Gina
Rinehart
Hancock
Prospecting Group
HPPL
House
28-42
Ventnor Avenue
West
Perth 6005
Dear Ms Rinehart
re your rumoured
new partnership with Scott Neeson and the Cambodian Children’s Fund
As a matter of principle Scott Neeson
does not answer questions from journalists. He will neither confirm nor deny
anything – including the rumour from within CCF that you will be investing
heavily in the Cambodian Children’s Fund. If the rumour is untrue you need read
no further.
If you are still reading, you should
take all I write here with a grain of salt. Indeed, it would probably help if
you started from the presumption that I am a nutter with a grudge against Scott
Neeson. This is the kindest of the epithets that Scott’s supporters refer to me
as in their public comments! I have no problem with being described as a nutter
but please consider the possibility that there are some questions you need to
ask Scott in you intend to donate to the Cambodian Children’s Fund.
I write here in my capacity as a
documentary filmmaker, a journalist and a blogger. (And certified ‘nutter’ of
course!)
You have had some experience with
Cambodia and so know that nothing here is ever quite as it seems to be; that
the epithet ‘Scambodia’ is an apt one for a country that attracts scammers of
all kinds here to make a quick buck exploiting materially poor Cambodians.
Opening an ‘orphanage’ in Cambodia,
for instance, is a license to print money. All those poor terminally cute
children, with their wide innocent doe-like eyes, smiling from Facebook pages
and NGO websites! What donor, what sponsor can resist the urge to reach for
their wallets!
The fact that 75% of the children in
so called ‘orphanages’ have at least one parent is no impediment to NGOs labeling
them ‘orphans’. Kept in the dark about this detail, sponsors can obtain a warm
inner glow that comes with giving an NGO $150 a month to ‘save’ the cute
smiling ‘orphan’. That this child shares a bed with three others or sleeps on
the floor is a detail sponsors and donors are kept in the dark about. The rest
of the rescued ‘orphan’ child’s family lives on considerably less than $150 a
month but this detail also is kept from sponsors and donors.
The fact that many of the parents have
been tricked into giving up their children to institutional living (thumb
prints on ‘contracts’ they cannot read) is no impediment either. Who is going
to stop such NGOs filling their ‘orphanage’ beds with kids whose mums and dads then
lose meaningful access to their children? The Cambodian Ministry of Social
Affairs? No.
And if, as is all too often the case,
these children are indoctrinated into the Christian faith, alienated from their
own culture, to whom can these materially poor parents turn to get their kids
returned to their care when they realize that their children have, in effect,
been stolen from them? Human rights organizations? No. These have developed
close (and symbiotic) relationships with the very NGOs that are filling their
‘orphanages’ (or other such ‘rescue NGOs) with children taken from functioning
(but very poor) families.
In addition to the crooks, the
scammers, (in the ‘orphanage business’ for the money), there are NGOs that are
sincere in their desire to help Cambodia’s poor. They believe that the best way
to do so is to remove children from their families, bring them up in institutions
and provide them with regular meals, schooling and an education, whilst leaving
the rest of the family in abject poverty.
In the case of the evangelical
Christian NGOs there is another advantage that accrues to this removal of
children – the opportunity to win souls for Jesus Christ. In this enforced
indoctrination these well-meaning Christians alienate the children they
‘rescue’ from their Buddhist religion, their culture and its traditions, their
communities and their families. That most of these NGOs mean well I have no
doubt, but their Christian benevolence has firm foundations in a sense of
cultural and religious superiority. The children in their care, they believe,
are much better off being brought up as Christians in an institution, cut off
from the wider Cambodian community, than in the heathen faith to which their Buddhist
parents adhere! One only has to visit
the websites of these NGOs to discover that close to the top of their agendas
is the saving of souls.
That the creation of this ‘stolen
generation’ of children is tacitly endorsed by human rights organizations such
as LICADHO and ADHOC reflects just whose human rights they believe to be worth
fighting for. Cambodian children stolen by NGOs to fill ‘orphanages’ do not
make it onto the list.
The easy path for any NGO wishing to
help poor Cambodian children (whether their motives be pure or less than pure)
is to remove them from their families
and house them in an institution. This allows the NGO to create its own
large extended family; to engage in its own social engineering experiment and
get sponsors and donors to pay for the privilege. It also provides for great
photo opportunities, which in turn generate donor and sponsor dollars.
The psychological and emotional damage
done to children removed from their families and placed in institutional care
is well known. That such removal is not cost effective is also well known. It costs
between 5 and 9 times as much to raise a child in an institutional setting as
it does to raise the child within his or her own family; within the community
that is the repository of the child’s familial ties, culture,
traditions, Buddhist religion and
his or her sense of personal identity.
The more difficult path for an NGO is
to help children in need (of food, education, medical care etc) within their own
families and communities. This is logistically much more complicated than going
down the institutional path. Those being helped are scattered and their
individual needs are different and require individualized attention. And great
photo opportunities of the kind that institutional living provides are not
available. A classroom filled with smiling NGO kids in residential care,
wearing neat school uniforms, tells a story that is clear and seemingly
unambiguous. Any potential sponsor or do not can look at the photo and say to
themselves, “Yes, this is a successful NGO.” A photograph of a smiling ‘barang’
with a young smiling girl in his arms in an institutional setting conveys a
clear message. This man cares for children. He loves them. He saves them. And
they love him. How heartwarming!
And buried deep within the hearts of
minds of donors and sponsors to institutional care provides by ‘barang’ is the
belief that ‘good white people’ know what is best for ‘poor brown people’ and
that the children are, when all is said and done, better off being removed from
their families.
What image for donor and sponsor
consumption can clearly convey the good work done by an NGO that is, say,
seeing to it that one girl from a severely disadvantaged family now has an
opportunity to get an education? Her labour is no longer required to fetch
water, cook food and take care of her siblings because these tasks have been
taken up by others in the community as a result of an income generation scheme
implemented by the NGO. Where is the photo opportunity? Certainly a photo of a
smiling ’barang’ holding this smiling girl in his arms in a village setting
would be…weird! Unsettling! Not likely to generate sponsor and donor dollars.
More likely to attract the attention of an NGO on the lookout for pedophiles!
Of course there are NGOs that do just
this – help disadvantaged children within their families and communities. And
they are to be applauded for their good work – much harder but potentially much
more beneficial than the herding of kids into institutional care. These NGOs are not a personality cult based – as was the Somaly Mam Foundation and as
is Scott Neeson’s Cambodian Children’s Fund. Their value lies in the results they achieve
within families and communities; results that are long-lasting and aimed at
making families and communities self-sufficient.
Such NGOs have a more difficult path
to travel in terms of raising money from sponsors and donors needing and
wanting a quick ‘feel-good’ fix; the warm inner glow that comes from seeing a
smiling child. Such photo opportunities
are not there for family and community-based NGOs. There can be no photos of
the celebrity NGO (Neeson, Somaly Mam) hanging out with Susan Sarandon, Heather
Graham or other celebrities as they watch Cambodian dancers perform for the Hollywood
glitterati. The work of NGO initiatives that are family and community focused is
boring from a photo opportunity point of view. The temptation to go down the
‘celebrity path’ is great.
So where does Scott Neeson’s
Cambodian Children’s Fund fit into the spectrum of NGOs in the ‘rescue
business’. It’s hard to know because (a) We only have Scott’s finely tuned and
very clever public relations to instruct us what goes on behind CCF walls and
(b) CCF staff, the families of children in CCF residential care, and young
adults still within the CCF educational fold, are forbidden to talk with the
media. It is a closed shop and anyone who speaks out is immediately banished.
I have never met Scott, despite many
invitations from myself to do so. My impression of him must, of necessity, be
based on those of his actions that are available to public view and on the
reports of those who have either been resident in one of his facilities or who
have worked for him.
It seems to me that Scott is not in
the business of rescuing kids for the money. And nor does he have a religious agenda. Without
children of his own, it seems to me, and with a clear desire for adulation (especially
within the world of Hollywood celebrity) Scott has set up his own huge family
with himself as the old style patriarch whose every wish, whose every whim,
must be obeyed by staff and residents alike. CCF is Scott’s own experiment in
social engineering and all runs smoothly as long as no-one acts in a way that
is contrary to Scott’s wishes; as long as nothing emerges into the public
domain that threatens to burst the bubble of the self-image Scott wishes to
project: Scott Neeson as Saviour! The 21st century’s answer to Mother Theresa.
The nagging question persists,
however:
“Why are there
700 kids living in institutional care when most of them have parents?”
Despite Scott’s grandiose and
endlessly repeated statements about his giving up his $1 million career to help
poor families living and working in the Phnom Penh dump, he was, when all is
said and done, just a very successful marketing person working in the film
business. And his success was deserved. Scott is very good at marketing.
However, marketing a product is not the same as having a good product to
market.
(It is worth adding here that most
NGOs have, in one sense or another, ‘given up’ an alternative career in order
to help materially poor Cambodians. You do not hear them saying “I gave up
being a banker/architect/engineer etc.
in order to help poor people.” This is a choice made by individual NGOs
and not to be endlessly bragged about.)
So, what is Scott’s ‘product’ – apart
from projecting a public image of himself as the savior of the 700+ kids he has
rescued from their impoverished families? Yes, pretty well all of the 700+ kids
Neeson has in residential care (the exact number is a secret) have mums and
dads; they have siblings; they are members of families and communities. Many of
these families are still working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump for annual accumulated
wages that are the equivalent of a couple of months of sponsorship donations to
CCF. How much of this sponsorship income finds its way into the pockets of the
families whose kids are in residential care? An interesting question, Ms Rinehart, and one
you might like to ask – not just of Scott but of the families themselves.
Without Scott or members of staff present.
Relative to the sheer number of
families whose children are in CCF residential care my sample (the families I
have spoken with) is a small one. Nonetheless, I have yet to find any one family that has
received more than a few kilos of rice in any one year from CCF. One family I
know well (and have filmed with) has three kids resident with CCF generating
sponsor income for CCF to the tune of $450 a month. In a two and a half month
period CCF generates more income caring for this single mother’s three children
than she and her other children earn in a year working in the dump. How much of
this money goes to the family working in the dump. None! Is this appropriate?
An example of how the CCF patronage
system works is to be found in the case of one family renting a small ramshackle
shack from CCF for $12.50 a month. The father became ill and could not work so
the family fell one month behind in their rent. And what was CCF’s response? To
lock the family out of its own home. See:
And read:
I have spoken with lots of people who
have worked for CCF, who are working for CCF, whose children are resident at
CCF but not with any children currently resident with CCF. This is impossible –
not just for me but for any journalist. For some sponsors and donors, yes, but
in such cases CCF staff are present to see to it that no child veers away from
the company line. Perhaps you and the CCF board might consider arranging to
talk with the children without any members of staff present. And perhaps talk
to members of staff without Scott or other senior CCF manager present.
Scott’s response to a suggestion such
as this will be to say all he can to discredit me. That’s fine by me, but
please ask a few questions and do not presume that the answers you get (from a skilled
marketing person!) are necessarily a true and accurate reflection of what takes
place behind closed doors. (I should add here that CCF is not alone in its lack
of interest in the precepts of transparency and accountability. This is true
for many NGOs in Cambodia. They do not want anyone to know what goes on behind
closed doors. And, alas, there is no-one, no organization, that will hold them
accountable.)
It may well be that some children can
and do benefit from being brought up in a residential setting – enabling them
to get the kind of education they could not get if they stayed with their
families. Helping the entire families of these children may not be a solution
to a particular child’s need for a decent education. Cambodia needs as many
well educated children as it can get. Indeed for Cambodia to eventually rid
itself of dependency on NGOs, on foreign aid, requires a whole new generation
of well-educated young men and women who can become tomorrow’s leaders in both
the worlds of business and politics.
The more educational opportunities
there are the better - especially for young women who, all too often, have to
give up their education in order to perform domestic duties. And a decent
education is not always available to them living in a remote village and in an
environment in which there is the expectation that they will perform domestic
duties of the kind allocated to women. A solid argument can be made for kids
such as this to be housed in what amounts to a ‘boarding school’, but questions
arise:
- How many of
the 700+ kids in institutional care at CCF are from remote communities?
- How many of
the CCF kids in residential care are going to local schools that are just a few
kilometers from where their families live?
- Why are the
CCF kids in residential care going to schools close to where their families
live not being supported within their families.
- What is the
quality of the education these kids are receiving?
- How many CCF
kids finish school?
- How many go on
to higher education?
- How many
‘graduates’ of CCF’s educational programs are gainfully employed two years
after they leave CCF?
A program is only as good as its
results. All too often NGOs are not results-oriented but wish to be judged by
sponsors and donors for their intentions. Good intentions are not enough. The
pathway to hell etc. It is results that count and without any independent
assessment of results sponsors and donors have only the word of those that run
the NGO to go by. This is unsatisfactory since all NGOs are on the lookout for
funding all the time and are in competition with other NGOs looking to secure
funding from the same sources. They need to make themselves look as good as
they can on their websites, on Facebook, etc. The better an NGO is at marketing
its product the more chance it has of securing funding; attracting sponsors and
donors. There is little funding to be found by by an NGO saying, truthfully:
“We have
discovered after two years, as a result of independent assessments that such
and such a program is not working. We have consequently abandoned it and will
no longer embark on any new programs until they have been rigorously tested and
proven to be effective.”
Bill Gates did just this after
spending $1 billion on an education program that looked great on paper but the
results of which did not bear out the preconceptions and predictions of those
involved in formulating it.
“Did Bill Gates
waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the
standard deviation of the mean? The Gates Foundation certainly spent a
lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of
the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they
discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best
performing schools.”
It is worth having a look at the
following:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html
My point is that with the Cambodian
Children’s Fund education initiatives (and this applies to all NGOs) it is not
enough to look at what is intended (no matter how noble the intentions) but at
the results. And the results are certainly not going to be made apparent with
photos published on Facebook or by picking out one or two feel-good success
stories as evidence of the program’s efficacy
More questions of a more general nature:
- When CCF
takes 2 or 3 children from the one
family into care, does it split these children up – sending them to different
CCF institutions? If so, why?
- Is it true
that teenage boys and girls in CCF residential care are not allowed to form
relationships of the boyfriend/girlfriend kind?
- To what extent
does CCF direct the young people in its care into the career CCF feels is best
suited to them? As opposed to the career that the young people themselves wish
to pursue?
- Is CCF‘s
approach to the children in residential care, when they grow up, one of wishing
to control the direction in which they live their lives? Are they free to study
whatever subjects they like? To pursue careers of their own choosing?
Broadly speaking, to what extent it
CCF seeking to control all aspects of the lives of both the children it is
educating and of the families of these children? Whose needs are being met
here? Those of the Cambodian children and their families (and hence of the
future of Cambodia itself) or of Scott Neeson?
Whilst these questions are being
directed here at CCF, they are questions that need to be asked of all NGOs
working with children who have been removed from their families? As far as I
can tell, such questions are rarely asked or debated in a public context in
Cambodia.
In the absence of transparency and
accountability NGOs can make up their own rules. Their fellow NGOs, operating
in accordance with their own rules, turn a blind eye to the human and legal
rights abuses perpetrated by unscrupulous NGOs – the end result being that all
NGOs are tainted by the misbehavior of a few. A sad state of affairs.
best wishes
James (Nutter) Ricketson
