The Haiti sex scandal has engulfed the charity in a crisis unprecedented in its 76-year-history. After a week of sleepless nights and as attacks on aid escalate, its CEO is fighting to save Oxfam’s reputation in a new climate of public distrust

Anyone arriving at Oxfam HQ this week unaware of the headlines would have guessed at once that something was horribly wrong. Staff looked shell-shocked; the silence was the stunned hush of a sudden bereavement. One small team accustomed to handling 200 or so emails a day was overwhelmed by an inbox running into thousands. Social media staff appeared close to tears, deluged by a relentless torrent of outrage and abuse, dismay and disappointment. The chief executive couldn’t even bring himself to look. “I couldn’t cope with everything that’s out there. It hurts,” he says. Mark Goldring hasn’t slept for six nights and he looks stricken. “The last six days have been the most intense and challenging of my life.”

Oxfam has been reeling since the Times reported last week that several of the charity’s aid workers – including the country director, Roland van Hauwermeiren, had used prostitutes in Haiti while providing humanitarian work, following the 2011 earthquake. The men involved lost their jobs, but Oxfam is accused of covering up the scandal. Further revelations of sexual abuse in Oxfam shops, some against volunteers as young as 14, have emerged, engulfing the charity in a crisis unprecedented in its 76-year history.

Many things have been said about Goldring and Oxfam this week, but the charge that they have failed to grasp the gravity of the situation seems absurd. Yet he came close to cancelling this interview, justifiably fretting that his words would be wilfully twisted to do Oxfam yet more damage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 killed 220,000 people and led to a humanitarian crisis. Photograph: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

“Anything we say is being manipulated: ‘Oxfam’s still making excuses, still trying to justify itself.’ I went on the Today programme on the first day and tried to explain and it totally failed. All it did was fuel the fire.” Every explanation he’s tried to offer has been branded an excuse “and just failed in the court of public opinion. We’ve been savaged.” Even apologies only make matters worse. “I said on TV: ‘Yes, we could have done some things faster,’ and all of a sudden we’ve got two former ministers calling for my resignation. What I felt really clearly is many people haven’t wanted to listen to explanations.”

To try again is a risk Goldring worries he may regret, but no one can doubt the courage it took. He talks to me alone, unchaperoned by press officers, and is unguarded and candid. The impression I form is of someone telling the truth: if Goldring has been guilty of anything, I think it might be naivety about the vulnerability of almost any organisation in the febrile public mood of distrust.

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Revelations about sexual misconduct in the aid sector have been surfacing since last autumn and the Charity Commission issued a warning to agencies to put their house in order months ago. Why, I ask, did he not anticipate this crisis, revisit Oxfam’s archive of incidents and release the full details of the Haiti prostitution scandal before the press got there first? “Well, I deeply regret it. But it actually never crossed my mind.” Until last week, he had never even heard of Roland van Hauwermeiren or the eight other men involved in the scandal. “No, when I joined Oxfam in 2013, I was briefed that there had been incidents in Haiti in 2011. I knew that Oxfam, as a result, had introduced a new approach to whistleblowing, a new approach to helplines, actually created a safeguarding team. So, the reason I knew about it was because of the improvements that were happening afterwards.”

The 60-year-old has spent enough of his career in disaster zones to know that extreme power imbalances and lawlessness are a recipe for sexual abuse. “Let’s be clear, it happens in every aid organisation.” What made the Haiti scandal unusual, he maintains, was Oxfam’s decision to make some details public at the time and then implement a programme of measures more robust than any in the sector. Safeguarding procedures are inherently imperfect in a field that employs people from all over the world, often at short notice, in chaotic conditions where law and order has broken down. Nonetheless, Goldring had been proud to consider Oxfam ahead of the field, leading by example – and he was not alone in this opinion. A Tufts University study of sexual violence in conflict zones reported sector-wide failure, but singled out Oxfam as an example of good practice only last year. But how does this square with the fact that Oxfam didn’t fire Van Hauwermeiren but allowed him to resign?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Goldring says he knows that the scandal will have an effect on public donations to the charity. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

Goldring takes some convincing that the public wants and needs to hear why, but the details he reluctantly offers are not insignificant. Oxfam was investigating reports of regular sex parties with prostitutes in a staff apartment complex, organised by employees who were bullying and intimidating colleagues to keep quiet, when Van Hauwermeiren’s separate use of prostitutes came to their attention. He confessed, apologised and, crucially, co-operated, to help them expose the bigger ring, for which he was granted a “phased and dignified exit”.

Still, the fact remains that, in 2011, Oxfam did not tell the public why staff in Haiti were dismissed. “That was wrong,” he says, but adds that it was not done to protect the men. “I believe it was done in good faith to try to balance being transparent and protecting Oxfam’s work. I don’t think [Oxfam] wanted to promote a sensation and damage the delivery of [the Haiti] programme. With hindsight, we should have said more. I’ve been clear about that since this broke. But if Oxfam’s business is to help save lives, if your organisation is there to actually help make the world a better place, I can see why people thought this was the right thing to do.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roland van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam director for Haiti who admitted using prostitutes. Photograph: web

That sounds dangerously like the kind of moral bargaining of which humanitarians are often accused. Critics claim that aid workers consider themselves synonymous with virtue, think their job titles justify anything, and so swank around disaster zones in their 4x4s, inflating local prices and living high on the hog, protecting sex abusers and telling themselves they’re heroes. “There are downsides, there is waste and there is abuse,” Goldring agrees. “But, overwhelmingly, I see the positive things. I don’t claim aid is responsible for taking a billion people out of poverty in the last 20 years, but I’m absolutely clear that aid has played a part in that.”

Many people, some very powerful, disagree with him profoundly on this. I ask if he thinks the anti-aid agenda is at the root of the attacks on Oxfam. “The intensity and the ferocity of the attack makes you wonder, what did we do? We murdered babies in their cots? Certainly, the scale and the intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability. I struggle to understand it. You think: ‘My God, there’s something going on there.’” Is it that political opponents of international aid – the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel – are exploiting Oxfam’s crisis? He hesitates.

Play Video 1:01 'I am deeply ashamed' says Oxfam CEO of the Haiti sex scandal - video

“Others are better to judge whether that’s right or wrong. I don’t think it’s right for Oxfam to say that at the moment, because even that feels self-serving. What I’m really concerned about is that this is not used as an approach to attack aid.” But it already is. “Yes. It is.”

In December, Goldring was criticised for writing in the New Statesman that most of the globe’s new wealth has gone to the richest 1%. Does he think that has anything to do with the current political backlash against Oxfam? “Part of our mission,” he replies carefully, “is to challenge the things that keep people poor. You don’t resolve people’s poverty by helping with a school and a well and a nurse, if that’s all you do. We go beyond that and say, what’s keeping people poor? We challenge that and a lot of people don’t like that.”

If Oxfam’s crisis is politically motivated, it’s working. Goldring readily admits that it is already affecting the charity’s revenues. “It will have a substantial effect on public confidence, which will affect public donations.” What are Oxfam’s corporate partners telling him? “I think at the moment they are trying to take a more reflective position. They want to know firstly what the truth is, and secondly how safe are we. We hope they’re just holding on and saying: ‘Let’s take a decision in the right way at the right time on the basis of the right evidence.’” It is, he says, inevitable that some will sever relations. “Yes, it is. The association is just a problem for them. Some will say: ‘Look, this just isn’t good for our public relations.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Actor Minnie Driver has stepped down as an ambassador for Oxfam over the reports. Photograph: Chelsea Lauren/Deadline/REX/Shut

Minnie Driver didn’t talk to Goldring before standing down as an ambassador. Did he blame the actor for quitting? “In the face of this storm, no.” He says that he has been speaking to other ambassadors and not one had talked of withdrawing their support. “That doesn’t mean that won’t happen,” he adds. Desmond Tutu followed her later in the week.

To anyone wondering whether to cancel their direct debit, the details Goldring gives probably matter. For instance, I want to get to the bottom of why a French charity, which subsequently employed Van Hauwermeiren, claims Oxfam gave it a reference. Goldring explains that had the charity been familiar with British employment law, it would have understood that, when Oxfam would only confirm Van Hauwermeiren had worked for them, this wasn’t a reference but an alarm bell. One of the other sacked men did get a reference “from Oxfam”, but it was written by another of the former employees fired for the prostitution ring.

Yet despite Oxfam HQ informing all its international offices not to hire the men, one was briefly rehired by Oxfam America. How could that have happened? “I’m afraid I don’t know. At the time, Oxfam was a more loose-knit organisation than it is now. He was hired as a contractor, not a staff member, so may have gone through a different recruitment system. But that’s not good enough and Oxfam America is investigating.”

Why didn’t Oxfam HQ warn not just its own offices, but all the other aid agencies not to hire the men they had fired? “That’s a fair question.” The answer, he explains, is that it would have been illegal. Oxfam and other NGOs have been working hard to solve this anomaly, possibly through the creation of an international register of aid workers “where you have to be recommended by your previous employer to join”. Goldring has since written to the embassies of all the countries from which the men sacked in Haiti came, and sent the names to the Haitian government and its ambassador. On Thursday, he met the Haitian ambassador and agreed to visit the country to apologise in person to its government and to explore ways to make practical restitution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Antonio Rodrigue, right, minister of foreign affairs of Haiti, after a press conference this week in Port-au-Prince. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

But Oxfam’s own former global head of safeguarding claimed this week that she had tried to warn Goldring about the scale of sexual abuse within Oxfam in 2015 and that he cancelled the meeting she requested with the leadership team. Her critique makes it look as if he was not taking the problem seriously at all. “It does,” he agrees. But in fact, he goes on, he had been concerned for her to meet instead with the relevant director better placed to act on her concerns.

Did she do the right thing by going public? “No, I think it was very unbalanced and, ironically, didn’t give enough credit to the very work that she promoted. I don’t think she gives either herself or Oxfam enough credit for what was actually steady improvement.”

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During those six sleepless nights, I wonder if Goldring had considered his own position. “Yes, many times,” he says softly. He would resign at once if asked to by the trustees, but: “I don’t think I have let Oxfam down. And the support from staff around the building has just been phenomenal.” I ask if there have there been any internal discussions about Oxfam falling on its sword and closing to protect other agencies from contamination. “No, we haven’t. We haven’t. I don’t think that’s the right conversation to have. We’ve got massive ongoing commitments. We’ve got the skill and scale that’s actually unparalleled in the UK. Even though we have been making steady improvements, we now understand that’s not been good enough. The challenges of the last week means we have to take more dramatic steps.”

I am curious to know if he shares my surprise that Van Hauwermeiren, when we meet, had managed to remain underground. “Yes, why are they doorstepping me instead of him? It’s true. They’re not looking for justice for him, you know.”

I ask why he thinks that would be. “People are gunning for Oxfam, not for him. He’s almost irrelevant.”