as a boyfriend-like relationship, but also economically necessary for family and education reasons:

He will pay my school fees, he will take me dancing, he will buy me a nice dinner. If my mother is sick, he will buy the medication … The difference is I need to be romantic with him even if I don’t feel that way … [I]f I don’t, then we have no one to pay for the things we need, and I would have to leave school. (Kolbe 2015, 9)

Another 19-year-old urban woman shared her multiple motivations, which involve receiving both payment and care:

Part of my motivation is the things I get that I don’t need. Every woman wants to have nice things. When he gives me money, it’s like a payment. But when he gives me a necklace or some perfume, that says that he cares about me. (Kolbe 2015, 12)

The research in Haiti also reveals that women seriously reflect on the comparable demands of heteronormative relations and sex work and explain the relief that it can provide from family obligations. A 30-year-old rural woman said:

All women have to choose a man … I chose men that give me what I need. I give them sex and they give me money. They give me food. They pay for my child’s school fees. They pay when I go to the clinic. Whatever I need, I just have to ask. To tell you the truth, my friends are all jealous! They have a man who just gave them a baby. He might not buy milk the baby needs. For me, I am lucky and my friends know it! I do it, take what I get from him, and he leaves. I don’t have to cook for him or wash his clothes. (Kolbe 2015, 13)

Cabezas notes that “women who sell sexual services to complement low wages, raise funds in a financial crisis, migrate, leave violent husbands, or achieve economic mobility do not fit the model of woman-as-victim, worthy of protection and deserving of salvation” (Cabezas 2009, 153).

Sex work stratification research shows further how different modalities of sexual labor performed by sex workers also intersect with race, class, caste, and geographic location. For example, Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) reveals that lower-class street workers engage principally in direct exchanges of physical sex acts for money, while higher-class sex workers provide their clients much more intimate experiences of what she terms “bounded authenticity.” Meanwhile in Haiti, Kolbe demonstrates how the urban/rural geographical divide operates in similar ways. In rural Haiti, for example, women say that their lives are governed by hunger and lack of access to basic needs, including “shelter, babycare items, medication and shoes” (Kolbe 2015, 11), and many explain that such desperation and distress motivates them to engage in sex work. Urban and suburban women report different motivations, including the need for money for housing, services, and consumer goods, such as mobile phones and clothing.

In research among sex workers in Vietnam, Kimberly Kay Hoang (2011) extends the work of Cabezas (2009) and Bernstein (2007), depicting three major types of exchange that occur there. These are (1) sexual exchanges (swift sex for money – low-end strata); (2) relational exchanges (complex intimate and economic short-term relations, which may develop into longer-term relations or remittance relationships – mid-tier strata); and (3) intimate exchanges (economic and intimate arrangements – short-term relations, rarely remittance-based, that last for the duration of the customer’s visit – high-end strata) (Hoang 2011, 372). The singular trope of “sexual abuse” deployed by the media, the government, and the NGO sector as the main descriptor of sex work in the Haiti scandal elides the actualities described in the research. The multiple factors that may motivate Haitian women to engage in sex work – including gaining access to money, services, and consumer items; avoiding heterosexual family obligations; and strategizing for future opportunities – were absent from the responses to the Haiti scandal.

The development sector’s occasional oblique references to women’s economic motivations for entering sex work were accompanied by statements that the sale of sex to “privileged men” is fundamentally unjust and a reflection of global inequity (see for example Oosterhoff and Sweetman 2018). Dallas Swendeman et al. (2015), however, explore in some depth why sex workers in Kolkata, India, not only enter but also stay in the industry. Research with a sex worker-led community development organization found that reasons for entry include relief from the social and economic marginalization that they experience based on intersections of class, caste, color, gender, and poverty; poor marital conditions that include violence, early marriage, and low status of widows; illness or death of relatives that leave them impoverished; and sometimes trafficking or coercion. The leading motivation for remaining in sex work is that it “afford[s] substantially more opportunities for financial independence and autonomy to make decisions” (Swendeman et al. 2015, 1015). The workers made calculated choices to remain in sex work, rather than change or return to jobs such as tailoring or aged-care nursing, because the flexible hours, in contrast to the regulated hours of other employment, enable them to better meet family needs.

Participants in Swendeman et al.'s (2015) research told of previous jobs where routine, uncompensated sex as part of workplace coercion was also accompanied by regular sexual harassment. By choosing sex work over these types of employment, they believed that they had more power over their sexual labor. Moreover, they expressed pride in their work and in their ability to support their families through sex work. According to one of them, “So I am a sex worker. If I do not respect my profession, then how will others respect my profession?” (Swendeman et al. 2015, 1018) Sex work is broadly reframed here as an empowering set of activities. This is not a romantic or triumphalist empowerment that glosses over the difficult and sometimes violent realities of sex work, but one that acknowledges the constrained agency of sex workers and the emancipatory feelings that they express when they speak of stigma and rejection alongside “personal autonomy and independence and the ability to support children and extended family” (Swendeman et al. 2015, 1011).

Lisa Caviglia’s (2017) ethnography with sex workers and entertainers in Nepal similarly reports on the inconsistencies in everyday lives that blur the limits of the bounded categories that development relies on when addressing sex work. For example, Lakshya, a sexual entertainer and dance performer in Nepal, impressed on Caviglia that she sought freedom not from sex work, but from the obligations that traditional married life would bring. She bargained her way out of local frames of ideal womanhood that entail sexual-economic exchange as part of kin obligations, to another kind of patriarchy in which she claims that she could have a more active part in the exchange (Kandiyoti 1988). “Her sexuality was still an object of trade, yet she felt more in control over the transaction,” Caviglia writes (2017, 205). She claims that having an awareness of and respect for women’s decision making does not mean that we have to ignore the structural inequalities of gender, poverty, and class that institute the contexts within which women choose to enter and/or remain in sex work.³

In other contexts, the negotiation of structural inequalities by sex workers takes different forms. Kathleen Jennings and Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović (2009) show how “peacekeeping economies” in Haiti, Liberia, and Kosovo create new service demands, where sex work flourishes with the influx of expatriate military and humanitarian populations. Post-conflict service economies intersect with tourism, and despite the zero-tolerance approaches adopted by the UN in response to peacekeeper transactions for sex, the consumption of sex by expatriate and local elites and the provision of sex by sex workers have not declined. Cabezas (2009) also highlights the links between sex work, state-sponsored tourism, and violence against sex workers. The extent of police violence against sex workers in the context of a tourist economy, she claims, “implicate[s] state national governments in gender-based violence” (Cabezas 2009, 164). As one sex worker, Miriam, explained:

Many forms of violence against sex workers are tolerated/normalized – state and police do not protect them when they are raped, beaten, robbed or killed by their clients, husbands or intermediaries … When a tourist gets killed, they round up all the sex workers. (Cabezas 2009, 154)

The studies discussed so far avoid capturing sex workers in the discursive binaries of perpetrator/victim deployed by Oxfam, or voluntary/forced, empowerment/exploitation, or choice/survival (O’Connell Davidson 2013, 176). Instead, they provide an insight into the multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradictory voices, experiences, and contexts in which sex work takes place. Rejecting the identification of sex with violence, Olivera Simic (2009) also argues that despite the ubiquitous representations of peacekeeper sexual encounters as inherently forced, violent, and abusive, such conflations reduce the actors to passive victims, effectively evicting them from the scene. For Simic, the evidence from those involved does not support these representations and occludes the consensual form that sexual relations often take. Luissa Vahedi, Susan Bartels, and Sabine Lee (2019, 4), in their study with women in Haiti who have birthed “peace babies” fathered by UN peacekeepers, found that both pleasure and danger are inherent in these encounters. The babies were the result of sexual encounters that were variously abusive, violent, exploitative, non-exploitative, consensual, long term, caring, and intimate.

In the face of this knowledge, the representations of sex workers in Haiti by Oxfam and the development sector become unreliable. The responses by the sector more closely approximate those representations of sex workers as “helpless victims in need of rescue” that postcolonial feminist scholars denounce as a platform that constructs “a damaged other as the main justification for its own interventionist impulses” (Doezema 2001, 17). The Haitian sex workers themselves, although occupying a central place in the responses, were spoken for and spoken about, and thus rendered marginal and incidental to the scandal. It is difficult not to see this effacement of the women as exactly the kind of “discursive colonialism” that Chandra Mohanty (1988) criticized long ago as justification for Western development interventions in general. While these representations may have enabled the development and humanitarian sectors to salvage their reputations through expressions of remorse and declarations of zero-tolerance polices, the lives, experiences, desires, and needs of the Haitian sex workers were effectively erased.

Conclusion

The Haiti scandal is remarkable in development circles for the way in which its negative effects were felt immediately and forcefully, thanks in large part to the global speed of electronic media platforms. Oxfam’s reputation was instantly tarnished, as evidenced by the rapid loss of support from high-profile donors and other supporters. Oxfam was denied funding from the UK government and the entire development and aid sector was subjected to the opprobrium of an increasingly wary public. While the mediatization of this event was extraordinary and damaging, the response by the sector was surprising, perhaps, but not arbitrary. The argument throughout this article has been that the response to the scandal was framed in terms of the prevailing racial and sexual hierarchies that constitute development. The sector, defined by its focus on poverty and inequality and a well-intentioned imperative to assist, even if this involves rescue and saving, has also relied heavily on racialized, gendered images and heteronormative imaginaries to generate support for its work. Victims of suffering, as the ideal subjects for reinforcing development’s legitimacy and claims for funding, and for whom it frames its policy and programs, are typically represented both visually and discursively through the bodies of non-white women (and children).

Moreover, by failing to seek out and enlist Haitian sex workers’ views and voices and by registering its own responses in moral and abolitionist terms, the sector adopted a stance at odds with most scholars, activists, and actors in the field of sex work. Actors in this field explicitly avoid questions of morality and the acceptability of sex work, attending instead to the context of the women’s lives and livelihoods. The sector’s representation of sex workers in Haiti only as victims of abuse, exploitation, and harassment materialized as attempts to bolster the legitimacy and survival of the development sector, rather than to attend to the aspirations of the sex workers involved.

By way of closing, we hope to open up avenues for further analysis and solidarity by taking this opportunity to bring ourselves into the critical frame through which we have analyzed Oxfam and the development sector. We acknowledge that as gender and development scholars, we too are situated within development discourse, even though we may seek to position ourselves against it through critique. In doing so, we write within (and against) the very terms of which we are critical and through which development is constituted: an “us/them dichotomy in which ‘we’ aid/develop/civilise/empower ‘them’” (Kapoor 2004, 629). Thus, we cannot erase the role of development when staging our own representations of sex workers, for we are also complicit in reinstating development’s discursive and political centrality to our work. Any claim to be “outside” this discourse while we “speak about” or “re-present” sex workers in Haiti, and indeed the Global South, is a disavowal of our own complicity and privilege (Kapoor 2004, 628). What, then, are the consequences for our own knowledge and what is the value of our critique after we acknowledge our complicity in the very object and processes that we critique? For Spivak and Kapoor, the task is not to assume that we might achieve a transcendent position of purity or transparency (Kapoor 2004, 640; Spivak 1988), but to retrieve through our work an ethicopolitical orientation toward the subaltern – that is, to consider the terms through which it might be possible to establish an ethical relationship with subaltern women, in which they are the subjects, rather than the objects, of development (Kapoor 2004, 633–634).

After analyzing the unproblematized representations of sex workers that populated the responses to the Haiti scandal, it seems imperative that we continue, and make more urgent, the work begun by others to deconstruct the racist history that has shaped and continues to regulate and discipline the development field. In particular, and as we have argued here, the propensity to racialize subjects and to sexualize race through the nexus of sex and humanitarian uplift is an ongoing legacy of development’s imperial past. As Gosine (2009) reminds us, just as sex has been at the heart of colonization (see also Stoler 1995), it has also been central to development. The “purposeful role” of sex in development, which always travels through tropes of race, gender, and class, is to authorize development’s “regulation of bodies and sexual practices” as it “harnesses anxieties about sex to advance and extend imperial ambitions” (Gosine 2009, 31, 26, 31). Academics and development practitioners alike remain equally complicit with this imperialism and its ongoing reliance on these relations to justify its work. After Haiti, an unreserved encounter with the racist and sexualized paradigms of our work (Kothari 2006; Wilson 2012, 2017) and serious efforts to “de-centre the ‘white gaze’” (Pailey 2020) of development and in gender-and-development scholarship seem like responsible and accountable starting points.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maree Pardy

Maree Pardy is an anthropologist in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia, specializing in the areas of gender, culture, sexuality, development, and global change.

Kalissa Alexeyeff

Kalissa Alexeyeff is in Gender Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and works in the areas of gender and sexuality, globalization, and development. She conducts research in the Pacific and the Pacific diaspora on contemporary gender identities, migration, tourism, art, and affect.

Notes

1 Widow burning was practiced in India and outlawed in the nineteenth century. The British colonizers argued that this prohibition was an emancipating event for Indian women. Many contest this interpretation, arguing instead that the women themselves were marginal to this debate (Mani 1998; Spivak 1988). We argue similarly here that the sex workers in Haiti were marginal to the responses by Oxfam and the development sector.

2 From the Charity Commission’s final report, we also know that sex workers attended gatherings and parties at the Oxfam residential premises in Haiti and that they likely stayed overnight. In relation to the serious allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Oxfam staff, there is no confirmation that the sex workers were underage. We know from Oxfam’s admission that it did not sufficiently or exhaustively pursue allegations that some sex workers were underage (Oxfam GB 2019).

3 For similar arguments in different contexts, see Bradley and Sahariah (2018) and Sandy (2014).