IT’S never comfortable when a person or a cause you believe in is found wanting. Like many I watched with a mixture of horror and grief as the scandal around Oxfam unfolded last week. The charity’s vision statement says it wants a “just world without poverty” where people are “valued and treated equally”. It is a radical charity that sets itself against global power and disputes right-wing orthodoxy. It has played an immense role, as a non-party-political organisation, in showing that poverty is man-made and can be unmade.

So it was gut-wrenching to discover that senior employees in charge of organising humanitarian aid in the aftermath of an earthquake were involved in abusing and exploiting the very poor and powerless that the organisation is funded to serve and protect. And worse, that the senior management of Oxfam had mounted a grubby cover-up, multiplying the reputational damage to the organisation umpteen times over.

The gloating of the right-wing media was also hard to stomach, as was the bare-faced hypocrisy of a Tory government that has a ghost train load of skeletons locked up in its cupboard. But just because the right-wing are opportunistically exploiting Oxfam’s woes doesn’t mean we should easily forgive the systemic failure of the Oxfam leadership in allowing abusers to gain positions of power, and in failing to hold them to account.

I’ve felt sorry for the people I know who’ve worked tirelessly for Oxfam, in some cases without pay, as the stories of abuse of women, and perhaps children, by men in Chad, Haiti and who knows where else emerged. They were as shocked as anyone else and in no way part of the cover-up. They could only gape in horror as the stories emerged of lurid “sex parties” with women involved in prostitution being ferried back and forth in Oxfam-funded cars to Oxfam-funded villas.

People who are admirably loyal to their organisation have had to defend the £130,000 pay of the chief executive, Mark Goldring – one of the lowest earners of the big charity bosses, it has to be said. But as they watched his rabbit-in-the-headlights media performance this week, they must be wondering if he’s worth it. In one interview I heard, he appeared to be justifying the cover-up by his predecessors on the grounds that any revelations could have damaged the vital work being done by the charity. The thousands of principled, committed and hard-working employees and volunteers of Oxfam, who actually practise what they preach, deserve better leadership than this.

Oxfam’s former head of safeguarding, Helen Evans, finally blew the whistle on Oxfam, in despair and disenchantment, after years of trying to get Oxfam to take abuse more seriously and allocate the requisite resources to ensure the protection of women and children. I applaud her. Much of the analysis and discussion of the Oxfam crisis has centred on governance. But this seems to me to go even deeper than a matter of procedures and vetting. To get effective governance right, you need first to get right the underpinning ethics and attitudes.

The reaction of the world to the Oxfam revelations was one of universal revulsion. Without necessarily thinking through all the issues, just about everybody who had anything to say just knew it was wrong. But I think it’s crucial to examine what exactly was so wrong, and why we are so repulsed.

Ronald Van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam’s head of operations in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, has admitted having sex with a woman whose family he assisted with “diapers and powdered milk” in the chaotic aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. And although he denies participating in the sex parties or paying for sex himself, he has confessed to being aware that his staff were using prostituted women.

I found it surprising that very few people attempted to defend his behaviour. Why? Because recently the general left, and the progressive charity sector, has been consumed by debates about prostitution. Amnesty International has adopted the position that prostitution should be legalised. The organisation advocates not just decriminalising prostituted women and men, which I would support, but also legalising brothel-keeping and living off the proceeds of prostitution – which I most definitely do not support. Amnesty now campaigns, ostensibly under a human rights banner, to make the purchase of mainly women’s bodies by men akin to buying a pint of beer or a cinema ticket. Their stated policy position says it does not take a position on whether “consensual sex work” needs different regulations from any other businesses or employment practices. In general, their analysis of prostitution is that it is a “free choice”. I wondered what their reaction would be to the Oxfam crisis. After all, Amnesty is a huge, international human rights charity with a lot to say about human rights issues across the world. And it has had an awful lot to say about prostitution. Surely it would have something to say about arguably the biggest crisis the progressive charity sector has ever faced? Yet while a scroll through its press releases reveals coverage of human rights issues from Sudan, to China, from the Philippines to Turkey, there is nothing about Haiti, Oxfam or prostitution. Surely, if what happened in Haiti was “consensual sex work”, Amnesty would be rushing to defend the ex- Oxfam employees and uphold the human rights of the women involved to exercise free choice and earn money, or nappies and baby milk, as they see fit?

Oxfam itself has been swept along by the theoretical mudslide that is a section of the left’s analysis of prostitution. In its own training manual, it does not ban aid workers from buying sex as this would “infringe their civil liberties”.

Well, the scandal of Haiti, Chad – and who knows where else – is a case of abstract theory colliding with brutal reality. If Amnesty is not prepared to defend the Oxfam workers, does that mean their policy just doesn’t apply in earthquake zones? So where does it apply? Where is the fault line? If it is not OK to exploit women in a poor country after an earthquake, where is it acceptable? In Glasgow in the midst of disastrous Tory austerity?

If there is one possible constructive lesson that can be learned in the light of the Oxfam crisis, it is surely that we need as a society to condemn prostitution as a matter of principle. I don’t mean locking up or fining women or men involved in prostitution, who are victims rather than criminals. I mean challenging the patronising theorists who promote prostitution as a job like any other, and who effectively legitimise an industry based on abuse. Prostitution may have existed since time immemorial, but so too has murder, rape and genocide.

I understand that there are many people who have reluctantly supported legalisation for the best of motives. Their intention is not to condone the practice but to protect vulnerable women. But that in my view is a defeatist approach, which inadvertently sends the message to young men that buying the bodies of women for sex is socially acceptable.

We have laws to prevent a range of activities that were once regarded as normal behaviour but are now recognised as harmful to others. Few people these days would argue for a return to the good old days when clouds of smoke polluted pub, cafes and restaurants. In the future, I would hope that people will look back with some revulsion to the days when the buying and selling of women’s bodies was big business on a global scale.

And right now, I would like to think that in the light of the Oxfam crisis, a lot of people will be willing to reconsider their support for a runaway sex industry freed from all legal and social constraints.