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.