Accountability and Exploitation in Aid

I'm Katie Meyler's friend on Facebook, although I don't think we've met. I'm pretty sure she came to my bar in Monrovia, in the early days of her organization for girls education in Liberia, visited the community non-profit in Robertsport that I co-founded, or heard about the UNICEF-led tech project we were doing with the Ministry of Education at the time. 

If you're just catching up on the story and/or TL;DR, Katie's co-founder at the non-profit she started (More than Me) was found guilty of serial child rape before he died, in jail, of complications related to AIDS. Scottish journalist Finlay Young broke the story after years of investigative work and the BBC have released a documentary.

I want so badly to tell you that I'm not anything like Katie Meyler. And I’m not. But the truth is, I'm also more like her than I want to admit. And if you're an aid worker, you might know what I mean. 

Those of you new to my writing probably don’t know that I started my leadership work while living and working in Liberia, after the civil war. West Point was my neighborhood and this is my community of aid workers, reeling from the shock and trying to figure out how to deal with the aftermath.

Responsibility is different than accountability.

I am not responsible, and neither are you, for what happened. But as leaders and changemakers, I'd like to explore the idea of community accountability when exploitation like this happens.

I'm speaking specifically here to people who do service work in challenging places, because the power dynamic that I’m exploring is the same in the aid industry as elsewhere.

I would like to suggest that as aid workers, we are all – in some way – accountable.

Navigating Triggering Terrain

First, I want to create a safe space for what is an intense and triggering conversation, especially for survivors of child abuse or sexual assault. This story involves sexual violence against children, so please consider this a trigger alert. It's good self-care to read this in a place where you are feeling resourced.

I am also going to say things that will likely challenge you, so if that's something you're not happy with, go ahead and click away.

This Happened to Girls in My Neighborhood

Back to Monrovia. Here is the view of West Point from the rooftop of Tides (courtesy of the bar’s current Facebook page).

Outside my apartment window, I could see fishermen coming back to the long beach, boys playing football beside the water. The disparity between my air-conditioned bedroom, complete with mosquito net and wall safe, and the makeshift slums of West Point outside, could not have been more severe. 

I'm accountable for contributing to the narrative that a young white American woman could arrive in post-conflict Liberia and make good things happen with a sparkle. Check my confidence in this video (14:00). What you can't see is that I've spent the last 10 years working in community development, communications and public health, most recently at UNICEF, and had spent most of my life at that point in Africa.

But telling the story of my expertise and community-driven development work next to stories about missionaries, amputee footballers and orphanages creates a different narrative, no matter what message of community empowerment I was trying to get across.

As my friend said, Katie "is a symptom of a system, not an outlier. There's a bigger picture about why people fall for narratives like this – because we want to feel good."

There are several points in this story I feel are opportunities for us to look at ways we are bystanders in these patterns of exploitation in our work, even though it’s going to be a little uncomfortable.

The outcome is well worth it. After all, it's up to us to shift how we do aid, and we owe it to the work to get this right.

Vulnerability, Safe Spaces and Healthy Shame

After Brené Brown's groundbreaking work on shame and vulnerability, shame has become almost a dirty word, something to excise and expose.

But looking at what’s happened, I think our shame can be healthy.

We should be ashamed, all of us, that our industry tolerates anything like this happening on our watch. We are here, doing the work, to protect, to "do no harm." Yet when the moment comes to say something, too often we hide.

I know that when people at those Monrovia pool parties confronted Katie about bringing children, not enough people took their side. Not enough people took a stand, said no and supported each other to establish a safe space and healthy boundaries, both for the adults who wanted to let of steam and for the children who shouldn't be there.

"Something is Wrong Here"

After sitting with the ProPublica story for a few days now, what's most clear is how, in my own work, I can easily participate in these same power imbalances that so often lead to exploitation.

 I've also been a bystander and not spoken out when I see something that is not right. Not every time, not as often as I would've liked. I have not always been an ally and I have retreated far too often into the comfort and safety of my own privilege.

The brilliant author/activist Sonya Renee Taylor perfectly captures the othering that white privilege creates in her spoken word performance "Poem fo the Girl." Like Sonya told me, the invitation is not to think how the girl in the poem isn't you, but how she is.

We hear statements like, "There was an issue. We confronted him. I don't know how much more I could have done," (from the org's filmmaker) or "Something about the way she said it made me uncomfortable, but it was never explicit," (from the co-founder). 

Each of us have stories like this, on the spectrum. Each of us have moments where we could've said something and intervened, but we didn't. In our silence, we are complicit.

Complicity can often feel like shame or guilt, but recognizing it offers us a way out.

Once we acknowledge complicity, we can see our accountability, and if we see ourselves as accountable, we are no longer bystanders. We are actors, empowered, with a system that is in a dynamic state of change.

The question is, what are we going to do with this new awareness? Where are we going go from here?

Good Intentions are Not Enough

Other titles for this section were, "Trying Hard Does Not Make You Right" and "So What Warren Buffet Proposed To Her, Katie Meyler Is Not A Role Model." 

I've written before about the archetypes of martyrdom, mothering and madness in the aid world, and their missionary and colonial roots. Implicit in aid is the west's "civilizing mission,” the idea that we know better than you, and inherent “power over” rather than “power with.” And when things go bad,  the uglier parts of this Messianic narrative emerge, particularly the idea that the perpetrator is the persecuted – something seen often in the backlash to the #MeToo movement.  

The response from Katie's social media community to the story breaking has been to treat the reporting on sexual violence against children as a persecution against Katie, a little move I like to call the Martyrdom Complex. 

To paraphrase an example, "Katie has sacrificed everything for those girls over so many years. I've seen how hard she's worked and how much she's suffered. She fights for good, but darkness is everywhere." The hashtags #Proud and #Brave are regularly used, polarizing the conversation into the "us/them" split that brings up elements of victim-blaming and minimize the co-founder’s responsibility to the children in her care.

More examples of this paraphrased character defense include, "No one (except survivors and families) took this harder or more transparently than Katie,” "I have lived a few years abroad a few in Liberia, and Katie is one of the best souls I have met. She tries her best," and finally, "Katie has devoted her life to Liberia and knows its heart, and respects the people, culture and children."

Responsibility needs to be placed firmly where it belongs.

Where is the outrage and support for the girls and their families? For the community of West Point, for the women and girls of Liberia?

This conversation needs to be had on different terms. For those of us who show up and do the work, in the most challenges places in the world, we owe it to ourselves to face this head on, so that no one else has to.

This conversation also needs to happen in safety, in our communities, calmly, slowly, without getting distracted by social media grandstanding and all the noise. How we create those safe spaces, I look forward to exploring.

The aid industry, by its very nature, creates a power imbalance that perpetuates racism. I would like us to model what it looks like for us to be accountable and transparent in addressing this in our work.  

I would like to explore what it looks like to accept not just responsibility for the explicit effects of our actions, but the implicit effects as well.

What if we all started to dismantle our own participation in patterns of exploitation? And what if, somehow, we made this something that was not just safe, but welcome?

The reflections this story offers are valuable to those of us willing to ask hard questions of ourselves, our work and our communities.

For the sake of the people we serve, particularly the most vulnerable, this conversation needs to happen.

The reckoning begun by #MeToo has just begun to scratch the surface of the aid world. And change must come. It's up to us to decide what that looks like. 

Thank you for being a part of the change and for joining this conversation. 

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