

I arrived in Port-au-Prince a few days after the earthquake in 2010. I was a spokesperson for Save the Children and my job was to help set up an emergency communications team.

It was my first experience of a humanitarian catastrophe and I was overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. I’d never seen anything like it. Neither had many of the aid veterans. The scale of the devastation and death – and need – was staggering. But what surprised me most was the huge appetite for debauchery among the foreigners who had flown in to help. I’d been expecting death. Perhaps I was naive, but I hadn’t been expecting sex.

The capital was devastated and millions of people had lost their homes. The aftershocks meant it wasn’t safe to sleep in the buildings that were still standing, most of which had been flimsy structures in the first place. The streets and parks were packed with families who had nothing and nowhere to go. We couldn’t even reach the areas that were worst hit.

Quick guide How dependent are UK NGOs on the government? Show Hide How dependent are UK NGOs on the government? Last year the UK government dedicated £13.3bn to international aid, with a significant chunk spent through UK charities. But these millions of pounds of aid money are now at stake, following reports of sexual exploitation by Oxfam staff in Haiti. The government has threatened to cut funding to Oxfam unless the charity shows “moral leadership”. In 2016-17, Oxfam’s total income was £408.6m, according to its annual report, which includes £31.7m from the UK Department for International Development (DfID). In addition to money from governments, international organisations and foundations, Oxfam generated £90m last year through its shop and trading network. Around £1.2bn of UK aid is spent annually through NGOs. In 2016, Save the Children secured multi-year contracts worth £91m with the UK government. It describes itself as one of DfID’s “key civil society partners”, which implements around 60 UK government-funded projects in countries such as South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. In the same year, the British Red Cross received £16.3m in DfID funding. Around one fifth of Christian Aid’s income came from the department, which provided £20.1m in the year 2016-17. Christian Aid reported in its 2016-17 annual report that donations had dropped 13%, which it said was due to “fewer high-profile humanitarian crises”. Some have voiced concerns that as NGOs have become more reliant on government funding, they have also become less willing to criticise its policies. Charities are also nervous that the UK’s aid budget, even before the Haiti sexual misconduct scandal, has been under increasing scrutiny. Last year, the UK was one of only six countries to spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid, a target set by the UN decades ago. Penny Mordaunt, secretary of state for international development, has said the UK remains committed to this target, despite some conservative MPs calling for it to be dropped. In a recent interview with the Telegraph, she said Britain will cut foreign aid spending to wealthier developing countries if they fail to “take responsibility”.

The disaster killed more than 220,000 people and injured more than 300,000. Many people were still trapped under rubble and the city stank of rotting bodies.

By some miracle, the Save the Children compound in Pétion-Ville had been untouched by the disaster. There weren’t enough secure buildings for us to stay in, but most of the charity’s staff slept in tents in the grounds. In the first week after the quake, I was awoken at night by the ground rippling with aftershocks and by street dogs, which had been feeding on human remains in the rubble, and were scratching to get inside my tent.

But many of the thousands of humanitarians and journalists flown to Haiti to cover the disaster were staying at the UN compound, including the photographer I was working with. Through him, I got a detailed insight into the parallel life of the humanitarian community in Haiti in the weeks after the disaster.

We were there for almost a month. Most days, we would drive out of our respective compounds into unbelievable horror. We saw children having legs amputated by surgeons beneath a tree in a park because the hospitals were in ruins. We met mothers who had been separated from their children and were desperately trying to find them, fearing that American evangelists might “adopt” them and that they would be lost forever. We saw people who were so hungry they looked ready to kill over sacks of rice.

Against the backdrop of this horror, the photographer would tell me stories from inside the UN compound. There was a huge bowl of condoms next to the till in the UN canteen, he said. By the end of dinner every evening, this bowl would be empty. The aid workers and journalists packed into the compound were sleeping on floors, in courtyards, hallways, wherever there was space, so there wasn’t much privacy. But a rota had been drawn up, he said, and at night the meeting rooms were booked up in hour-long slots for people to have sex.

I should be clear, I didn’t see – or experience – any of this myself. This is hearsay. Nor did I see or hear about any aid workers or journalists paying for sex. There didn’t seem to be the need.

And of course, sex in war and disaster zones isn’t surprising. I’ve seen a lot of it in other disasters since; there have been books written about it. There’s a basic psychology to it, something about a primal need for comfort and trauma bonding. But what I found disturbing in Haiti was the profound disconnect between the overtly sexualised atmosphere in the aid and journalistic community and the visceral horror of the catastrophe surrounding us.

I saw the international aid community do a lot of good in Haiti. It also brought cholera to an already devastated country. Now it appears that aid workers also took the opportunity to buy underage sex cheaply. Trauma bonding I can understand – callous exploitation I cannot.