HE: I think it was about a year into the role. We were putting in place new reporting procedures [and] training, and the allegations started to come in. And at that point we realised there’ had been quite systemic under-reporting and I became concerned about whether we had resources in place to tackle the number of allegations we were getting in. By 2013/14 it was 39, and it increased significantly after that.
CN: You went off for maternity leave, and when you came back in 2014 the number of allegations concerning Oxfam staff overseas really escalated didn’t they. So tell us about the sense of scale.
HE: So when I came back from maternity leave, my maternity cover had been out to a number of countries, including South Sudan, and we’d been doing confidential surveys of about 120 staff. And the results were very very concerning. We were getting people reporting that they’d either witnessed or experienced rape, or attempted rape, by Oxfam representatives and in one country [South Sudan] that was 7% of staff saying that.
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