The British public has a deep social contract with charities, which makes a real difference for the world’s poor, averting famine in Somalia last year. As the international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, noted: “The poorest in our own nation are giving generously to others less fortunate than themselves, time after time.” But since the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood, disturbing revelations of sexual abuse have swept through politics, business and now the aid sector. Some of the biggest names in development have been hit by allegations of sexual misconduct, at home and abroad.

The succession of scandals requires immediate and concrete action to restore trust in two areas: the protection of vulnerable people, and evidence that aid makes a difference. It is clear that when dealing with traumatised, impoverished and often uprooted people, the duty to protect lies with aid agencies. Every British charity that recruits people to work abroad should be held, by law, to the same standard as agencies working with vulnerable people at home. This would require a vetting system, like the one for UK schools, to be put in place for aid workers that could screen potential recruits for previous complaints of sexual abuse. A global industry needs a global system of checks; an agency like Interpol could oversee such a system. This would help keep high-risk predatory men out of the charitable sector.

Last week Kevin Watkins, Save the Children’s CEO, warned that the current crisis of trust experienced by charities is comparable to that of the 2008 financial crisis, which eroded confidence and destroyed institutions. To regain trust charities will have to move beyond simplistic slogans about “making poverty history”. Development’s next challenge is to expand the freedom that poor people have and the real choices they are able to make. Not all inequality is a constraint on freedom. But the extreme inequalities of wealth and of opportunity across so many countries are barriers to human development. Charities need to show, with evidence, that aid is making a difference in this regard, else the British public will lose faith in the sector.

Charities’ power is not in glitzy events with celebrities or getting a line into a G8 communique – it is providing a connection between the UK public and people at the sharp end of globalisation. Today, we have a near-instant awareness of suffering, and the public does respond. The aid sector is a conduit for compassion and human solidarity. It is still the case that carnage proceeds in many parts of the globe and the world does nothing. Sometimes this inaction is because intervention – especially military action – is a cure worse than the disease. Sometimes it is that our attention and resolve is arbitrary and pinched.

However, empathy has to underpin our own security in an interconnected world. This understanding is relatively new. More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith made the case that compassion for others was too unreliable to be relied upon. He wrote that if “a man of humanity” knew he would lose his little finger tomorrow, “he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the more profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren” in an earthquake that entirely destroyed the whole of China. Technology means that we now see our brethren. The appalling disclosures of the last few weeks ought not make us turn away.