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Category: IICSA

  • Jagged Edges: Where Safeguarding Overlaps with the Trust Deficit

    by Professor Helen King, an authorised preacher in Oxford Diocese and an elected lay member of General Synod

    (picture credit: BBC/Yourkevich)

    ‘Trust’ is currently one of Synod’s key words. As part of the formal agenda, we’ve recently had a presentation and a report on why we don’t trust each other. At the July 2025 General Synod the papers included a further one on the progress of this work, which includes developing “trust and trustworthiness repair strategies”. That paper told us that the Trust Task Group, working with a reference group and a theologian (thus avoiding from the outset the question ‘where’s the theology for this’?), has decided to cancel one of its surveys, originally planned to produce some quantitative data, simply because it’s so blindingly obvious what the results will be.

    From what I’ve been reading recently, I wonder how far this trust deficit is related to the series of safeguarding disasters with which we have to live: from IICSA to Smyth to Soul Survivor to the Nine O’Clock Service with, along the way, the prime-time TV airing of The Sixth Commandment bringing to a far wider audience what happened in Stow and Maid’s Moreton. One of the many items on the agenda at the July General Synod this year was the Final Drafting and Final Approval (the capital letters are there because this is a piece of legislation) of the Redress Scheme for victims and survivors of church abuse. The Redress Scheme is person-centred and trauma-informed; it is not an adversarial process, because repeatedly having to tell one’s story is retraumatising. It now has to go through Parliament before an opening date can be announced, and information and updates can be already seen on the House of Survivors site.

    As one of the supporting documents for the Redress Scheme sent to Synod notes, “The Scheme’s development has been overseen by a project board which included representation from victims and survivors, and which has heard from a broader group of voices on a survivor working group.” Survivors have been involved at every stage.

    In another arena, a friend of mine, Maff Potts, set up the Camerados social movement, which has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. The movement is all about the importance of ‘People and Purpose’ and Maff has now published a book telling stories from that first decade. Camerados reverses the usual service or charity model of helping others, and instead recommends “Ask someone who is struggling to help you”. This is a powerful model, and I think the involvement of survivors in designing the Redress Scheme can be seen in these terms.It’s now very clear that survivors can and do help everyone else.

    Here, I want to introduce a resource from another group of survivors; a resource which needs to be better known and which has made me think about trust. Produced in the Newcastle Diocese, this is Jagged Edges: A New Stations of the Cross. I was thinking about Jagged Edges in the Redress debate last week, when Revd Jenny Bridgman mentioned Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, a classic on how trauma goes on affecting the body and the brain. She suggested that the body of the Church also keeps the score; that our responses are continuing to be affected by what IICSA and subsequent reports of abuse have told us about ourselves. Even those of us who are not victims and survivors of church abuse – and in every debate on the subject at Synod there seem to be more speakers saying that they too have been through this – are in some way traumatised by what we now know. Is that affecting our capacity to trust each other in other areas of church life?

    Although it has the full support of the Bishop of Newcastle, Jagged Edges is not a clergy-led project. It was created by survivors David Creese, Peter Locke and Sarah Troughton and combines David’s poetry, Sarah’s linocut prints and Peter’s music. All the resources are available on one website, here, including audio of the music and the poems and a video of a presentation given by the contributors and their editor, Maggi Creese, in the Moral Injury Webinar Series hosted by the International Centre for Moral Injury at Durham University. Like an earlier Newcastle Diocese creative project on abuse, “If I told you, what would you do?”, this is all free to download and use.

    As that Durham University Centre explains, this is about trust: “Moral Injury involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways”. Moral injury not only feeds into the current Synod debates on trust, but also underlies the Private Member’s Motion considered in July about whether the House of Bishops should “urgently submit itself to an independent culture and governance review” (for the record, we did not vote on this but decided instead to move to Next Business).

    The focus of Jagged Edges is on repairing relationships in the Church; while embracing anger and pain in the “wounded heart” of the Church, the tone is generous. The resources are best used slowly, and absorbed gradually, as – with this reader at least – they connect viscerally. There are reflections included, which can be used by an individual reader or in a group, The exploration of abuse through the experience of Jesus draws on Michael Trainor’s 2014 book The Body of Jesus and Sexual Abuse. Even the process of lino printing replicates abuse: cutting into the sheet, covering it with ink – “shame, guilt and self-condemnation” – hiding it under a sheet or paper then applying pressure to reveal the image. Traumatic events affect memory; details are clear, but the narrative order breaks down. That is just as true of the differences between the gospel accounts of the days leading up to the Cross.

    While the poems start from and explore the original Greek of the descriptions of the events leading up to the Passion of Christ, the resources go up to the Resurrection with an image of Jesus and Peter healing their relationship on the beach as they begin to repair broken trust. As Jagged Edges says, “It is not a matter of finding the right way to say ‘sorry’ so that we can all ‘move on’. It is about discerning what it would mean to do as Jesus instructs Peter when he says ‘Feed my sheep’.”

    When I was working with a spiritual director, she advised me to keep on asking the question, “Where are you being fed?” We need to be fed if we are to feed others. As we not only listen to survivors, but learn from their wisdom, is this the re-set we need in the trust debate?

    The exhibition of the Jagged Edges material will be at Newcastle Cathedral from 1 October.

  • Safeguarding: Who is in Charge?

    by ‘Graham’

    In the Wilkinson Review of the Independent Safeguarding Board, 30 November 2023, I was quoted as follows:

    “Everything in the Church of England falls between two stools. You’ve got the NSP, the NSSG, the SRG, the NST, the Archbishops’ Council, the House of Bishops, the Lead Bishop, Lambeth and individual dioceses and it allows everyone to say, ‘Well, it’s actually not my job,’ and decision after decision in the Church of England is made without anyone in control, without anyone saying, ‘Come on, enough’s enough.’” (Para 317).

    I was reminded of these words when reading about the shenanigans in Blackburn. There were multiple interested parties, multiple attempted interventions, but at the end of the day a process was undertaken that allowed a person to sue, and receive a payment. Nothing worked. There was no process, no policy, no disciplinary procedure, no forum, that allowed a comprehensive investigation and justice (whichever way it went) to be seen to be done.

    And I reflect on what all the bodies that I listed in the Wilkinson Review actually do. Who reports to whom? And who can make decisions? Where is the “Head of Safeguarding” (no such role exists) to ensure that fair process, natural justice and competence are delivered?

    Because everything falls between two stools; in fact, many more. And frequently it is not the Church of England who actually do anything. The Jonathan Fletcher Review: an outside agency, 31:8, appointed not by the CofE but by Emmanuel, Wimbledon. The Pilavachi case: an outside agent, Fiona Scolding KC, has been appointed by Soul Survivor. The Titus Trust Reviews: an outside agency, 31:8 again, appointed by Titus. The Scripture Union Review: an outside agent, Gill Camina, appointed by, guess who, Scripture Union. The investigation into Iain Broomfield, who led the Iwerne camps from 1987-2000, well, no one knows what happened there, and a group of alleged victims put out a stinging rebuke. Where was the Church of England in all of these?

    We know the CDM is largely discredited, but it is worth noting that in the cases of Jonathan Fletcher, Iain Broomfield, the fellow in Blackburn and Mike Pilavachi it is extremely unclear what process was undertaken under CDM, and justice was “not seen to be done”, certainly in the eyes of victims. The process that was in place, was not fit for purpose. “Learning Lessons Reviews” (a misnomer if there ever was one) have been replaced by “Safeguarding Practice Reviews”: toothless, neutered, never debated by General Synod. I mention them as it is telling that not a single Safeguarding Practice Review has been commissioned in the 13 months since they were approved in July 2023. Despite the pleading of the ISB11, and the continuous flood of abuse revelations, the CofE does not have a single current Review (Makin was under the old regime).

    Let us look at the ISB. Who was responsible for the flawed (it is claimed) Terms of Reference? Who was responsible for the paucity of resources? Who was responsible for the sudden closure? I will leave readers to look at the Wilkinson Report for some of the answers to those, but the cynical outside observer sees parties ducking and diving, and denying responsibility.

    The Makin Review is my biggest bugbear, as a victim of John Smyth, and as the victim who came forward almost 13 years ago. We still have no answers, no justice, no closure and I have written many times about that. But, I ask again and again, who is responsible? NST say it is an Archbishops’ Council commissioned review, and independent, so they cannot intervene. The AC say that oversight was delegated to NST. Does the NSP have a view? No idea. Does the NSSG have a view; no idea. Have the Lead Bishops ever taken an interest? Well, Joanne Grenfell has never replied to or even acknowledged a single email I have sent her. General Synod? Well, lots of questions, faux outrage, but nothing is done. Do the paymasters care? I shudder to think of the cost of lawyers to date, yet alone the payments to Keith Makin: and am outraged, incandescent, in the contrast with support for victims when the Redress Scheme is further delayed. So, the Makin Review can drift on at enormous expense, 1555 days late (as I write) and no one “owns it”, no one has held his feet to the fire, no one has taken responsibility.

    And where do victims go ? I am also quoted in the Wilkinson Review as follows:

    “….that there had been a number of circumstances in the last seven years where they had needed somewhere to go and had needed an independent body that provided oversight, authority and power within the Church of England…..” (para 260.2).

    As no one is “responsible” for the Makin Review, I have nowhere to go. No one to complain to. No one who will intervene. The ISB might have provided this for us, though I suspect had they intervened they would have been accused of exceeding their brief. But even the ISB lifeline was taken from us, and of course from Mr X and the ISB 11.

    What do I ask for? That the multiple layers of safeguarding bureaucracy are consolidated. The relationship between the NST, NSSG and NSP must be clarified. The responsibility for safeguarding which falls between General Synod, Archbishops’ Council, House of Bishops, all those myriad bodies, must be clarified. I would hope and pray that this can be an eventual outcome of the deliberations by Professor Alexis Jay. Though I add, the Response Group appears to be a toothless “talking shop”. The Chair, Lesley-Anne Ryder, has refused to engage with victims. Their consultation received feedback from just 11 victims: surely that reflects the lack of confidence and trust in the process. The ISB took almost two years to gain the trust of damaged, nervous, traumatised victims. Does the Response Group even want to gain our trust?

    The final thing I ask for is a prophetic voice. Someone to stand up and say “Enough is Enough”. It is not coming from the hand wringing Archbishops. It is not coming from the invisible Lead Bishops. It is not coming from the incompetent NST. I could not even name the Chair of the NSP and NSSG, neither body having crossed my path, over seven years after the Channel 4 exposé. Where is the leadership, the vision, the ambition? Where is the person who “gets it” and can blend a ruthless drive for change, and a compassion that will gain the trust of victims? A “Head of Safeguarding” might not be appropriate, but where in these plethora of organisation would they even sit?

    Until then, everything will fall between two stools. We have no Makin Review. There is paralysis over Christ Church, Oxford. There is chaos at Blackburn. The ISB has gone. The Lead Bishops are silent (as is Lambeth and “victims come first” Welby: yeah, yeah, yeah). General Synod is impotent. NST are dysfunctional.

    And victims are left by the side of the road.

  • Beyond Jay: Here’s What the Response Group and Synod Need to Do for a Safer Church

    by Gilo, hymn writer, co-editor with Janet Fife of the book Letters to a Broken Church, and co-creator of the House of Survivors website

    Three diocesan bishops seek my take, with varying degrees of regularity, on developments in the Church of England’s safeguarding and response to survivors. I’m careful to point out that any views I express are mine, mine alone, and do not represent those of any organisation or group. I neither seek nor receive any funds in the process. So the thinking expressed here is not the only viewpoint, nor necessarily the right one (if such exists). It is simply mine, in a field which is likely to be contentious in the forthcoming Synod.

    The three bishops have each asked what I think of the Jay report. In my view the Jay is undeliverable and, even if it were, would it necessarily result in something better than the current mess? Professor Alexis Jay has done the reverse of what she did in IICSA. The IICSA recommendations were limp and didn’t go far enough. Now she’s gone too far, and by proposing Org A she’s given CofE a possible excuse to slow down the crucial Org B. She is a political naïf, and in my view the recommendations in the Jay report arose perhaps as a form of psychological penance for not being ambitious enough in IICSA. I think this report will set the Church back, not move it forward. If you follow its course logically, then other institutions may seek Org A structures in the name of ‘independence’ and we’d end up with a multitude of safeguarding bodies creating further confusion. I think no amount of Org A, and no amount of expenditure on Org A (which would put current CofE safeguarding expenditure into deep shade) can stand in place of properly designed mandatory reporting in the statutory framework. This is the key. The best course of action the Church could be taking is banging loudly on Home Office doors to argue a case for an end to the ‘potemkin village’ Whitehall is wanting to create and instead to introduce effective mandatory reporting. Whitehall wants mandatory reporting in name only, in a watered-down version of the IICSA recommendation which was already itself a watery version.

    The Church has undoubtedly arrived at a car crash moment. Where does responsibility for this lie? Failed leadership. Synod must remind itself that failure at the heart of the axis of power, represented by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in conjunction with the Secretary-General, has brought the Church to such a desperate situation. Had they resolved their differences with the ISB in a transparent and safe way there would have been no need for the Jay report.

    Let’s turn to the much-needed Org B, which is where I believe focus must be directed. Org B, as an essential body for scrutiny and oversight and the all-important handling of complaints is urgently needed, and is long overdue. The Church must give such a body effective powers if it is to avoid creating another toothless tiger (NSP anyone?). At present I believe the power to place a diocese into special measures lies within the gift of the Archbishop. This happened memorably to Chichester Diocese under Rowan Williams. This is the kind of bite Org B requires. Not the set of rubber dentures which Archbishops’ Council and their NCIs will be looking to manufacture.

    And no veto by an Archbishop. It may well be that one of the places needing such Special Measures might be the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, alongside London Diocese which would seem a prime candidate for emergency action. London is not alone in being crashy, but it’s up there amongst the worst. We only need one diocese placed publicly into Special Measures and any other dioceses currently lagging behind in handling of cases or responses to survivors will tighten up their bootlaces in a weekend. The routine blanking and obfuscation that still persists in some quarters will quickly end.

    And above all it must end within the NST.

    Whatever shape the Archbishops’ Council eventually decides to give to a new shiny ‘independent’ model, the NST must be removed from the grip of the Secretariat. Its days as an arm of the legals and comms of Church House must end. If it is to have a positive future, it must be repurposed, retrained and given a new vision of itself, with independent management which involves survivors, with all our experience and narrative wisdom. The NST leadership must face their own cognitive dissonance squarely and courageously, and recognise that its deployment by Church House in various aspects of reputation management has been disgraceful and dishonest.

    Whatever happens, ‘Delay’ is likely to be the watchword. Delay by design, but also through incompetence and systemic dysfunctionality. One thing is for definite: the CofE must never again allow one individual to hold as much unaccountable power as is currently compressed into the office of the Secretary-General. He has presided over a rotten borough in the NCIs and puppet-stringed the NST to such an extent that it has become almost impossible for survivors to have much trust in the thing. But the problem is not William Nye alone; it’s the inherited system of which he is a part, albeit a big part. We must factor in too, the lack of leadership by the Archbishops, the Lead Safeguarding Bishop and the NST.

    The House of Bishops is an enfeebled house with a poor grasp of these things. What we’ve seen across the past decade is fewer than a handful of bishops speaking out. Alan ‘Elbows’ Wilson knew that any time the media approached bishops on matters ‘survivor related’’, the traffic would immediately be centrally controlled through Church House comms. He ignored this, and spoke directly to journalists without approval from the centralized machinery of the Secretariat. He was past playing safe games with the structure and was happy to be out on the edge speaking truth to its power. He doubtless took many a kicking but it never seemed to upset him. Julie Conalty has been a courageous voice too, often a lone voice highlighting particular aspects of corruption. But I suspect she’s marginalized by a structure which expects all bishops to stay blandly ‘on message’. She needs a few diocesans to step up and publicly support her when she dares to challenge the status quo.

    Bishops must stop being cowed, stop colluding with toxic culture. They must learn to get over their fear of receiving ‘heavy shepherding’ from one or other of the Archbishops when they speak out of turn. If an Archbishop arrives on your door to bully you into submission to the rules of purple enclosure – then stand up to him. If you stick your head above the parapet, you will be marginalised. Learn to embrace this. The likelihood is that this or that particular bit of funding for your diocese will be squeezed. It’s been indicated to me that this is quietly how the culture of collegiate control operates. So the purple enclosure stays on message and lets any missives be handed out by a Lead Bishop who to all intents and purposes seems mostly missing in action as far as survivors are concerned. When a bishop dares to go off-piste and makes an authentic comment, they experience the polite scowl of the institution. But if enough speak out, especially from the top of the Lead trio, then the toxic culture might begin to change.

    Successive lead bishops have discovered they have nothing but rubber levers to work with! The real levers, those of power and any real change, are held by Archbishops’ Council which in turn is heavily controlled by a shadowy Secretariat. The wheels turn slowly because everything is hardwired to move slowly. Just as the structure is hardwired to protect hierarchy and itself. One of the bishops who listens to me recently asked me what I consider to be the three main obstacles to progress. In my view, these are:

    (1) centralised and dysfunctional power which rules an unchecked empire with disastrous consequences. Look at the handling of the ISB members and the way they were closed down at an hour’s notice.

    (2) siloed mindset of the bishops who occupy a ‘me and my diocese’ headspace. There is little public collegiate expression of responsibility and far too much collegiate fear.

    (3) the transparency gap. Too much of the structure is wedded to reputation management and used to hiding stuff. The institution has failed to grasp that transparency is the best route to salvaging reputation.

    I want to end on a positive note, because the picture is not all gloom. Some dioceses have made huge strides. I’ve been supporting one survivor in recent weeks. We sent an initial letter of disclosure to the relevant diocese, and I advised that we should hopefully expect a response within 48 hrs. The reply came within 15 mins! And was hugely positive. Not only did the diocese agree to therapy costs immediately but they are also meeting us in the home geography of the survivor’s town rather than expecting us to make the journey cross-country. The bishop also sent a positive response as soon as he could. I believe dioceses must continue to retain responsibility for the deliverance of good safeguarding and positive response to survivors. And dioceses that are operating out of a handbook that should have been jettisoned a decade ago should be placed into the equivalent of an ambulance that Org B will need to have on standby for just such an eventuality.

     

     

  • Safeguarding & Living in Love and Faith: Learning for the Church of England from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse & Lessons Learned Reviews[1]?

    Via Media does not normally publish long pieces, but in this case we are making an exception; we have a record of expressing concern over safeguarding.[1] The following document was prepared in 2023 by Judith Maltby, a member of the House of Clergy of the General Synod.  She was encouraged to produce this paper by one of the lead bishops for safeguarding and also received critical feedback from a diocesan safeguarding professional before completion. It was presented at a meeting of the National Safeguarding Steering Group on 30 January 2024, after which it was placed on the  CofE Safeguarding Training Portal. That site requires a log-in, so we are making it available here to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of the links identified by IICSA and numerous professional Lessons Learned Reviews between the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and catastrophic safeguarding failures. All the documents cited are referenced in the notes and are in the public domain. 

     

    Revd Canon Judith Maltby is College Lecturer in Theology & Emerita Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Emerita Reader in Church History, University of Oxford, and a member of the House of Clergy of General Synod

    1. Introduction[2]

    From 2012-13 until 2022, I served as a central member elected by General Synod on the Crown Nominations Commission, the body which nominates individuals to be diocesan bishops.  I began around the time of the time of the investigation into safeguarding failures in Chichester Diocese led by Baroness Butler-Sloss.[3]  Although I had up till then followed safeguarding issues in what I hoped was a responsible way for any priest, my election onto the CNC made me realize that I needed to be much better informed as safeguarding needed to be a key element in its discernment work.  Remarkably at the time I started on the CNC, there was no explicit focus on safeguarding in its deliberations.  That has changed in the past decade.  As part of my commitment to the work of the CNC, I started reading all major safeguarding Reviews and followed the proceedings of IICSA closely.

    In 2017, I was invited in my capacity as a professional historian to join one of the disciplinary work streams for what became Living in Love and Faith.  As a member of LLF, I raised a number of times (I was not the only one to do so) that we should be drawing on external Reviews and IICSA of our safeguarding failures in our work on human sexuality.  This work did not take place.

    This paper is the result of two areas of work for the Church of England I have been part of over many years:  the Crown Nominations Commission and Living in Love and Faith.  It is not an attempt to ‘weaponize’ safeguarding in the Church’s sexuality debate, but rather to help us hear what numerous professional, independent Reviews (LLRs) and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) are saying to the Church:  that our lack of inclusion of LGBT+ people has a serious and detrimental impact on the Church’s ability to deliver good safeguarding.[4]  There is very little of my own text in this paper – it is almost entirely drawn from IICSA and LLRs.  So far, as a Church we are failing to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ this growing body of evidence from the very safeguarding professionals we have, in many cases, asked to undertake it.

    1. Questions in General Synod 2018 & 2019

    In the previous quinquennium of General Synod, on two occasions, I asked the following questions about making connections between the work of LLF and the learning needing to be done from IICSA.

    General Synod Questions July 2018

    The Revd Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q43.  How will the insights and learning from the report due to be published later this year by the UK Government’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) concerning the culture of the Church of England in respect of gender and sexuality be incorporated into the Teaching Document on human sexuality promised for 2020?

    The Bishop of Coventry to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    1. The Co-Ordinating Group for Living in Love and Faith is expected to be attentive to developments in other areas of the Church of England’s national life that are relevant for its work. When the report from IICSA is published, it will consider whether there are specific points for it to reflect on, and how to go about this. It is also likely that the report will be relevant to the work of the Pastoral Advisory Group.[5]

    General Synod Questions July 2019

    The Revd Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q94.  The Church Times (10 May 2019) reported that the hearings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse this July will ‘scrutinise, among other topics … the House of Bishops’ forthcoming teaching document on gender and sexuality’ and the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, in his response to the May 2019 IICSA report on Chichester and Peter Ball, responded ‘It is absolutely right that the Church at all levels should learn lessons from the issues raised in this report’. Will the forthcoming ‘Living in Love and Faith’ show evidence of learning lessons from the IICSA hearings of March, July 2018, and July 2019, as well as the report of May 2019, about attitudes in the culture and practice of the Church of England towards women and LGBT people?

    The Bishop of Coventry to reply as Chair of the Living in Love and Faith Coordinating Group on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    1. The purpose of the Living in Love and Faith resources is primarily educational: the plan is for the resources to be widely used by parishes, deaneries, dioceses, the House and College of Bishops and members of General Synod to enable teaching and learning. In this way LLF will demonstrate its learning from the IICSA process by promoting a culture of mutual respect, clarity, openness and transparency across the Church in relation to matters of human identity, sexuality, gender and marriage. It will also provide appropriate correctives to misinformation about human sexuality and identity. We hope that the Pastoral Principles will establish a helpful culture for using the LLF resources by enabling the Church to address the evils of prejudice, silence, fear, ignorance, hypocrisy and misuse of power, all of which have played their part in the tragic realities of sexual abuse that have been the subject of the IICSA hearings.[6]

    1. LLF’s Engagement with IICSA (November 2020)

    I served on LLF from its beginning and, along with others, attempted a number of times to have learning from IICSA incorporated into its work.  In the end, the only reference to IICSA in LLF is:

    While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project… (LLF, 2020, p. 87).

    As far as I know, the work to ‘be carried out separately’ has not taken place.

    1. Illustrative Extracts from Safeguarding Reviews and IICSA

    Below are extracts from recent independent LLRs into Church of England safeguarding failures.  They argue that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is a significant contribution to what is, from a safeguarding perspective, a more dangerous safeguarding environment.

    4.1. Dame Moira Gibb Review on Peter Ball (June 2017)

    We believe that the Church’s attitude to homosexuality at the time played a part in the failure to act appropriately. Ball’s abusive behaviour was trivialised and its consequences were set aside (p. 2).

    This issue continues to be a source of division and debate in the Church, and an important concern for some of Ball’s victims. We would simply emphasise that the Church must promote an open and accepting culture in which everyone, regardless of their sexuality or their views about homosexuality, is clear about their responsibilities towards those who might be abused or who might want to raise concerns about abuse (5.7.3).[7]

    4.2.  Independent Review by Dr Adi Cooper, OBE on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 2012-2019, Diocese of Oxford (April 2022)

    In her review on the abuse and murder of Peter Farquhar and the abuse of Anne Moore-Martin by Ben Field, Dr Cooper makes a direct connection between the Church of England’s ‘wider policies regarding homosexual practice’ and putting people at risk:

    1.3.  The closed culture of the Stowe Church in general, including attitudes towards homosexuality, meant that the [sic] Peter Farquhar’s homosexuality and the relationship between Peter Farquhar and Ben Field was a ‘well-known secret’. The wider policies of the Church of England regarding homosexual practice and approach to sexuality and relationships put Peter Farquhar at risk and vulnerable to exploitation. A culture which supported openness and transparency would have better safeguarded Peter Farquhar.  Whilst people continue to feel forced to hide or lie about their sexuality, they can become vulnerable to exploitation, as was Peter Farquhar. [8]

    Dr Cooper cites the earlier report by Dame Moira Gibb on Peter Ball:

    The recommendation from a previous review, ‘that the Church must promote an open and accepting culture in which everyone, regardless of their sexuality or their views about homosexuality, is clear about their responsibilities towards those who might be abused or who might want to raise concerns about abuse’[9] is reinforced by this review.

    She continues:

    Negative attitudes towards homosexuality and homosexual practice in the Church of England reinforce internalised homophobia. An area for applying learning from this case review would be to ask, ‘How many other older men and women in similar positions to Peter Farquhar may be vulnerable to exploitation?’ There is an issue here for the wider church to consider how it offers support to its lesbian and gay members, not to ‘cure’ and ‘heal’ them as this would be a deeply homophobic response …. However, the institutional Church of England faces challenges to resolve its own positioning on this, before it can effectively support any individuals with their expressed tensions between sexuality and religious beliefs. This case review calls for a concerted effort to be made to reduce the stigma of homosexuality within the wider Church of England communion, so that it can provide a safer place for lesbians and gay men to worship, as is its intent.[10]

    The issue of how to explore issues of personal relationships and sexuality is a complex area, particularly given current contradictory expectations from the Church of England regarding homosexuality and heterosexuality, which may lead people to lie about the reality of their sexual lives. The current position taken by the Church of England, continuing to insist that sex is for married couples only and that any other partnership has to be a sexually abstinent friendship is not conducive to disclosure, particularly from young people, as well as exposing people to risk, as discussed in section 1 above. This needs to change and the Church should consider how to make it possible for people to be honest about their relationships, as well as being a safe place for lesbians and gay men.[11]

    4.3. Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)

    The connection between the Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality and creating a less safe environment, was repeatedly made in the IICSA proceedings.  What follows is a representative, rather than an exhaustive, sample.

    (i)  5 March 2018.  Fiona Scolding, QC, at the IICSA inquiry into Chichester Diocese  set out a number of questions such as:  ‘How far did the reaction of some within the church to homosexuality possibly inhibit the reporting of child sexual abuse?’[12] Later, she cited DI Wayne Murdock, a police officer involved in the investigation of the Peter Ball case, stating that ‘one of the factors that influenced his view of the public interest in bringing a prosecution was the risk that some church witnesses would be exposed as homosexuals in court. That would, in his words, have seen their roles within the church effectively finished.’ As Murdock put it: ‘“I believe that the issue of homosexuality had a detrimental effect in encouraging witnesses and potential complainants within the church to come forward”’.[13]

    (ii)  14 March 2018.  When Fiona Scolding interviewed the Bishop of Chichester, Rt Revd Dr Martin Warner, she asked: ‘Do you not think that the Church’s difficulty in coming to terms with the complexity of self-identity when it comes to sexual orientation may have contributed to the misapprehensions you have identified because, you know, certainly amongst conservative individuals, homosexuality is seen as sinful?’

    Bishop Warner replied:  ‘Yes.’ Ms Scolding then asked, ‘The idea of civil partnerships is seen as anathema and the idea of getting married within the church is anathema. Do you think the church may have, albeit unwittingly, contributed to that by its approach to sexual orientation in the past?’ Bishop Warner replied: ‘I think there has been contribution from the church on this’. He went on to talk about how covering up homosexuality contributed to a culture in which sexual abuse was also kept secret.[14]

    (iii)  14 March 2018.  Ms Scolding’s examination of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, raised the link between attitudes towards homosexuality and safeguarding failures, particularly in the case of Bishop Peter Ball.

    1. Specifically, inasmuch as you know about the case involving Bishop Peter Ball, do you think the church’s attitude towards homosexuality may have played any role in the way the church treated him either during his time as a priest or afterwards?
    2. I think so, and, again, I’m speculating, but it does seem to me that, at a time when people were beginning to feel awkward about the traditional closeted attitude, there was perhaps overcompensation, saying ‘Well, we don’t want to be judgemental about people’s sexual activities. We may formally, in a disciplinary way disapprove, we may treat them according to the protocols, but we mustn’t be seen to be – or we mustn’t be judgemental.  We must therefore give people second chances and understand the pressures’, and so on.  So I think there is an element of that coming in, a rather paradoxical consequence of the traditional view of homosexuality within the church; you want to overcompensate a bit for it.[15]

    Lord Williams acknowledged that guilt or dis-ease about the treatment of gay men, especially clergymen, in the Church of England may have allowed Peter Ball to go unchecked in his criminal behaviour for decades.  He received a lot of criticism for his remarks, but I think he was correctly describing a pattern of disordered institutional behaviour.[16]

    (iv)  24 July 2018.  Fiona Scolding, interviewing the former Archbishop, Lord Carey of Clifton, proposed that: ‘The church was so uncomfortable in dealing with and managing same-sex relationships that it didn’t really have an understanding of what was an appropriate same-sex relationship and what was an inappropriate same-sex relationship.’[17]

    (v) 25 June 2019.  In his Second Witness Statement, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, stated:  ‘I am informed by Mr Tilby that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.’[18]  That review never appears to have taken place or if it did, it had no impact on LLF.   LLF states:  ‘While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project…’ (LLF, 2020, p. 87).

     (vi)  11 July 2019.  Archbishop Justin Welby was asked whether ‘there is sufficient openness about human sexuality in the church now so that there is, and can be, proper debate and discussion with victims and survivors and proper work on minimising risk within the church?’  He responded, ‘Yes. I think there is far more openness than there was. I think the Living in Love and Faith Project has enabled a culture of transparency in ways that didn’t exist before.  I’ve no doubt we have got a huge amount further to go on that ….  the project was just getting going then … It is now coming within 12 months of its end and I think that that has had a huge impact, and will continue to do so’.[19]

    (vii) October 2020.  In the Executive Summary of the IICSA final report, we read that: ‘Deference to the authority of the Church and to individual priests, taboos surrounding discussion of sexuality and an environment where alleged perpetrators were treated more supportively than victims presented barriers to disclosure that many victims could not overcome.’[20]

     (viii) October 2020.  The full investigation report of the Anglican Church by IICSA observes:  ‘There was a culture of fear and secrecy within the Church about sexuality.  Some members of the Church also wrongly conflated homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults.  There was a lack of transparency, open dialogue and candour about sexual matters, together with an awkwardness about investigating such matters.  This made it difficult to challenge sexual behaviour.  Mr Colin Perkins, diocesan safeguarding adviser (DSA) for the Diocese of Chichester, told us that homosexual clergy may have found themselves inadvertently “under the same cloak” as child sexual abusers, who sought to mask their behaviour “in the same cultural hiding place”’.[21]

     4.4. Chris Robson Review on Father Alan Griffin (July 2022)

    Shortly before the July 2022 session of General Synod, the report on the suicide of Father Griffin was published and states:

     This illustrates a divisive issue that has been at the centre of this review – the Church of England’s stance on homosexuality. Again, this issue is so complex that it could not possibly be dealt with in significant detail by this review. At the same time, it cannot be ignored.  There is clear evidence that the way Father Alan was treated was, in part, influenced by the Church and individuals’ conscious and unconscious bias around his sexual orientation (5.3).[22] 

    1. Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) and National Safeguarding Panel (NSP) at General Synod July 2022

    At the July 2022 Synod, during the presentation ‘Safeguarding and Independence: Update and Next Steps (GS2263 and GSMisc 1320)’, I asked the following question:

     The Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs): We have had a number of safeguarding reports and reviews, the Gibb Report on Peter Ball, IICSA and the most recent one on Fr Griffin which just came out a few days ago. All those reports make a connection between the Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality and being a less safe Church and I wonder if you as a panel have views on that.

    Professor Maggie Atkinson: Chair, thank you and thank you for the questions. I am going to take the first question and Meg is going to come forward and answer the second, because this is in collegium …. Meg is going to take the one that was asked about safety or otherwise if you are homosexual or an LGBTQ person, LGBTQIA and so on.

    Ms Meg Munn: Thank you, Maggie. The reason I volunteered among us to answer this one is because it sounds to me like this is a policy type question and, as I said at the outset, one of the things that the National Safeguarding Panel does is look into issues of policy, procedure and process. Looking at some of the issues that come out, including practice, of those reviews is the kind of scanning of the horizon that I would do with the panel when we are determining the kinds of issues that we might look at. That issue has not been one that has been discussed by us to date. It could well be one that we would discuss [my italics].

    The National Safeguarding Panel currently only meets six times a year. Well, in fact, we meet five times a year and one of our sessions we use for good practice workshops and to discuss issues of importance. I will certainly take that issue into our discussions. One of the things I tried to do is to make sure that we have our discussions when they are going to have an impact. If we know that policy procedure is being reviewed or due to be reviewed, then we will choose those kind of subjects.

    But we also try to and look at issues which we think are important and that the Church is not taking enough notice of – I mean the Church as a whole not just the National Safeguarding Team. For example, in the past we have put issues like prevention on our agenda and we have put issues like adult safeguarding on our agenda because we felt that they were not getting enough focus. This could well be an issue that we might look at in the future but, to date, the National Safeguarding Panel has not looked specifically at that.[23]

    1. General Synod February 2023

    In the LLF debate on the morning of 9 February 2023, I returned to the learning to be done from IICSA and the contributions from major reviews of safeguarding failures to our discussion of sexuality.[24]  In the afternoon of 9 February, there was an opportunity to ask questions of the new Director of the National Safeguarding Team (NST), Mr Alexander Kubeyinje.  Both the Revd Robert Thompson (London) and I asked Mr Kubeyinje about the NST’s engagement with the connection made in IICSA and other independent reviews concerning attitudes toward LGBT+ people and safeguarding failures.  I asked:  ‘When we have these major Reports like Robson on Griffin and material from IICSA, what is the process for learning and absorbing from those Reports by the NST?’  Mr Kubeyinje replied:

    Judith, with regards to your question, we have plans, we have a lot of meetings with other people. We are starting to do audit activity. We are trying to triangulate and close the loop. We know we still need to work on our quality assurance element, but we do take those recommendations seriously, and some of those recommendations have actually moved along quite well. [25]

    It is good to know that there are ‘a lot of meetings’ and allowance must be made for Mr Kubeyinje’s newness in the post at the time, but it is not at all clear what ‘triangulate and close the loop’ means or which recommendations in regard to sexuality and safeguarding ‘have moved along quite well’.  Synod was not provided with any actual example.

    1. General Synod July 2023

    7.1.  Questions.

    I returned the issue of the connection made by IICSA and various LLRs in a question at the most recent General Synod.

    The Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby (Universities & TEIs) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    Q100.  Archbishop Welby said in his Second Witness Statement to IICSA (June 2019): “I am informed by Mr [Graham] Tilby [at the time National Advisor, CofE Safeguarding] that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.” The only reference to IICSA in LLF (2020) is: “While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project…” (p. 87). May Synod know what group is carrying out the separate work of theological reflection on the learning from IICSA to ensure the LLF process does “sufficiently address safeguarding related issues” as stated by the Archbishop in 2019?

    The Bishop of London replied:

    The Bishop of London to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

    A The question asks about two separate things. Theological reflection on the findings from IICSA underpins the work of the National Safeguarding Steering Group in overseeing the implementation of IICSA’s recommendations. Meanwhile, the materials arising from the Living in Love and Faith process are still in development, as reported in GS 2303. Material on pastoral guidance and pastoral reassurance will be reviewed from a safeguarding perspective before they are finalised.[26]

    Bishop Sarah’s answer indicates that it is the responsibility of the NSSG/NSP to undertake the work in the area of attitudes towards homosexuality and safeguarding.  However, in July 2022, in the Presentation from the NSP and ISB to General Synod, the then Chair, Meg Munn, stated that the topic has not been discussed:

    That issue has not been one that has been discussed by us to date. It could well be one that we would discuss …. But we also try to and look at issues which we think are important and that the Church is not taking enough notice of – I mean the Church as a whole not just the National Safeguarding Team (see 5 above).

    7.2. Safeguarding Code of Practice:  Safeguarding Practice Reviews GS2295

    At the same meeting in July 2023, Synod approved a proposal to replace Lessons Learned Reviews (LLR) with much more detailed Safeguarding Practice Reviews (SPR).  GS2295 speaks in numerous places about the dissemination of learning from Reviews to inform the Church’s practice.  For example:

    From the Cover Paper for GS2295

    4.4.1 Some concern was expressed that these Reviews would not hold people to account for what they had done and they would not establish guilt. We have tried to be very clear that the purpose of this process is not about managing allegations or about findings of guilt/responsibility. It is about understanding the reasons why events have happened so that an organisation can learn and improve its safeguarding. As explained in 1.3 above, there are other processes for holding individuals to account (p. 8).

    6.3 The reflective exercises we suggest are exactly that: they are suggestions to help people find the way that works best for them and for their organisation to learn from safeguarding events in a variety of circumstances. The key thing is the move away from focussing only on what is wrong with individual practice or processes, into what is hampering or enabling good safeguarding practice at an organisational level. We will continue to work on developing tools and resources to help this. 

    Main Document GS2295

    1.2 What a Safeguarding Practice Review is and what it is not

    The main features of an SPR are that:

    • It is a planned process of reflective learning by a Church body designed to improve the quality and impact of that Church’s body’s safeguarding activity.
    • The aim is to identify a limited number of key themes which, if implemented, will result in improved outcomes for victim(s)/survivor(s) and respondent(s).

    1.3 The outcomes of SPRs

    SPRs should seek to achieve the following outcomes:

    • The identification of systemic and organisational factors or failings which impacted on what happened. This should include any issues of organisational culture, the nature and quality of human relationships, resourcing and governance, and any inappropriate use of power within the Church body.

    It is worth noting that there is no mention of the Church’s doctrines or teaching on sexuality in its references to ‘organisational culture’ in this extensive document.

    From the section describing the structure of a SPR, GS2295 speaks of the importance of understanding the ‘why’, not only the ‘what’, of a safeguarding failure (pp. 26-7):

    Why answers might include;

    Whether any ‘contextual factors’ impacted on the case and in what way, for example:

    • Availability of adequate guidance;
    • Resourcing of safeguarding/workloads/staffing levels;
    • Training/supervision/support for relevant Church Officers;
    • Organisational culture and relationships;
    • Personal constraints (e.g. excessive or onerous responsibilities);

    The Reviewer’s conclusions: what are the key lessons and changes required of specific Church Bodies and/or the whole Church system?

    The Reviewer’s recommendations:

    1. These should be focussed on a small number of high priority, outcome focussed, SMART recommendations, normally between six and ten in number. The aim is to have a smaller number of achievable, impactive recommendations, rather than a large number of recommendations which are not impactive.
    2. Recommendations need to be aligned to the Safeguarding Standards:
    • Prevention
    • Culture, Leadership and Capacity
    • Recognising, Assessing and Managing Risk
    • Victims and Survivors
    • Learning, Supervision and Support
    1. Within this, recommendations should be grouped under the following headings:
    • Strategic: Recommendations relevant to the whole Church system.
    • Local/operational: Recommendations relevant to the specific Church Bodies involved in the case. This must include whether further action is needed to manage on-going risk, and whether consideration of further investigatory action should be undertaken by Church Bodies within their capability and disciplinary frameworks (These latter would not be published.)

    The section on Tone and Methodology (pp. 28-9) states:

    Adopting an appropriate tone and methodology is essential if the Review process is going to help to deliver learning which results in actual change. This is particularly the case if change in beliefs, values, behaviours and culture are needed.

    An approach which:

    • treats all involved (that is victims, survivors, respondents, clergy and staff, volunteers) with empathy, respect and compassion as valuable and complex human beings who matter;
    • is dialogical, seeing all those involved as partners in the development of understanding and solution finding;
    • is marked by genuine curiosity and transparency;
    • is marked by creative ways of exploring issues relevant to the circumstances;
    • prepares those who will be involved to address anxieties and fears, is more likely to help bring about genuine change than one marked by fear, threat, fixed and strongly held positions, and inflexibility.

    GS2295 speaks of ‘disseminating learning’ from Reviews (p. 42):

    The Church Bodies involved in the case under review should give consideration at the earliest possible point as to how the learning from the Review will be shared and disseminated …

    GS2295 continues:

    On a wider scale, the NST will have a role in reviewing the themes that are emerging from all the Reviews carried out. This will feed back into the NST’s planning cycle for learning and development thus closing the learning loop. Linking the recommendations to the Safeguarding Standards also allows for them to be included in any further external audits, again ensuring that the learning is captured and implemented.

    It isn’t clear how the ‘learning loop’ operates or how it impacts on learning and development – especially in the light of the evidence of multiple references in IICSA and LLRs, connecting discriminatory policies towards LGBT+ people and catastrophic safeguarding failures.

    1. Conclusion

    On the basis of the evidence gathered and presented here, it appears that none, or very little, of the insights and learning from IICSA and other independent Reviews on catastrophic safeguarding failures in the Church of England and the connection to discriminatory attitudes towards LGBT+ people, are being incorporated into our safeguarding policies, structures and training or are part of our deliberations about the inclusion of LGBT+ people in the life of the Church of England, in any meaningful way.  External Reviewers cited in this paper are consistent in making the connection.  Despite this, over its six years, the LLF process did not incorporate the learning from IICSA and LLRs.

    GS2295 speaks of the importance of ‘reflective exercises’ (p. 43):

    One of the marks of a healthy organisational culture is when the individuals who comprise the organisation are personally self-reflexive and welcome feedback from others. Self-reflexivity is different from just self-reflection because it contains the idea of turning self-reflection in to actual action that brings about change.

    Dr Cooper, in her Stowe and Maids Moreton LLR, states:

    Recommendation 13: Provide strong leadership in responding to the recommendations of the case review, to ensure that they are delivered both within the Diocese and raise for wider action within the Church of England.[27]

    It remains to be seen where this leadership is being shown or where the ‘turning self-reflection in to actual action that brings about change’ is being done.

    Notes:

    [1] See also Helen King:  https://viamedia.news/2020/10/16/why-the-church-of-england-must-connect-the-dots-iicsa-and-llf/#_ftn1

    [2] This paper predates the publication of Makin on John Smyth and what will almost certainly have to be an independent Review of Soul Survivors, given the network of conflicted interests.

    [3] IICSA identified a number of deficiencies in the Butler-Sloss Review, which failed to mention the abuse committed by Bishop Peter Ball.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-chichester-peter-ball/case-study-1-diocese-chichester/b5-butler-sloss-report.html

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82HzdoOAC-4

    https://audioboom.com/posts/2765739-on-31-12-14-phil-johnson-released-this-march-2011-recording-of-his-discussion-with-butler-sloss

    [4] The LLR on Jonathan Fletcher (March 2021) notes how the removal of his licence was seen as weaponizing safeguarding: ‘“When the announcement was made by Southwark [Diocese] about [the] removal of Jonathan’s licence – I thought and others – this is [a] stitch up – yet again Southwark having a go at the conservative constituency”’.  See C5.3 and C4.6.2.  https://walkingwith.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Final+Report+of+ECW+Review_March+2021.pdf

    [5] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2018-07/general-synod-july-2018-questions-paper.pdf

    [6] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/general-synod-july-2019-questions.pdf

    [7] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/report-of-the-peter-ball-review-210617.pdf.  See 5.7.

    [8] 1.3; see also 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.10, 5.11.  https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/61f2fd86f0ee5/content/pages/documents/20211012-doc-events-in-stowe-and-maids-moreton.pdf

    https://www.oxford.anglican.org/stowe-maids-moreton.php

    [9] Gibb on Ball, 5.7.3.

    [10] Cooper on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 5.10.  https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/61f2fd86f0ee5/content/pages/documents/20211012-doc-events-in-stowe-and-maids-moreton.pdf.  Dr Cooper cites the House of Bishops’ Report (2017), ‘Promoting a Safer Church policy, the Church of England’s policy for Children, young people and adults’, p. 5.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/cofe-policy-statement.pdf

    [11] Cooper on Stowe and Maids Moreton, 5.11.

    [12] IICSA (5 March 2018), p. 116.  Ms Scolding also queried:  ‘How far did the church’s position in respect of the ordination of women and the fact that the church was, until 1992, a largely male-led-and-run institution impact upon the management of safeguarding, if it did so at all?’  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221214224622/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4335/view/5-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [13] IICSA (23 July 2018), pp. 77-8.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215041430/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/5977/view/23-july-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [14] IICSA (14 March 2018), pp. 84-8.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215014004/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4690/view/14-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [15] IICSA (14 March 2018), pp. 143-4.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215014004/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/4690/view/14-march-2018-anglican-public-hearing-transcript.pdf

    [16] For critical responses to Lord Williams (14, 15 March 2018), see https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/2018/03/.

    [17] IICSA (24 July 2018), p. 25.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221216171917/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/6029/view/public-hearing-transcript-24-july-2018.pdf

    [18] See p. 12.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/12831/view/ACE027710.pdf.

    [19] IICSA (11 July 2019), pp. 204-5.  https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215044054/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/12777/view/public-hearing-transcript-11-july-2019.pdf

    [20] https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-church/executive-summary.html (October 2020).

    [21] 4.5.  See also 14.  https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/anglican-church-safeguarding-church-england-and-church-wales-investigation-report.html

    [22] https://www.london.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/AG-report-Final-Report.pdf

    [23] See pp. 283-85.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/general-synod-group-of-sessions-july-2022_0.pdf

    See above Archbishop Welby’s Second Witness Statement on 25 June 2019:  ‘I am informed by Mr Tilby that these [LLF] resources will be reviewed by the NST before they are finalised to ensure that they sufficiently address safeguarding related issues.’

    [24] 9 Feb 2023, p. 172.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/updated-report-of-proceedings-feb-2023.pdf

    [25] pp. 370-71.  https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/updated-report-of-proceedings-feb-2023.pdf

    [26] https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/questions-notice-paper-july-2023.pdf

    [27] Stowe and Maids Moreton (7.7, p. 26).

  • Safeguarding: When Good Reviews Go Bad

    by Andrew Graystone, who uncovered the abuses by John Smyth in a series of reports on Channel 4 News in February 2017; he continues to advocate for victims of church abuse, and speaks regularly with survivors of John Smyth.

    There have now been seven public reviews of the activities of John Smyth – or eight if you count my own book, Bleeding for Jesus. The first was Operation Cubic, which was conducted by Hampshire Police, and ended with a referral to the CPS. Then, after the revelations were made public, the Scripture Union commissioned a review into its own involvement. A review was conducted for Winchester College, where Smyth groomed many of his victims. The Titus Trust has held two reviews – one into Smyth’s abuses and a second, by the safeguarding agency ThirtyOne:Eight to conduct a review of its internal culture. The Advance network of independent churches carried out its own investigation, which focussed particularly on the involvement of its former leader PJ Smyth, who is John Smyth’s son. And finally, we await the arrival of the Makin Review, which was commissioned by the Church of England.

    As someone who has reluctantly become something of an expert on John Smyth’s abusive career, I have participated in all of these reviews. Aside from taking a huge amount of time, this has given me some insight into how such reviews are conducted, and what makes them effective or ineffective.

    It is worth remembering that one reason why there were so many reviews into the one narrative is that the key agencies at the centre of the case refused to work together on a single inquiry.

    Speaking to Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News in April 2019, Archbishop Justin Welby explained that only a joint inquiry would be effective. “Unless you can get everyone in, you’re never going to get anywhere near the truth.” Nevertheless, having failed to persuade everyone to participate, the Church of England eventually commissioned its own review. That review – scheduled to last nine months – has now lasted five years, and there is still no date for its publication.

    It is worth rehearsing the gloomy history of delay and obfuscation in this inquiry.  The Church of England’s intention to hold an inquiry was first announced by the then Bishop for Safeguarding, Peter Hancock, on the morning after Smyth died in August 2018. By then Smyth’s abuse had already been in the public domain for almost 18 months. Justin Welby had been aware of it for over five years (discounting earlier knowledge, which he first denied, but now admits.) The first formal complaint had been made to the Church of England six years earlier. And of course many key figures in the church, some of them at the highest level, had carried the knowledge for a staggering thirty-five years.

    Even so, the inquiry was not formally launched for a further twelve months. It was scheduled to last nine months, meaning that it would be published in May 2020. Since then there have been no less than six announcements that the inquiry was going to be late. In every case, survivors were promised that it was imminent. In January 2022, survivors and General Synod were told that the first drafts would be presented in April 2022. They weren’t. Then General Synod members were told that it would be published in the Autumn of 2022. Of course it wasn’t. The National Safeguarding Team has stopped making announcements about the timetable.

    There are two important questions. Firstly, what has caused the seemingly endless delay?  Secondly, why does this matter?

    Bishop Jonathan Gibbs, the second of three “Lead Bishops” to preside over the review so far, told Synod that “There have been significant delays due to COVID and the exceptionally high volume of information.” Blaming the pandemic is convenient, but disingenuous. The review was already well behind schedule before lockdown was imposed. In any case, very little of the work has been done face to face. Blaming the unexpected amount of evidence is a nonsense too. What on earth was the church expecting? They knew when they started that there were over 100 victims, four decades of history, and scores of witnesses to hear from. If they were taken by surprise by the “high volume of information” it can only be because they weren’t paying attention to what the victims and others had been telling them.

    The core problems that have caused the delay are quite different. They are:

    1) An insufficiently experienced reviewer. Perhaps Keith Makin will yet turn out to have been an inspired choice for this important role. We have not been told by what process he was given the job. He had never previously conducted a review on anything like this scale. He had held senior social work management posts, and had been an Independent Scrutineer for local authorities, but he had little forensic experience, and nothing that would seem to prepare him for such a complex case. He also had little experience of the church’s structures and processes.

    2) Lack of resources. The church decided that the task of reviewing a case lasting over forty years with more than a hundred victims could be handled by one part-time reviewer contracted for just two days a week, with a part-time assistant. This is far less resource than you would expect in comparable reviews. Of course it is not Mr Makin’s fault that he was given such inadequate resources for such a huge task. The church either didn’t recognise the scale of the review it was launching, or simply didn’t care. For example, the review was launched without the necessary GDPR arrangements in place. It was seven months out of a scheduled nine before interviews could be recorded and transcribed. Staggeringly, the necessary privacy notice was not issued until a full year later. On the same day that the Smyth Review was announced, the church announced another review, this time into the child rapist Revd Trevor Devamanikkam. That case – though no less serious – had just one perpetrator and one known victim. Yet it was set up with the same timetable and resources. Perhaps the church was simply not thinking clearly about what it was doing. Or perhaps the prime motivation for launching these reviews was just to be able to send out a press release saying that it was doing something.

    3) Lack of purpose, drive and consistency in the commissioning body. The church still appears to have little idea about how reviews work. They don’t seem to be able to distinguish between a review, an inquiry and an investigation. To this day it remains unclear who wants the Makin Review, why they want it and why it needs to be done in a timely way. As usual, nobody even knows what will happen to the report. Will it be read by bishops? Debated at Synod? Or just sit online somewhere for a few weeks before it is lost?

    4) Lack of oversight. Best practice for a review like this is to appoint an independent accountability body, separate from the reviewer and the commissioning body, whose task is to monitor the progress and scope of the review. That body might include interested parties, including representative survivors. When Thirty-One:Eight reviewed the abuses of Smyth’s fellow-abuser Revd Jonathan Fletcher, just such a body was appointed. They were able to provide assurance about the independence and thoroughness of the review, and also added their own statement to be read alongside it. Makin has not had this advantage. He has had no one asking him what is going on (with the exception of dogged Smyth survivors who take it upon themselves to do so informally). He has had no one asking him awkward questions about such crucial areas as record-keeping, confidentiality, resources or timescale. And when (or if) the review is published, there will be no one independent to give it an imprimatur. It will be, effectively, an undefended reviewer saying ‘This is how I see things.’ I fear that the lack of an independent scrutiny body is going to be particularly awkward over the next few months, if those who find themselves criticised by Mr Makin decide to cut up rough.

    So there are several reasons why this review has struggled from the start, and why it is so shockingly delayed. But why the rush anyway? Conducting reviews is a lucrative business. The author of an earlier church review reported privately but proudly that he had bought a London flat with the proceeds. In 2019 the NST themselves inadvertently leaked Mr Makin’s day rate – at that stage, it was £650 per day. The Church of England has been extremely chary about revealing the overall cost of the Makin Review. Bishop Jonathan Gibbs was asked about this directly twice in General Synod questions in November 2022. He would only say “There is always a financial cost associated with any Independent Review, however this must be balanced with establishing the truth and listening to the voices of victims and survivors.” Synod members might feel they have a right to greater clarity.

    Why does all of this matter? Well, first, because the delay makes the review weaker. In the time between the disclosure of Smyth’s abuse twelve years ago in 2012 and the publication of the inquiry (2024? 2025?), some key figures have conveniently died. They include Smyth himself, who consequently managed to escape justice from the church, as well as the criminal courts. Revd David Fletcher, who probably did more than anyone else to enable Smyth’s career of abuse, has also died. Others have retired, or will do so before publication, placing them beyond the effective reach of the church’s disciplinary measures.

    In the course of writing my book, I approached a number of senior clergy who were implicated in the failure to stop Smyth’s abuse. In several cases they said they weren’t willing to speak to me until the Makin review was complete. That was now several years ago. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave assurances that if any currently serving church officers were found to have failed in their safeguarding duties, they would be investigated and disciplined whilst the review was in progress. To my knowledge only two very junior clergy have been sanctioned, and one of those was long retired. My book, published in October 2022, identified nine currently serving bishops who appeared to have failed in their safeguarding duties. They include Archbishop Justin Welby. Have any of them been disciplined?

    The delay also matters because there are two over-riding reasons to hold such an inquiry. The first is to restore confidence in the church. The hope is that the inquiry will draw a line under a terrible episode. Ideally it would show that the church did not make any mistakes in its handling of disclosures of abuse, but that’s unlikely to be the case. The alternative is that the inquiry should demonstrate that, even though the church made mistakes, it will not do so again. Lessons have been learned; processes have been changed; staff have been retrained or removed.  This is the basis on which trust can be rebuilt. But for that trust to be rebuilt, the process of the review must itself be sound. If there is any suspicion, justified or not, that the church has not been fully transparent, then the measure of trust will decline instead of increasing. If there is any hint that the church has tried to avoid, delay or manipulate the publication, it will do itself more harm than good. As things stand, those suspicions are hard to avoid.

    In this case, the process of the review has served to diminish, not enhance, trust in the church’s safeguarding practices. The review itself has been marked by delay, mismanagement, amateurism, poor communications and obfuscation. These are the same characteristics that allow abusers like Smyth to operate. However good the text of the Makin review is, if and when it is eventually published, no one who has watched the national church’s handling of the process will be able to say with confidence “This could never happen again.”

    The second reason to hold such an inquiry is for the sake of the victims. It is a vital part of the church acknowledging that it made mistakes. Only when the church recognises this publicly is it possible for victims to begin to rebuild their lives, and even in some cases to forgive. If the church, by its acts or by its omissions, allows victims to imagine that it might still be hiding facts, or avoiding facing up to the truth, then instead of healing, victims are re-abused by the process.

    For what it’s worth, I think publication of the Makin Review into John Smyth is still a long way off. Even if the first draft of the text is complete, there is a long way to go before publication. Parts of it have been seen by a number of Smyth’s victims, but it has not yet begun the lengthy representation process known as ‘Maxwellisation’. In other words, anyone who is referred to critically in the text will have a right to read it, and respond to what they perceive as factual errors. This isn’t going to be quick. There are likely to be many people on the wrong end of Mr Makin’s pen. Many of them will call in lawyers. Those who are unfamiliar with the process of reviews may not realise that before a text is published there can be endless legal battles over what it can or can’t say. The church is almost continually waging these battles with reviewers. Given that one of the individuals criticised for his failures over Smyth is almost certainly going to be Archbishop Welby, I would be surprised if the report is published before his retirement is announced.

    When it is published, what can we expect? Will anyone take responsibility for the largest abuse scandal in the Church of England for a century by offering their resignation? I doubt it. Will there be sanctions for those who enabled Smyth to abuse, or failed to act on what they knew? There’s no precedent for that. Will the report be debated by General Synod? I don’t suppose so. What then? I imagine there will be the usual apology from Lambeth Palace, posted on a website somewhere. Such apologies are now so familiar that I could have a good stab at drafting it for them. Then it will be business as usual for the church. If there is another John Smyth out there, and to my certain knowledge there is, he will surely breathe a sigh of relief.

    The scope of the Makin Review was always limited. For instance, it doesn’t look into Smyth’s time in Africa, where most of his abusing occurred. Nor will it look at the influence of the Iwerne network in the Church of England, nor the theological drivers that motivated the cover-up of his abuse over three decades.

    We are on to our third Lead Bishop and our fifth Director of Safeguarding since the review was announced. Synod and Archbishops’ Council are hopelessly distracted. In the absence of an independent supervisory group there is little support or accountability for Mr Makin, and little pressure to get his work over the line. What if he has found himself out of his depth in the scale, detail and politics of the process? In the meantime, he is earning handsomely from the delay – although that hasn’t prevented him from taking another role as Independent Scrutineer for the London Borough of Croydon. Perhaps most significantly, a significant number of senior church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have good reason to want the review to continue indefinitely.

    Perhaps there is another way forward. The Church could acknowledge that the Makin process has broken down. Given that there have been seven reviews and a book, a barrister could be appointed with two months to produce a digest of what is known so far.  There would be unanswered questions, but they could be identified as such. Without such a breakthrough, my own growing expectation is that the review will never be published.

  • Are Churches Safe?

    by a member of the Anglican Survivors Group

    I write this small piece as a survivor of a clergy sexual abuse ring. I was a core participant in the Anglican IICSA inquiry and it took me over 30 years of fighting to get my abusers jailed.

    One of the recurring memories of the abuse was desperately trying to report it and not being heard. The lack of ability to effectively report meant the abuse continued for many years.

    The church has a long history of covering up abuse and allowing it to continue in order to protect the reputation of the church. Many instances were revealed publicly at IICSA, yet still to this day no one has been disciplined or sacked for their part in allowing our abuse to continue.

    It was for this reason that many years ago a number of survivors, among them myself, approached the then-new head of the National Safeguarding Team, expressing how important it is for safeguarding to be clearly visible both on parish websites and in church buildings. When the Parish Safeguarding Handbook was published it included on p.2 the need to CLEARLY display on the FRONT page of parish websites the parish’s safeguarding arrangements.

    The reason for it to be on the front page was so that the search engines would pick it up. Research from the NSPCC and evidence given to IICSA both confirm that many teenagers (and younger) have access to mobile phones and the first place they look for information is via search engines.

    If the parish website just has a small hidden link to a document that only gives your policy, with no contact numbers, then you have missed the entire point.

    Sadly, even to this day many parishes have nothing on their front pages, and many still have nothing at all.

    Several years ago now, the same group of survivors started trawling through some 12000 websites. We found compliance with this basic requirement to be under 50%. We emailed and telephoned many parishes, most of whom weren’t even aware of the requirement. Very slowly, compliance started rising. But some parishes just refused.

    Some used the “due consideration” loophole where they said they had given safeguarding requirements due consideration and decided not to do it. That led to a further campaign by survivors to close this loophole.

    Eventually, after much chasing, we were left with just over 600 parishes against whom we issued CDMs. This was the wake-up call many needed. We agreed to withdraw the CDMs if the parish became compliant. Many however simply put up a copy of their policy. hidden on page 28!

    Some parishes have the clergy as the Parish Safeguarding Officer or contact, which is totally unacceptable. Some churches share a safeguarding officer with other churches and at a parish level the officer is never present at church.

    Sadly, there are some very evil people out there, including clergy, who will do the unthinkable. A successful DBS check may just mean that a person has not yet been caught. A DBS check doesn’t stop abuse: but good Safeguarding practice may. And one of the keys to that is that people are able to report things as soon as anything inappropriate happens.

    Posters need to be clearly visible to all. They need to be understood by a child. They need to be at a height where children can read them.

    The campaign led to some excellent diocesan responses. The Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser at Salisbury came up with a simple poster that simply said:

    “Is someone hurting you?”
    “WE CARE. Please call 01234 567890”

    Safeguarding is NOT about an admin exercise. It’s not about traffic lights on a Diocesan dashboard. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of a vulnerable child or adult.

    We ask, as survivors ourselves, one simple question. If YOU were 10 years old and trying to report abuse, could you?

  • Missing, Between Synods

    by Professor Helen King, lay preacher in the Diocese of Oxford, member of General Synod and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group

    This is a funny old month. It started with what many members regarded as one of the worst Synods yet, and is ending in gloomy cold wet weather which makes those five very full days seem like a long time ago. So much at Synod was left unanswered, unresolved, and now here comes August – the month when the Church of England, along with other churches, seems to stop. In my parish, the choir has the month off, and the various groups take a pause from their activities. Sunday services remain otherwise unaffected, and we pray for those on their holidays, not always thinking of those who for whatever reason remain at home. At national level, too, it all stops: no more meetings of the assorted councils which run the Church of England until September.

    But maybe that’s not entirely the case; maybe the Archbishops’ Council meets, otherwise I am not sure how to understand the response from the Bishop of Stepney to a Question in July about the review published by the Independent Safeguarding Board just before it was dissolved – the Spindler report into the handling of the case of Mr X. She said that the outcome of a July meeting of the National Safeguarding Steering Group would be presented to the Archbishops’ Council (Q.108 here) and, since the Spindler report was expecting a response within 4 weeks, her response wouldn’t make much sense if the Archbishops’ Council won’t say anything until September. The most recent meeting of that NSSG listed online is dated 11 April 2023 (!) and I am not aware of any list of dates when the Archbishops’ Council meets or any record of what it does at its meetings.

    And that’s part of the feeling of ‘missing’. We don’t know who is meeting, we don’t know what they are discussing and we don’t know who makes the decisions. And yet here we are with – apparently – nothing happening.

    The contrast with the time at Synod couldn’t be greater. Synod feels frenzied, this July particularly so with both Living in Love and Faith and Safeguarding on the agenda, and with some days timetabled until 10 p.m. It’s all so intense: the two sessions of Questions, where various bodies of the C of E respond to questions sent in by Synod members, attracted a record number of questions – 237 – many of them, too, around those timetabled presentations on LLF and Safeguarding. The press release on the LLF presentation summarised it as ‘Synod members scrutinise work since February vote’ but I would hardly call listening to a presentation ‘scrutinising’. In answering one of the Questions on the LLF documents, the Bishop of Lichfield assured us that ‘we are working to bring draft guidance to the November meeting of the General Synod’ but then in the LLF presentation itself the Bishop of Guildford cast doubt on that timetable. So, even within the July Synod, it all depended on how you interpreted what was said.

    On the key topics of the July Synod, we kept hearing answers on the lines of ‘We don’t know but it may all be clear by Sunday’ or ‘We don’t know but we are working on it’. In fact on Sunday, the day of the Safeguarding presentation, the general atmosphere of mistrust came to a head. The presentation was due to have been by the members of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) but changed because the Board had just ceased to exist. The two members of that Board who were no longer able to present to us were in the public gallery and, after some convoluted attempts to find an appropriate standing order, were allowed to address us briefly. It remained unclear what had gone wrong and how it had been decided that the Board should cease to exist.

    And the confusion didn’t stop when we went home from Synod. In the days immediately afterwards, both Meg Munn and Maggie Atkinson published their own statements about what went wrong with the ISB. Then Archbishops’ Council met, and later on 20 July it was announced that Professor Alexis Jay, who had led IICSA, was going to come in to develop proposals for a fully independent safeguarding structure. Clearly, she hadn’t been approached the day before. Was this the plan all along? Who invited her to take this role?

    Thinking back to Synod, for me the low point was the attempt by Gavin Drake to bring to debate his motion asking for an independent inquiry into our Safeguarding structures. It failed, due to a requirement for a 75% majority to suspend the relevant standing order (SO 8 (1)). This was one of the many technical points which Synod members have to grasp. The standing order states that “Where a member in his or her private capacity tables a motion arising out of business specified in the agenda, the motion is to be subject to the time allowed in the agenda for the consideration of that business.” But the agenda had ‘timed business’ – business which has to start at the time specified – and this standing order meant that Gavin’s motion ran out of time. Many members of Synod were not in the debating chamber and so could not vote to suspend it and thus to allow his motion to be discussed, and there was no warning bell to bring them back in. And then Gavin resigned: a real loss to the House of Laity.

    As my fellow member for Oxford diocese, Mark Bennet, has commented, “The 75% rule is there for a reason, of course, but given the extraordinary circumstances, the instinct of so many members of Synod to deal with the issue rather than leaving it hanging had a great deal to commend it. There is now anger not addressed which will spill over into November and perhaps beyond.”

    And that’s the problem. Much is unresolved. Much remains unclear. We don’t meet again until November – a ‘bonus’ meeting, as usually we manage with two residential meetings, in February and July. Is the hope that all the upset, the confusion, the mistrust of July will have been forgotten by November? I somehow doubt it. And my own hope is that the many unanswered questions will be remembered rather than falling into the black hole of the month when everything stops in the Church of England.

  • A Peek under the Episcopal Carpet – Past Cases Review 2 and its Blind Spots

    by the Revd. Dr. Brenda Wallace, a former member of General Synod, an active member of Broken Rites, and part of the organising group of the Campaign for Equal Marriage

    Last week, without much fanfare, the Church of England published the Past Cases Review 2. This summarises the thorough investigation into past cases of abuse which have been “swept under the carpet” by church authorities across the country. Time and time again, the need to protect the ‘integrity’ of the organisation has been prioritised over the need to protect the individual victims of abuse.

    The report notes that: ‘The review of the 75,253 files within the scope of PCR2 was conducted by independent reviewers across the dioceses and other church bodies between July 2019 and April 2022. […]  The independent reviewers identified 383 new safeguarding cases relating to children and vulnerable adults’ (p. 11).

    The continued scandal of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Church of England has – rightly – received much attention in recent years, as the Church has been forced by IICSA to wash its dirty linen in public and admit to its persistent failures to protect its most vulnerable members. Despite much handwringing by Bishops and Archbishops, and in General Synod, there is still a long way to go, both to address and redress the past failings, and to create a safer church.

    I don’t want to minimise this appalling record of cover-up of the abuse of children and young people within the church. But I want to draw out two areas of abuse which continue to receive little or no acknowledgement in discussions about safeguarding.

    The first is around the whole issue of human sexuality. Sexual orientation is a protected characteristic under equality legislation. Yet the Church has continued to allow discrimination against LGBTIQA+ members. In over 400 pages, the Living in Love and Faith book only mentions safeguarding twice, briefly, and in both cases, in relation to children. There is no comment on the constant abuse, marginalisation, and exclusion that many gay people receive in their churches and in social media. Pressure by some individuals and organisations for churches to be exempt from proposed government legislation to ban conversion therapy highlights the safeguarding issues and the danger that young people are in within certain church traditions, where attempts to ‘cure’ them of their supposedly aberrant sexuality continue to be practised.

    When the LLF discussions were taking place last year, the Campaign for Equal Marriage ran a series of workshops where those sympathetic to our aims could have a conversation within a safe space about the LLF Report. We heard numerous stories of individuals who had not felt that discussions within their Diocese or local church were a safe space for them to be, and that the Pastoral Principles which were supposed to provide protection were frequently ignored. While taking part in the national Safeguarding training required regularly for all licensed clergy, I raised the question of safeguarding for LGBTIQA+ people within church contexts. Those delivering the course looked puzzled that I even raised the question, and quickly replied that it was not part of the training. Of course, all young people and vulnerable adults need to be protected within the church, but an awareness of the particular vulnerability of young LGBTIQA+ people in our churches appears not to feature.

    The PCR2 report briefly mentions bullying (p. 107), quoting from a case of a priest who was persistently bullied by a member of the congregation and was forced out of post, which the church authorities dealt with inadequately. But there is no mention of numerous recent cases where gay, partnered priests were forced by Bishops to relinquish their licences and their posts because of their desire to marry their partners, the alternative being to live in enforced celibacy. The lack of pastoral care for clergy in many such cases, and the attempts of church authorities to suppress complaints, is well documented. This is yet another area where safeguarding is inadequate, and the institution is protected in preference to the individual.

    The second area which I would like to highlight is the issue of domestic abuse within clergy marriages. This does indeed get a mention in the PCR2 report – three whole pages (pp. 102 ff.)! It wryly notes that ‘The number of domestic abuse cases seems low for the size of the organisation and where allegations are made there is an inconsistent approach to investigating and identifying risks. There were cases where no final outcome was recorded, which could suggest that risks were left unmanaged, and no safeguarding was put in place’ (p. 103).

    In this context, I am writing as a member of Broken Rites, a charity providing mutual support when clergy marriages fall apart, founded in 1983 at the initiative of Frank Field MP. We are an ecumenical organisation with members from other UK Church denominations; it’s obvious that this is not just an Anglican issue. Our broken and bruised members, victims of failed clergy marriages, tell time and time again of the way in which the circumstances of their breakdown have been swept under the carpet by church authorities. These spouses, the majority of whom are women, have often suffered decades of physical or emotional abuse, coercive control, or narcissistic behaviour. Others have seen their marriage ripped apart by adulterous relationships by their priest partner. While marriage breakdown is always painful, it is particularly so for clergy spouses who have to leave their home in the vicarage, their own role within the church and its supportive network, and fight for financial support for themselves and any children. Some have to find paid employment for the first time, after many years of faithfully supporting their clergy partner’s parish work. Whatever their situation, they face being forced out of most of their familiar settings to make a fresh start, while recovering from the trauma of an abusive or broken relationship.

    The Church does now make some practical support and financial provision for separated clergy spouses, but the support is patchy and poorly signposted, and inconsistent across the country. In many cases, the offending priest gets to stay in post and in the clergy house, whilst the spouse is the one to move out. Even more patchy is the pastoral and emotional support for the departing spouse. Once again, the Church protects its own and has prioritised the safeguarding of the Church’s reputation rather than the individual. This is not the space to tell my own story, simply to note that I talk from personal experience.

    The stories we hear through Broken Rites are only a few – the stories of women and men who have had the courage to break away, despite the emotional and financial cost. We have no idea how many more continue to suffer because of the pressure to hold on to their marriage vows no matter what, and because of the lack of awareness of the problems by church authorities. Allegations of abuse by their partners have been repeatedly ignored or downplayed.

    PCR2 has taken a peek under the carpet and found a massive pile of debris. But, if you will excuse the mixed metaphor, there’s still an awful lot of muck left in the Augean stable under the episcopal floor-covering.

  • Clericalist Individualism? Power, Abuse and Transformation

    by Ruth Harley, a curate in the Diocese of Oxford, and co-author of “Being Interrupted: Re-imagining The Church’s Mission From The Outside, In” (SCM Press, 2020), whose research interests focus around feminist ecclesiology and questions about how power is understood and used within the church.

    Immersing myself in the transcripts of the IICSA Anglican Hearings as the basis of my MA dissertation has been by turns frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, upsetting and enraging. But it has also been very enlightening. Much here tells us deep and uncomfortable truths about the church: who we are, how we fail and how we handle failure, what and whom we prioritise and at what cost. IICSA’s October 2020 report, at the very least, should be compulsory reading for anyone with any measure of responsibility or authority within the church.

    The primary outcomes from the IICSA process must, of course, be centred around safeguarding, and around the needs and voices of survivors of abuse, far too often side-lined and retraumatised by the church. There is a very real need for repentance in response to IICSA’s findings: for a willingness to confront the ways in which the church has too often been a safer place for abusers than for their victims, and a willingness to invest not only money and resources, but also our time, care and attention into the radical changes which are needed.

    But the impact of the IICSA findings extends far beyond their specific scope. The Anglican Hearings have been an apocalyptic event in the life of the Church of England (and, to a lesser extent, the Church in Wales), both in the sense that they were devastating, and in the literal sense of the term ‘apocalypse’ – that which reveals. IICSA has revealed the devastating extent of abuse in the church. It has revealed some of the systemic and cultural flaws which have led to the church becoming a place where abuse can thrive, where the reputation of the institution and powerful individuals within it are prioritised at the expense of victims and survivors of abuse, with those who report abuse ignored, stigmatised and re-abused by the very people and systems supposed to protect them.

    IICSA has also revealed something about what the church is, and how power is understood and (mis)used within the body of Christ. One of the factors I identified in my research into the ecclesiologies expressed during the Anglican Hearings was something I have termed ‘clericalist individualism’.

    It’s well documented that clericalism is part of the mechanism by which clergy who abuse can go unchallenged; see for example Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson’s To Heal and Not to Hurt and Gilo and Janet Fife’s Letters to a Broken Church. A culture of ‘Father knows best’ is not one in which transparency and mutual accountability can flourish. But, deeply intertwined with that clericalism, there’s a kind of individualism which sees significant information and decision-making – in short, significant power – rest with individuals (often, though not always, ordained) in ways which both render those individuals unaccountable, and obscure or distort the proper nature of the church as an interdependent body, characterised by mutuality. This clericalist individualism is not a problem of ‘the top’: it’s a danger at every ‘level’ of the hierarchical structure, from home groups, to the parish, the diocese, and the national church.

    The apocalyptic revelation of the church’s failings which IICSA provides may not seem like any ground for hope. But we are a church which both preaches and (at its best) lives resurrection: life which emerges out of death and trauma, and meets us on the road in unexpected ways. In revealing the sins which beset the church God is, I believe, doing a new thing, calling us to a new understanding of who we are and what it means to be church.

    And it starts with power. Naming, confronting and repenting of all the ways in which power is used in the church to silence, oppress and abuse. And then daring to believe that another way is possible. Resources within and beyond the church’s traditions can help us with that re-imagining. For over half a century, feminist theologians have been calling the church to renounce hierarchical power – ‘power over’ – and embrace a different kind of power, rooted in mutuality, relationship and solidarity – ‘power with’ and, as laid out in Anna Mercedes’ book of the same title, Power For.[1]

    It is a call which the church has so far largely chosen to ignore and suppress.  But as we confront the endemic nature of abuse within the church, and as we wrestle too with the ways in which oppression (on grounds of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and more) thrives within the body of Christ, it is a call which has never been more urgent. God, whose way is love and whose work in Jesus Christ is the work of liberation, is calling us, the church, to embrace the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit in our midst, and to step into new ways of understanding how power can and should function in the church, so that we can grow more fully into the body we are called together to be: characterised by mutuality, interdependence, honesty and accountability and – above all – love.

    It would be all too easy to tell ourselves that abuse of power is something that happens ‘over there’ – only within ‘the hierarchy’, or only in churches ‘not like ours’. That is a comforting but dangerous lie. In any culture in which abuse flourishes, an underpinning myth is that “it could never happen here”. It could. It has. It does and it will. And each of us who are members with one another of the body of Christ have a responsibility to do the work which is required to make that body a safe and supportive church where all can flourish.

     

    [1] Letty Russell’s Church in the Round offers a more general feminist model of church based on mutuality and interdependence.

  • Independence & Safeguarding: Marking Our Own Homework?

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of Living in Love and Faith project

    The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) issued its final report on the Church of England last autumn. Now, the heat is on, because the deadline for the church’s response to the various recommendations is 22 March.

    That explains a lot. It explains why the document on Independent Safeguarding Structures for the Church of England presented to General Synod last Saturday was only sent out two days before the meeting. It also explains why it has so many typos: I’m all in favour of getting on with sorting out the safeguarding mess, but typos don’t give me much confidence. This document was clearly completed in a rush. The House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council each had just one week in which to suggest changes. One revealing typo features in a section about how ‘club mentality’ is “exacerbated in an institution where ordination conveys authority which can leads to a culture of clericalism in which challenging the authority of the ordained becomes a kind of spiritual offence”. “Can leads to”? I’m guessing that this started out as “leads to” but someone didn’t like the suggestion that clericalism is an inevitable part of ordination and wanted to add that “can”.

    It’s a good point about how we weaponize the spiritual, but was it right to make that change? Fiona Gardner’s Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church (2021) notes how difficult it is to challenge the authority of the ordained. In 2005, while Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser for Bath and Wells, she was shut out by the diocesan hierarchy as it closed ranks to protect itself when the abuse carried out by Rev. David Smith became known. In her words, she was “seen as peripheral (not ordained and female and not, as it turned out, ‘in the know’ about what had been going on)”. Smith’s crimes finally came to public attention in 2007.

    That point about how the hierarchy failed to see someone who was “not ordained” as a peer and a professional is revealing; even more, the combination of being “not ordained” and female. Independent Safeguarding Structures includes a point made by the survivors who worked on the current proposals; namely, that clergy training needs more on “the causes and nature of abuse”. For more on that, again, see Gardner, who uses her psychoanalytical experience to think about how the culture of deference – clericalism – protects abusers. She quotes David Runcorn on the role of boarding school values in shaping abusers: “devotion to the team” but also “distrust of women, suppression of emotion, assumptions of patriarchal and hierarchical social ordering, mocking of any feminine trait in men and minimal empathy for the weak and ordinary”. Can the Church of England name and reject these values?

    I was reminded of boarding school culture again when listening to the presentation on Independent Safeguarding Structures made to General Synod. We were told several times that the aim of a new Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) is to avoid the church “marking its own homework”. The phrase was used by Richard Scorer, representing 21 people abused within the Anglican Church, at the end of his submission on the first day of the public hearings at IICSA, 5 March 2018. It has since featured in media headlines about the Peter Ball abuse case, and after the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral had failed to report a disclosure made to her. It has also appeared in headlines around the inquiry into historic child sex abuse in Scottish football.

    But marking your own homework – self-assessment – is a recognised part of teaching at all levels: here is a 2017 document from Trinity College Dublin. And it can be a very good idea. Assessment has traditionally been something from which students are excluded, so that self-assessment changes the dynamics of power as the teacher becomes a facilitator rather than the mysterious source of grades which determine your future. When I’ve used self-assessment as an educator, I’ve found that students are often harsher when marking themselves; they are more aware of the shortcomings of their own work. Self-assessment helps students to understand how they learn. But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – it requires humility and honesty, and those have been qualities in short supply as the Church of England has covered up abuse.

    Independent Safeguarding Structures is certainly an improvement on the usual unconvincing claims that ‘The church has come a long way…’ or ‘That was the past and it’s all fine now’. In Bishop Jonathan Gibbs’ presentation to Saturday’s Synod, he talked about “things we are not doing well now”. Wording like “Given the church’s past failings and present weaknesses in safeguarding…” is far more realistic. Other good things include the acknowledgement of inconsistency between dioceses on safeguarding arrangements; that it is the “internal cultures of the Church of England which too often have resulted in preventing best practice”; the involvement of survivors and the intention to involve them even more as Phase 2 develops; the realisation that it is at the very least problematic to expect someone to trust the institution through which their abuse took place to provide a fair investigation into what happened to them.

    Bishop Jonathan said that the aim of independent safeguarding is to rebuild trust. It’s clear from the document that they are expecting people to be suspicious; even needing to say how important it is to “demonstrate that the appointment process is not being manipulated in favour of ‘safe’ candidates” shows the basic lack of trust that has resulted from this long and sorry history of failing to deal with abuse, as does the wording that this is a search for “a structure which the church may put in place, but which it cannot frustrate”.

    Will this document be enough to satisfy IICSA? It isn’t clear to me whether the aim of Phase 1 of Independent Safeguarding Structures – an Independent Safeguarding Board – is quite what IICSA had in mind. IICSA specifically asked for Diocesan Safeguarding Officers to be able to make decisions independently of the bishop; the present document envisages them instead appealing to the ISB if “difficulties arise within the diocese which compromise their effectiveness”.

    Even if it is enough, we can’t abdicate all responsibility to an independent body. In some ways, we are still going to need to mark our own homework. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it requires not just honesty, but self-knowledge. Marking our own homework can be part of our reflection on how we are doing. Every one of us needs to be aware of our role in preventing abuse. Renaming safeguarding ‘training’ as safeguarding ‘learning’ – something else mentioned on Saturday – isn’t enough.

    As for those who have already suffered at the hands of church abusers, listening, repentance and redress must be prioritized.