The Conundrum of Making Your Nonprofit Look Bad While Trying to Be Better

As NPQ has covered the humanitarian aid sector’s longstanding problem of sexual harassment and abuse, we’ve observed a recurring problem: When an organization starts to take the issue seriously enough to encourage people to come forward, in the short term, it can end up looking worse to outsiders and external stakeholders than organizations that suppress reporting. This isn’t any kind of surprise; the difficulty in measuring the abuse of women after improving the responsiveness of helping systems arises because if you are more responsive, you get more reports. The very agencies that look best on paper and show the fewest incidents of sexual assault may actually pose much higher risk to the women who work for them. As a result, it’s hard for aid agencies that depend upon public support to move forward with full transparency, but they must and quickly. Understanding this, some in the UK are calling for a sector-wide review of sexual assault and harassment, with an eye toward implementing reforms that will help, not harm, individual organizations.