The original person making the posts is no sock puppet, he was actually driving a load of aid out that he'd picked up from us from our Leeds Fest collections when he made the original post, and he's been involved for a fair amount of time.
The main organisations working on the ground all have codes of conduct on this, and have been making efforts to ensure all volunteers who register with them undergo training about it.
The site is a vaguely tolerated site, nobody is in charge, and nobody can ban someone from simply rocking up to the site and helping out how they choose to, and following whatever rules they feel like following, or none.
There are many pretty young, pretty naive volunteers who end up on the site in one way or another who firstly have probably not considered the potential consequences of their actions, and secondly don't necessarily have the same levels of power imbalance involved as would be the case with official NGO run refugee camps where those running the camps control all aspects of camp life. In some cases we're talking about 18-19 year old girls on summer holiday volunteering missions, sometimes music or arts related, or litter picking etc finding themselves in a very strange situation in a camp surrounded by thousands of mostly 18-30 year old single men from many different parts of the world who're mostly bored out of their minds most days. And many have little control over anything going on in the camp.
So in the majority of cases, while it's probably inadvisable, it's a lot more questionable about whether their actions are particularly abusive in the same way that would usually be the case with big NGO run refugee camps. Some are living and volunteering side by side with the refugees in the camp for weeks or months on end, and combined with stressful situations like this I'd be more surprised if there wasn't some level of sex going on than finding out that there is.
I suspect in some cases it would be the volunteer involved who ends up feeling the worst about what happened on camp rather than the male refugees involved. In at least one case a volunteer who met someone on the camp is now living with them in the UK - was this abuse?
Basically IMO there's a lot more grey areas involved than the black and white tone of the OP / article.
Not to condone underage sex or exploitative sexual relationships if they've happened.
I fully support the position of the main organisations working on the site in promoting codes of conduct to ask volunteers to maintain professional boundaries and not get involved in this way, for the good of the volunteers involved as much as the refugees. But ultimately if you're going to have thousands of single young men mixing day in day out with dozens / hundreds of young volunteers for months on end in this sort of environment then I doubt it's ever going to be possible to stop it happening entirely.
It's also a little too easy to criticise from the safety of an armchair (or a plush NGO office, while ignoring the fact that the NGO's being questioned in the article have done fuck all to help in Calais to my knowledge).
