ViaMedia

Category: Sexual Abuse

  • Abusers of Faith

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s, Member of General Synod and Vice-Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

    David ison 2

    In June 2017 the Church of England published the Gibb Report An Abuse of Faith, an independent enquiry into the Church’s handling of the Bishop Peter Ball case, a damning exposure of how the Church had responded poorly to Ball’s abuse victims and had colluded to cover up the seriousness of his manipulative conduct.

    Two and a half years later, on 13th and 14th January 2020, came the screening of two hour-long programmes on BBC2 called Exposed: The Church’s dark secret, which used survivor and witness testimony and dramatic reconstructions to bring home the emotional impact of Ball’s betrayal of trust set out in the Gibb Report. The bravery of the survivors of abuse was remarkable; and so was the incompetence and lack of care shown by some senior Church and establishment figures in the 1990s and 2000s.

    The Exposed programme made links between Peter Ball and other paedophile priests, and hinted at a wider public school culture where physical punishment, humiliation, emotional and sexual abuse in the name of ‘manliness’ or even ‘godliness’ facilitated abusive behaviour. Peter Ball’s abuse was on the basis of anglo-catholic monasticism. But it has strong resonances with similar behaviour uncovered in the last few years in relation to John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher, two evangelical Christian leaders who were involved in manipulating young men into stripping and being beaten. In Smyth’s case his abuse was known but dealt with covertly, allowing him to go on abusing in another country.

    Why do men act in such ways? Why does the church establishment not respond with compassion towards their victims and survivors? Two starters for ten.

    The perversion of sexuality.

    Healthy personal identity includes coming to terms with our sexuality, whatever it is, and living it appropriately (whether in relationship or in abstinence). Being gay, lesbian or bisexual is not a perversion if it’s who you are. Denying your sexuality, without integrating it into your life and putting appropriate boundaries around it, is what leads to perversion. Whether it’s a poor public school boarding system or a dysfunctional family which takes away from children the opportunity to learn healthy intimacy and relationships, the repression of emotional warmth and the dis-integration of the self makes people vulnerable to finding their missing intimacy in perverse ways. Sexuality becomes covert, shameful, hidden, and leaks out in ways that can damage other people as well as the person themselves.

    Jesus said, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8.31-2). We need to be truthful and open, rather than dogmatic and hidden. Ball, Smyth and Fletcher were orthodox and exemplary Christians on the surface, but were not truthful about their impulses and who they were, and used others for their gratification rather than admit their problems and find help. They preferred to exercise power and control over other people than be vulnerable themselves. The healthy response is for people to acknowledge their sexuality and seek to integrate it into their lives; and the Living in Love and Faith process in the Church of England offers a further opportunity for all of us Christians from across the spectrum of sexuality and church tradition to face up to our own insecurities and temptations, and build healthy, compassionate and equal relationships with others.

    Beliefs that reinforce separation and authority.

    Common to Ball, Smyth and Fletcher was the use of selective Christian teaching combined with overt and covert appeals to the spiritual authority of the person doing the controlling. They groomed their victims in a spiritual context which validated what they were doing. They also groomed the organisations they worked for into believing that they were great leaders and that what they were doing was normal and right. Ball in particular was spectacularly successful in getting both Church and Establishment to see things from his perspective, treating his victims as being to blame for the problems that he had created, and perpetuating a culture where people with power could not be held to account.

    Any ‘charismatic leader’ runs the risk of allowing pride and control over others to overcome compassion and Christ-like service to them. But that risk is greatly magnified in faith settings where there is a view or expectation that the leader is a saint, or closer to God than others; and also where there are rigid beliefs that keep people from thinking ‘outside the box’ and questioning their leaders, views which stop them hearing the beliefs and experiences of others. The recent book Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse by Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys (SPCK, 2019) gives many examples of how ‘groupthink’ can happen in a church closed off from Christians and others who are different and could challenge the leadership. Such churches can be fertile breeding grounds for abusive behaviour. Whether it’s evangelical or catholic or liberal, any church or group which doesn’t accept difference is more vulnerable to hosting abuse. One reason why Peter Ball didn’t come to justice for so long was that few people wanted to believe that a bishop could be like that, and bishops who knew otherwise weren’t prepared to acknowledge it: protection of their position was more important than caring for others and telling the truth.

    There are catholic cultures and institutions which shelter perverse sexuality, the divide between the aspiration to celibacy and the reality. There are evangelical churches which deny the reality of gay, bisexual, intersex and transgender Christians, in the context of a Church which denies acceptance to gay people wanting Christian and faithful relationships on the pattern of marriage. That’s part of what needs to change in order to be healthy, so that ‘if we walk in the light as [God] himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.’ Until we tell the truth and live in the light – together – we will continue to make it easier for there to be victims of abuse.

    After watching the second programme on Peter Ball, I changed channel to see the news. The second item was the report on child sexual abuse in Rochdale, where Manchester police and social services had written off vulnerable young girls in care and allowed wholesale abuse by men to take place against them. It’s not only the Church that has refused to listen to victims of abuse –  it’s a massive social problem of how men can turn to abusing others instead of taking responsibility for managing their own sexual desires and conflicts in a healthy way. The Church should not collude with it, but be leading the way out of hypocrisy and dis-integration into the light and truth of Jesus Christ.

     

  • A ‘Low & Dishonest’ Decade?

    by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation 

    my-name-is-paul

    Just over 80 years ago W H Auden, in New York, wrote his poem “September 1 1939”:

    I sit in one of the dives
    On Fifty-second Street
    Uncertain and afraid
    As the clever hopes expire
    Of a low dishonest decade:
    Waves of anger and fear
    Circulate over the bright
    And darkened lands of the earth…

    That was then; but is it also now?

    The decade just gone was certainly full of clever hopes – getting Brexit done, spending billions of pounds at no cost to you – which have not yet expired. They continue to be spun, and to dazzle many. And whether the last ten years formed ‘a low and dishonest decade’ depends on your view of what high life and truthfulness might look like. For me, overall, ‘low and dishonest’ says it pretty well.

    Once again, though, just as in 1939 (or still earlier, in 1914) the complacent assumptions of a sunny liberalism have been shaken out. The shadows are in focus once again.

    Clever hopes shine more brightly against a dark background; for this reason President Trump in his 2017 inaugural address referred to the “American carnage” from which only he could save his nation. The trouble with speaking like this is that the evocation of carnage, the summoning of dark spirits, can become unholy flesh, as we see almost weekly in the US, most recently in the shootings in a Texan church which ended when worshippers pulled their own guns and shot the shooter. Carnage indeed.

    But it is not only in the USA that the evocations of darkness can be heard. And wherever they are heard the question follows: in such a time, a time of untruth, a time marked by anger and sudden violence, how can we live truthfully?

    It is at least reassuring that this is not a new question.

    When Pilate asked “What is truth? ” he spoke as a representative of Empire, and over the years Empires have learned that if they cannot define truth, they can at least devalue it. The New Testament can be read as the building of a community in the teeth of Empire, or to use its own imagery in the face of the Beast . The bright hope of the Eucharistic meal shines against the dark background of Judas leading the authorities, seeking the One whose table once included even him. How did our friends live truthfully, they who shared our faith in the crucified God; how did they live in a time of untruth? And for us, as one decade folds itself away and a new one begins, how should we live?

    Living by a Rule

    Here in Liverpool Diocese we aim to shape ourselves by the truth of Jesus Christ, by means of a Rule of Life. It is as simple as we can make it; we say that we are called by God and sent by God; called to pray, read and learn; sent to tell, serve and give. We speak of the inner journey of calling, and the outer journey of sending. We say that praying and reading and learning equip us to tell and serve and give, but we also say that speaking our faith, and struggling to see justice done, and offering and spending our lives, that these things deepen our prayer and our reading and our learning too. Public witness and private devotion form one undivided discipleship.

    My colleagues and I hope that this Rule of Life produces a certain disposition in us, and in all those who seek to follow it, in a time of untruth. We know that our Rule is lived out by each disciple in very specific and concrete ways, but we hope that these ways have a family likeness; the likeness of the siblings of Jesus, together.

    What are some of the marks of this family likeness? I only have space in this small piece to speak of two: of truthfulness and the courage it requires, and of gladness and the discipline it demands.

    Truthfully and Gently

    Several times in this piece I have spoken of “a time of untruth”. I do not only mean by this that our political leaders lie to us. They do, but this is not the worst of it. Worse than lying is the shamelessness that sees no sin in lying, that knows there will be no penalty to being caught lying, that pays no penalty, that systematically devalues truth in the pursuit of popular power.

    In the face of this it is still possible to live as if truth matters. To do so is to live a life of resistance, which needs to be resourced.

    A Rule of Life is merely a spiritual bauble if it does not resource God’s people in truthfulness. To choose to pray to the true God, and read truthfully, and learn the truth together; to tell the truth and to act with truth and if necessary to pay the price of telling the truth; these things matter when the gale of lies is blowing. As the new decade begins I honour those who live, or wish to live, as though these things matter.

    In a time of untruth Christianity itself can be weaponised and distorted like everything else, made into a tool of national populism. The pictures below show how this is being done in our own nation.

    The attempts of populist politicians to appropriate the Bible and the cross, for example in the USA, in Italy, in Hungary, are seen here also with increasing frequency. But this is not an inevitable thing. The excellent work of the group led by the Bishop of Truro on the world-wide persecution of Christians points to the reality of that persecution while resolutely turning its back on the sort of defensive Christian supremacy that is being used to stir up fear of the other, of other faiths, of other lives, of other human beings. Instead, Bishop Philip and his group had a quieter and more demanding aim: to tell the truth.

    There is a price to be paid in telling the truth.

    This applies to telling the truth within the family of God as well as “speaking truth to power”. The remarkable courage shown by victims and survivors of abuse in the Church exemplify this costly price, and I continue to honour their example of truthfulness.

    The last thing that the world needs is a harrumphing self-righteousness from Christians who do not see the glass house in which they live. In its wider life – not only its treatment of victims and survivors – the Church has absolutely no reason to boast, except only to boast of the God of truth under whose judgement and mercy we all stand.

    The Church is a fallen and a broken community, all too often caught up in its own contentions, treating living human beings as “issues” or as the objects of “debate”. This has been the fate of the marginal in the Church to this day. And it will remain so into the New Year unless the truth of human lives – living and breathing human beings – is honoured with the utmost vigilance.

    To prefer abstract words to human breath is to give insufficient attention to the real world, and insufficient devotion to the true God. It is the true God in the real world whom we are to serve, the true God who loved the real world so much as to give the true God’s only begotten One – Jesus – for the real world’s life. To live courageously in a time of untruth is therefore to speak for truth from a place emptied of pride and defensiveness; a place of utter dependence on the Truth which is beyond us and will always be.

    Gladly and Securely

    Speaking the truth can be a hard thing, and too easily a hardening one. This is true for me. The last thing that the world needs is my own harrumphing self-righteousness, adding to and increasing the volume of noise instead of communicating the sound of the One who speaks softly in silence, the One whose yoke is easy and whose burden ls light.

    The God whose truth is beyond us, and always will be, is the same God whose love sustains us, who will love us and the world into wholeness in the end. To live well as a Christian in a time of untruth is therefore to live truthfully and gently; but also to seek another gift from God – not only courage, then, but also an unquenchable gladness – a gladness which has, indeed, been promised.

    Psalm 45 contains a vision of what it is for authority to be truthful and glad:

    Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.
    Your royal sceptre is a sceptre of equity;
    you love righteousness and hate wickedness.
    Therefore God, your God, has anointed you
    with the oil of gladness beyond your companions…

    This image is taken by the writer to the Hebrews and applied specifically and directly to the Lord Jesus . This same Jesus has breathed the Holy Spirit on his friends; this same Jesus has told us that we will know the truth and that the truth will make us free . In the spirit of this Jesus then, understanding who it is that holds and rules the Universe, we are to be glad, even as we speak the truth clearly and resist evil strongly.

    There is no place in this Way for refusing the real world. There is no place in this Way for a furious and impotent anger that so easily turns inward and consumes our friends and ourselves. In short it is good to be clear-eyed, and with clear eyes to be glad.

    In a world marked by a wilful embracing of lies and fantasy on the one hand, and an angry and self-righteousness shrilling of truth on the other, the Gospel of gentle gladness weaves its way. It is easily missed, and its insistence that we live without corrosive anger is easily refused. But to live as a Christian is to trust that the Gospel’s shuttle is weaving our lives too, making it possible for us to be an honest and gentle community in a time of untruth.

    My hope then at the turn of the decade is that the Church will see this today, as Auden saw it 80 years ago:

    … Defenceless under the night
    Our world in stupor lies;
    Yet, dotted everywhere,
    Ironic points of light
    Flash out wherever the Just
    Exchange their messages:
    May I, composed like them
    Of Eros and of dust,
    Beleaguered by the same
    Negation and despair,
    Show an affirming flame.

    A blessed, truthful, glad and happy New Year to all.

     

     

     

  • The Fallout from Tribal Scrums

    by the Rt Revd David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

    david-walker

    With England in a Rugby World Cup final, it’s a good weekend to allow ourselves to be a little bit tribal. I’m not intending to paint a St George’s Cross on my face, but I might allow myself a chorus of “Swing low, sweet chariot” or two. Meanwhile, I shall quite understand the majority of my Welsh, Irish and Scottish friends hoping for a Springbok victory. After all, if you can’t win yourself, at least you can hope that your nearest neighbour and closest rival doesn’t.

    Tribes matter.

    A good portion of my academic research has been around the concept of Belonging (quick ad – my book God’s Belongers has been reprinted ahead of my next opus You Are Mine coming out later this month), and the various tribes we belong with form a core part of who we are. Among our tribe we feel included, protected, valued, understood; apart from it we experience higher levels of loneliness, exclusion, vulnerability and mistrust. A tribe can support quite considerable levels of diversity, about all those issues that aren’t part of its defining identity; it isn’t just a fancier word for a club. The basic cost of joining, and remaining a member of the tribe, may be little more than the expectation of loyalty, even if there are many opportunities to express ones identity in more visible, audible or tangible signs – from rhymes to rituals.

    The tricky issue however, is that loyalty is not a fixed or readily measurable substance.  How do we judge when standing up for our tribe has become a cost no longer worth paying? A cost greater than that which will be exacted from us for leaving.

    The last few months have seen MPs leaving their parties, or having the whip removed, in numbers and across a range of traditions not seen for many decades. An even greater number have rebelled in ways that party colleagues (and even more so the world of social media)  believe amount to treachery. For many, it signals the end of their political career, at least for the foreseeable future. Whichever way they have jumped, and for whatever reason, I would want to at least applaud their bravery. Most have faced not merely harsh words but direct, personal threats of violence.

    So, perhaps swimming against the tide, I think many of our politicians emerge with greater honour than do some of us in the Church.

    There are too many examples of how our ecclesiastical tribes can police a loyalty fiercer than their political equivalents – not least because we often invoke God as our ultimate enforcer. Deserting the tribe is equated with heresy or apostasy, and the leaver treated accordingly. Exalting tribal loyalties so high, putting them almost on a level with God, is perhaps the single most corrupting force at work among Christians of our generation.

    The evidence of that corruption is all too visible. It is deeply shameful when those trusted with responsibility in the Church sexually abuse children. But what survivors repeatedly declare to be even more shameful are the ways in which the Church then works to deny, minimise or cover up the abuse. Often it is those closest to the abuser, the members of the same tribe within the church, who work hardest to deflect scrutiny and prevent accountability, whilst whistleblowers are anathematised.

    Loyalty has been permitted to grow, cancer like, to the point where the potential dishonour faced by the tribe is seen as of greater import than the lives and wellbeing of those abused. Even at a more prosaic level, I come across good missional endeavours being resisted and opposed on grounds that seem more to do with them originating from the wrong tribe than any other defect.

    Like in rugby, if we can’t be victorious ourselves, we don’t want our rivals to enjoy success. St Paul spoke out against such sentiments, challenging those who wished to claim allegiance to Apollos, to Peter, or even to himself, to such an extent that it superseded loyalty to, and unity in, Jesus.

    This is no way to be the Church of God.

    So this weekend, let’s enjoy the rugby. Sing with, or shout at the TV set if we must, whoever we want to win. And let’s enjoy the particular qualities and strengths of our church tribe. But remember to whom it is that we ultimately belong, the only one who merits unswerving loyalty.

     

     

  • Shhh….It’s Secret!!

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Member of General Synod

    Rosie Haarper

    ‘The vows you are about to take are made in the presence of God, who is judge of all and knows all the secrets of our hearts.’

    I get the point. The truth is the truth even when it is well hidden.

    If you believe in a personal God who relates to you rather like a human but with super-powers, then this is a bit creepy. A bit like a cosmic stalker. As a child I used to worry about this idea that God was watching me all the time; not just seeing what I was doing (even going to the loo) but knowing my thoughts and my motives. When I was about eight I accidentally broke an elegant large green vase that my father had just given my mother for their wedding anniversary. Money was tight and I knew he’d saved up hard to afford it and she was delighted with the gift. I worked out that the best strategy was to deal with it straight away. ‘Mummy, Daddy, I’ve done something awful and I’m so, so sorry. You are going to hate me.’ ‘Darling , you know we would never hate you.’ I thought that if I went in hard like that they’d imagine something monumental and be relieved that it was only a broken vase. The strategy worked a treat. I overheard them talking later and although they were fed up about the breakage they were so proud of their daughter who had been really contrite and had owned up to her mistake. I felt terrible. A real sense of shame. Not so much because I’d been manipulative but because of the weight of thinking that God knew and was disappointed in me.

    What we choose to reveal and what we choose to hide. It’s powerful stuff, and mostly it is driven by fear and shame.

    There are good secrets.

    That delicious time when only you know you are pregnant! When you are engaged but haven’t told anyone yet. Maybe, I wouldn’t know of course, when you have won the lottery and keep it under your hat.  But most good secrets are transitory. You hug your good news for a while and then have great fun sharing it.

    There are sensible secrets.

    I’m guess that you, like me, think it is wise to keep some stuff about yourself under wraps. I have grown less and less prone to doing that. For example, I made myself a promise that I would try never to preach anything I didn’t believe. I don’t like that script that says ‘if only they knew what I really think.’

    Then there are bad secrets.

    The most obvious is the abuser who tells their victim ‘this is our special secret’ This is a hugely powerful way of exerting control. For a child there is a toxic mixture of shame and fear that can chase them through the rest of their lives.

    Secrets that are imposed are usually abusive, and the bible is not at all keen on such secrets: Mark 4.22 – ‘Everything that is hidden will be made clear and every secret thing will be made known.’

    The biblical principle seems to be that openness, transparency and mutual accountability are the way to go.

    So why is the Church rife with bad secrets? It operates at a personal level.

    Lizzie Lowe had a secret. She should never have had to believe it should be a secret. Sadly such was the Church culture that she believed her secret  – that she was gay –  was so shameful that it drove her to take her life. Many, many other men and women have kept their sexuality secret, sometimes even from themselves, and it has almost destroyed them.

    It also operates at an institutional level in a weirdly inverted way. Churches are one of the very worst places for confidentiality, and the leaky sieve is usually prayer.

    In the realm of the hierarchy of the C of E secrecy comes naturally.

    We are all waiting for ‘Living in Love and Faith’ – the work is hidden. There are, I believe, copies circulating but not for the plebs. If the Pilling Report process and text had been less secret squirrel we might have been able to challenge the ridiculous reliance on cod-science. Secrecy rarely make things better, but it does make those in the inner circle feel important.

    At General Synod we have the opportunity to ask questions. The idea is that we hold our seniors accountable, but the whole process is risible. Almost every answer amounts to ‘I am sorry I can’t tell you that  – it’s secret.’ I asked how many Non-Disclosure Agreements the Church has entered into and the answer was exactly that. Sorry Rosie  – it’s secret.

    It’s a fine demonstration that information is power. It matters because the NDAs mean that victims have to choose between financial recompense and bringing their wrongs into the light so that others can learn from them. The Church likes them because it saves them an expensive court case, the perpetrator because no-one gets to know what they have done and they may even be free to do it again, but the survivor gets given an other secret and of course secrets is often where it all began  – they are still being controlled. In most cases NDAs are abusive. Secular society is recognizing this but the Church holds on tightly to its culture of secrets.

    There is a parallel biblical strand about darkness and light. The very best thing about flying is leaving a dark rainy airport and rising above the clouds. And I sit by the window and feel the sunshine on my cheek and bathe in the light, and feel nearer to God.

    We are called to walk in the light…

     

     

  • Safeguarding & Survival Systems – Loyalty vs Trust

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper & the Rt Revd Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham – co-authors of ‘To Heal and Not to Hurt’

    Rosie & Alan

    In an interesting quirk of coincidence the book that we co-wrote, To Heal and not to Hurt, was published on the same day as the BBC Panorama program Scandal in the Church of England was broadcast.

    Panorama was very carefully researched and took a cool, measured look at serious safeguarding issues in the Lincoln Diocese. The degree of cover-up was extraordinary, except of course that it was actually all too ordinary. The Safeguarding lead bishop, Rt Revd Peter Hancock, did all the familiar hand-wringing and apologising. He seemed very sincere but offered not the slightest glimmer of hope that anything was actually going to be different.

    In our book we look at 15 examples of the type of abuse that happened (they are true) and is likely to continue to happen within the church. We make some concrete suggestions which, if implemented, would make a considerable difference. Of course there is resistance from the top. They do not want to make any of these changes, mostly it seems because they introduce both accountability and taking responsibility for the consequences of cover up and wrongdoing.

    Instead we have more courses, training, staff and meetings. It’s still a tight circle and needless to say survivors are mostly kept out!

    The other dynamic of the book  (do buy it!) is a long hard look at the internal drivers: theological, cultural, emotional. It comes down to that oft quoted point: ‘good people do good things, bad people do bad things, but it takes religion to make good people do bad things.’ But why? Why when we preach that ‘the truth will set you free’, do we then find ourselves watching open-mouthed as senior clerics make defensive statements that are peppered with inaccuracies. What is happening on the inside that makes such behaviour seem reasonable?

    Whilst discussing with a mutual friend the multiple high octane apologies from people who seem genuinely deeply sorry for the suffering of survivors without being able to help them effectively we came across the following theory.

    It makes a lot of sense, but if it is true it is chilling.  It is based on the concept of Systems of Survival, which was first developed by Jane Jacobs – an American Urban Activist.

    Her basic hypothesis is that that there are only two ways of making a living (ie. Surviving): Either (i) you have Territory, a space on which you can grow, hunt, fish, farm etc , or (ii) you find or make things to Sell.

    Each of these two Systems of Survival is based on a separate set of values.

    The first system is based on Loyalty and the second on Trust.  The Loyalty cultures are Politics, Government, Armies, Church etc.  The Trust cultures are based around commerce where deal-making is vital. As a society we need both.

    The error that we, and many like us have been making, is that we expect folk in the Loyalty cultures to be Trustworthy when we should in fact only trust them to be Loyal.

    This explains why in certain institutions that they may have very tight and well-developed whistle-blowing policies, in the end it is inevitably the whistle blower themselves who lose their jobs.

    It also explains how, if you are critical of anything in the Church the response never ever tackles the actual issue. The offence is not being right or wrong, the offence is being disloyal. The offence is daring to speak at all!

    This would help explain why George Pitcher, who until 2011 was Secretary for Public Affairs for the Archbishop of Canterbury, had no compunction in commenting in a memo: (IICSA Day 8 Page 154-5 (Chichester))

    “+Hind may have to be thrown to the press as a sacrifice. The potential scale of the scandal though — it seems to me — is such that the backwash must reach the Archbishop (quoting from a previously received email).

    The real danger here is that these stories are used to suggest that the CofE is as bad as Rome, both in abuse and cover-up”

    The game is to say what is necessary to protect the Institution. The actual truth is, it seems, secondary.

    And Loyalty is what we have seen in Church Safeguarding.  Loyalty to those who are in the team, in our camp, flying our flag.

    However hard outsiders like the two of us implore the Church to put survivors first they are genuinely unable to do so.  They can tweak the internal systems and processes, and they can wring their hands, but as for putting survivors at the heart of things – that is impossible.

    That place in their heart is already occupied by the Institution.

     

    ‘To Heal and Not To Hurt’ is available for £9.35 from WH Smith and is published by Darton Longman Todd.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • IICSA – Holding the Past to Account?

    by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

    Jeremy Morris

    Now that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has held its preliminary hearing into the next cycle of material coming forward from Church of England institutions, we can look forward – if that is the right term – to further painful examination and analysis in July, when the full hearing takes place.

    Looking through the published transcript of the preliminary hearing, available in full on the IICSA website, it’s clear that the implicit methodology of the hearing will include attention to questions that are essentially historical ones.  In using that word ‘historical’ I don’t mean that they’re far in the past and therefore have a limited bearing on the present – far from it.  You’ve only got to look at the continuing distress of those affected to grasp that, in terms of their impact and the damage they cause, these are present and ongoing matters.  What I mean is that the attention of the inquiry will have to include considering what were the processes and standards of safeguarding in place officially at the time when the various allegations of abuse and institutional failure at issue happened, how they compared with those of other professions or with best practice at the time, and whether – probably the key question – responsible individuals failed to observe the processes and standards in place, or whether the Church and its institutions corporately were at fault for failing to follow contemporary best practice.

    In looking at these matters, the inquiry will have to concern itself to some degree with comparisons between the present and the past, albeit a very recent past.  This is just a specific example of a general issue affecting all such inquiries into the iniquities of the past, of course.  And it leads to a predictably sensitive and acute question – can you judge the behaviour and attitudes of the past (even the recent past) by the standards of the present?  Can you hold the past to account?

    A lot of nonsense is written about this, probably to try to defend the indefensible.  It seems to me that, for a start, there’s an obvious distinction between things that were accepted as wrong at the time they happened just as they are today, but which may have been ignored or covered up, and things (this holds particularly for attitudes I suppose) which we’d now regard as unacceptable but which were widely thought to be harmless or just eccentric or humorous at the time.   The recent death of Windsor Davies, star of the 1970s sitcom ‘It ain’t half hot, Mum’, has evoked memories of a time when mainstream family comedy was shot through with attitudes that today would be regarded as abhorrent.

    How this distinction applies in practice might seem a straightforward matter, and on the whole I think it probably is.  Child sexual abuse falls into the first category, obviously.  A great deal of what passed for popular humour a generation ago might fall into the latter – jokes that we’d now see as obviously sexist or racist, for example, were commonly accepted as harmless in the 1970s and 1980s.

    But there are some grey areas, even so, which can make the matter of holding the past to account a tricky one.

    The distinction certainly isn’t, for example, a simple fault line between actions and words.  Just as some forms of humour were beyond the pale and widely condemned even at the time, some actions in the past were unacceptable to many, but only partially so, and it’s unclear how widely they were criticized.

    Back in the eighties, I was slapped on the bottom on several different occasions by a clergyman at the church I attended.  I was taken aback, a bit shocked even, but I was unsure what to think.  It was in the presence of his partner.  Was it simply playful?  Was it a kind of advance?  It was certainly unwelcome.  But I didn’t say anything at the time, and now realize I probably should have done.  I think I rather minimized the matter, assuming most people would go for the ‘he’s just being light-hearted’ line and it wasn’t worth making a fuss.  Also, I rather liked him, and didn’t want to make things difficult.  A common enough reaction, as I realize!  But looking back, it’s significant I remember distinctly each occasion, and the very fact that I didn’t want it to happen and that it was a repeated pattern puts it in a different light today.

    And this gets more complicated still when we try to take into account the processes by which things in the first category, things which were clearly wrong and widely accepted as such, were handled at the time.  Sometimes – these occasions seem depressingly rare – they were publicly exposed or condemned, or taken to the police perhaps, with definite consequences for the perpetrator.

    But quite often we seem to be dealing with situations in which the processes used were thoroughly inadequate to the nature of the abuse.  And here the distinction between individual culpability and systemic or institutional failure is not at all clear, partly because standards of safeguarding have changed.  What if someone in a position of authority thought they were taking firm action to stop something happening again, by perhaps warning others and moving the perpetrator on from a particular job, or making sure they never worked in that capacity again?  What if – at the time – it was widely thought that this was the way to deal with bad situations?  What if, by their lights, they were taking appropriate action according to the advice they received?

    I don’t have an answer to these questions, and I’m not looking for a way of exonerating anyone.  But I do have two comments, which to some extent cut across each other.  One is that, by my reckoning, it’s an awful long time we’ve been talking about child abuse and other forms of sexual and domestic abuse – well over thirty years.  The Orkney case of alleged ritual abuse, for example, may have been effectively disproved (or at least called into question), but it came at a time of growing public awareness of abuse, and that was nearly thirty years ago.  Churches were already aware of the potential scale of these problems back in the 1980s – indeed the Catholic Church in Ireland was taking out insurance against claims over thirty years ago.  So the argument that people weren’t aware of these things, or didn’t take them so seriously, can certainly be pushed too far.

    The other comment is that the suggestion that ‘standards and processes were different then’ can be put to the test historically.  It ought to be possible to review just what was expected of people in positions of authority by way of safeguarding anything up to thirty or forty years ago, with examples of good practice then, and some attention to the norms and values which guided the processes (even if utterly inadequate) in place, and also to the changing language of safeguarding.  This is the stuff of good historical work, looking at relevant documents, interviewing people who were alive then (including survivors as well as figures of authority, and even perpetrators), rooting particular directions and ideas in the broader assumptions of the time about harm, family life, intimacy, and so on.

    I know this is in part what IICSA hopes to do.  Good luck to them!

     

     

     

     

  • Remembering, Reliving & Dealing with the Church’s Abuse

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Member of General Synod

    Rosie Haarper

    So much remembering. We’ve had some very moving events. Poetry and music evoking the darkest moments of WW1. In Great Missenden, the village where I work, there were 39 men killed. Many of them lived in Church Street and went to our school. We all stood round our newly restored memorial at 11000 on the 11th our heads bowed in respectful silence. Then we processed into Church and one sort of remembering morphed into another. ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’

    As a human and as a Christian community it’s what we do. We remember.

    Memories are a crucial component of our identity. If illness erodes your ability to access your memory, it leaves you and the people around you in a difficult and scary place. Every bit of scientific progress that helps tackle such illness is crucial, and I’m sure we are all hoping or praying for a real medical breakthrough.

    In the light of the recent #MeToo revelations I was thinking about another dynamic of remembering. It’s to do with the difference between remembering and re-living.

    We all sometimes think about painful things that have happened. It is healthy to do that.

    Like most churches we have a special service for those who have been recently bereaved. It’s called Remembering with Love, and just for an hour we deliberately step into that space of recollection. The love and the pain are still there, but as time passes we distil the memory so that we remember without having to re-live.

    If we haven’t dealt with it however, remembering becomes agony. Many of the women who were abused by Harvey Weinstein suppressed the painful memory so effectively that it is only now that they truly access their feelings about what happened. They are not so much remembering as re-living those events.

    I have heard people recently saying: ‘for heaven’s sake, it was 25 years ago!’. Well, I would urge compassion. Facebook has been full of people saying that the recent Judge Kavanaugh allegations have triggered memories for them, and it feels ‘like yesterday.’ These are events in their lives that have not been processed or resolved. This is why it is so important to take historic disclosures seriously. Until that happens the person is never able to be free of the pain.

    It’s interesting that remembering is at the very heart of the Christian faith. Knowing that he was about to be killed Jesus said ‘remember me’ and gave his friends a symbolic way of doing that which has lasted to this day. Over 2,000 years it has no longer got any overtone of grief. There is no re-living in the Eucharist. The remembering is all about love and thankfulness. We have probably now reached this place with WW1. It’s not raw grief, we weren’t there. But the gratitude, respect and hopefully commitment to peace, that is worth the ceremony.

    So our Eucharistic heart should make church a good, safe, and healing place to do all sorts of remembering.

    Sadly this isn’t always the case. We are only just beginning to uncover the extent of abuse that has happened in a church context. With extraordinary courage there are people who are telling their stories and considerable resource is being put into making it less likely that this can happen in the future.

    It will of course, human beings do unspeakable things. But we are trying hard. Safeguarding training is now obligatory and there are more robust new protocols in place.

    It’s the remembering part that hasn’t gone well. For most people who make a disclosure the speaking out and telling the story is like re-living it.

    When men returned from the war most of them didn’t tell their stories. Articulating the memories would have taken them right back there. It was a self-protection strategy, but a very costly one. A whole generation of men were emotionally unavailable. Women and children lived with people who couldn’t show affection. I hear this again and again as I sit with families to prepare funeral tributes.

    When someone speaks out about their abuse in the church they become a ‘case’ to be managed, dealt with.  It’s as if the person who listens to their story is being asked to face the real church rather than the fantasy one, and that is too hard.

    The significant thing is that their remembering is also ours.

    None of us were at the battle of the Somme. Half my family didn’t even live in this country during the war. They were Swiss. Yet standing silent for two minutes at the memorial the memories become all our memories. Remembering becomes community.

    This is the step the church needs to take. As someone courageously speaks out about their abuse we need to embrace that story, painful though it will be, and allow the truth to dawn. When things do go tragically wrong we all have to take responsibility and understand that ‘their’ story is really also ‘our’ story. Then we can share the pain and share the healing.

    This is work that we all need to do, and it is urgent. I cannot begin to say how urgent.

    The National Catholic Reporter printed a letter on 9 November 2018. This was the headline: Open letter to US Catholic Bishops: It’s over.

    It’s over?!

    People wonder why I push and push about equal rights and moral responses to survivors. Well -it’s because I do care about the C of E, and every time I step outside the protected (shrinking) bubble I am told that we have lost our way.

    The test of a civilized society is the way it treats its weakest members. The same applies to the Church. Look at the way we treat the weakest and most vulnerable and the news is bad.  People who have been ‘othered’ and left outside, show to the world that we don’t act out what we say we believe.

    This week-end Churches were full. There is a wonderful residual good will toward the Church of England, but for too long we have been spending the capital. It is such a simple message and one which most decent folk in this country take as given. Treat everyone equally and let people remember their abuse and respond with love and care and generosity. End of.

     

     

     

  • My Struggles with Fear & Distrust

    by the Rt Revd David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

    david-walker

    As part of a team training exercise in Manchester, I recently redid my Myers-Briggs personality type. I haven’t changed from the previous occasion, at least a decade ago. I’m a firm ENTP, fortunate to be surrounded by a mix of colleagues of different types. I love exploring, in a logical and evidence based way, how things can change and be better. And I really enjoy meetings that I go into with an open mind as to where the Holy Spirit will lead us, rather than ones that are constrained towards a very particular conclusion. If only life were always like that! But it isn’t, and being the person that I am, I need to be sensitive to the emotional dynamics that are going on in meetings and conversations, not least to pay attention to what might be happening subconsciously within my own head and heart.

    I’ve been thinking a bit in recent weeks about two particular areas of feelings: fear and distrust. What does good engagement look like when fear is high and trust is low? I’m often perceived as being the person, or the representative of the organisation, with considerable power in a conversation. Others may have good reason to fear and mistrust both of who I am and what I represent. It may be because of what I and the Church might be going to do; perhaps through Pastoral Reorganisation or the Clergy Discipline Measure. Or it may be because of things done in the name of the Church in the past, but where the wounds are rightly still raw.

    So, I’ve been asking myself, what are the steps I can take to prove myself less scary and more worthy of trust? It’s still very much a work in progress, and what I offer here does not pretend to be more than a few baby steps along the way. But even the longest of journeys is made up of many small movements forward.

    In some of my early meetings with representatives of Manchester’s diverse Jewish community, I was advised to pop my pectoral cross into my breast pocket. I needed to understand that what for me was a symbol of the crucified saviour, the one who must always been on my heart and in front of me, was for them the sign in whose name they had been persecuted, exiled and murdered repeatedly down the centuries. Making the cross less visible was not denying my belonging to Jesus, it was simply removing a cause of fear. As we have got to know each other better, there have been fewer occasions when it has gone into my pocket. Fear has reduced, trust has grown. My personal accoutrements no longer get in the way.

    I could take that simple course of action because somebody bothered to make me aware of the issue. And awareness seems to be a key. So, for example, if I am conscious that any or all of the facts that I am a tall, White British, heterosexual male, with an Oxbridge education and a doctorate can be a barrier, then I can work with those with whom I am engaging to put those facets of my identity in the service of us all, not as instruments of domination and power. And slowly, as with my Jewish friends, they cease to overshadow our conversations.

    But it’s not just about me, it’s at least as much the institution I belong to. We not only carry an inheritance of racism, sexism, homophobia and a failure to grasp the damage done by sexual abuse, there are still too many occasions when the words and actions of those within the Church suggest we are still to be feared and distrusted, especially by those who have been hurt and abused by things done in our name. The temptation is to dissociate myself from the damage done; to shout “not in my name” as loudly as I can. That might help me to feel that I had exonerated myself, but it would be little more than virtue signalling.

    Owning what I am caught up in, and seeking to be the change I long for, feels the better way.

    Part of that is recognising my own fear and lack of trust. Some of the places I may need to go will require as a condition of entry that I make myself vulnerable. That’s scary, because there is a real risk of my being hurt.

    I realise that in doing so I may need to put my trust in people who have experienced deep betrayal by the Church. My own fear is that some of these people might believe that betraying the trust that I have put in them will in some way help them on their own journeys.

    So I have come to realise I cannot do this alone. I in fact will need their help.  They, the fearful and the mistrusting, will in fact need to help me with my own feelings of fear and mistrust, and together we will seek to engage and rebuild that trust. I’m aware that this is an incredibly hard ask, but I believe it is a necessary one as the work is too important for each one of us to let it slip simply because I am unable to do it unaided.  As such we find common ground in our vulnerabilities.

    As ever and above all else I will need to deepen my own worship and prayer life further, so that through abiding in the love of God that casts out fear, and trusting in the one who is truly trustworthy, I can fully play the role I hold.

    And so I ask for your prayers too – for me, for the institution I represent and for those who find themselves having to engage with us despite all our fears and distrust.

  • Episcopally Led and Synodically Managed

    by Dr Meg Warner, Theologian, Lecturer and Member of General Synod

    Meg Warner

    In the most moving session of the recent meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England (York, 7-11 July) a survivor of church-related sexual abuse spoke about her experience of reporting the abuse, about the support organisation to which she had turned for care and advice (see details below), and about her more recent work with that same support organisation, helping others who have been sexually abused by clergy. Her presentation was engaging, challenging, and harrowing.

    In his introduction to the debate that followed the Bishop of Bath of Wells noted that the final report of IICSA on the handling of sexual abuse claims in a number of institutions including the Church of England was not due to be delivered until 2020. Nevertheless, he said, improving the experience of those survivors of church-related sexual abuse who were brave enough to report their abuse was so urgent that synod ought not to wait, but should begin to take action immediately.

    The synod went on to vote overwhelmingly in favour of the motion before it, endorsing priorities for action and calling on the House of Bishops and Archbishops’ Council ‘to ensure that the plan of action is implemented as a matter of priority’.

    Here was a good example of synod in action. The bishops and the business committee brought a matter before synod, synod listened and voted.

    This debate, however, and particularly the Bishop of Bath Wells’ comments about the 2020 IICSA report,  threw into sharp relief the decision of Business Committee (no doubt supported by the House of Bishops) that the topic of human sexuality will not be included in the agenda of synod before the Episcopal Teaching Document (recently titled ‘Living in Love and Faith: Christian Teaching and Learning about Human Identity, Sexuality and Marriage’) is published in – wait for it – 2020.

    This decision was made despite the fact that more than one Private Members Motion on the subject has attracted the requisite number of signatures to be presented to the synod for debate. It was made despite the fact that provisional synod dates for November that have been in synod members’ diaries for months have been declared unnecessary. It was made despite the fact that the House of Bishops has decided to take no action on the clear request of synod in July 2017 that they sponsor the development of liturgy for welcoming trans people. It was also made despite the fact that this current synod will be prorogued following the July 2020 synod and a new synod, many members of which will not have participated in this synod’s shared conversations, will be formed in November.

    LGBTI+ Christians are hurting, and the response of the church has often, if anything, added to their injury. It is absolutely the case that the need of survivors of clergy sexual abuse is urgent, but the need of LGBTI+ Christians is urgent too. By 2020 many more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and otherwise queer Christians, many of them young, will have left the Church of England. Some of them will have self-harmed or committed suicide because their church tells them that their identity is unacceptable to God.

    Nevertheless, the business committee will not bring this matter before synod before 2020. The synod will have no further opportunity to listen, and nor will it be seen to be listening.

    The House of Bishops and the business committee have either not learned the lesson of the synod’s snub of the House of Bishops in its rejection of February 2017’s take-note debate, or they have learned it only too well, and reasoned that it is not safe to allow the synod to get its hand on this particular subject.

    It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that synod is being very, very carefully managed, so as not to allow it to get too close to controversial issues. These are being deftly kicked into the long grass or, as one synod member put it during the business agenda debate at the beginning of synod, kicked like a can along a road. Either way, synod is not being let loose on them.

    General Synod, at its best, is a dynamic and responsible decision maker. We saw that in this synod with a spirited debate on the relative merits of engagement with and disinvestment from energy companies. The Diocese of Oxford had campaigned widely prior to synod, and won much support for its proposed amendment in favour of disinvestment. Synod, however, heard an extraordinary and compelling account of the success of the NIBs and the Ethical Investment Advisory Group in their engagement strategy, so that even before the conclusion of the unusually strong speeches it became apparent to most that many synod members had changed their minds and that the amendment would fail, as it did decisively.

    In the investment debate, and even more so in the safeguarding debate, we saw the power of stories to change hearts and minds, especially where the lives of vulnerable people are at stake. The stories of LGBTI+ people will not be heard again by this synod. More’s the pity.

  • The Trouble With Fish….

    by the Revd Janet Fife, a retired priest and a survivor of abuse

    IICSA - hearings

    As a survivor of abuse and a spokesperson for others who have been abused, the Revd Janet Fife has been given a right of reply to the Revd Canon Simon Butler’s piece “A Via Media in Safeguarding“

    Imagine a chain of fish restaurants, the Good Fish Co., with an unreliable supply of shellfish. Now and again customers become ill from eating them – and the branch managers respond in various ways. Some respond immediately to complaints, investigating and then discarding the suspect batch. The sick customers are kept informed, and compensated for their bad meal. Other branch managers react differently. They refuse to respond to complaints or investigate, so more customers get poisoned. Environmental Health officers visit and make recommendations, but the managers fail to implement them. Complaining customers find their phone calls and letters are unanswered, and they’re out of pocket for their meal and any missed wages from being off sick.

    Some disgruntled customers complain to head office. Good Fish Co. could listen to those customers, learn from what they say, and correct the problem. The issue would then be done with, and the company better for it. Instead, it too refuses to answer letters and phone calls from the customers who have been poisoned by their food. Far from offering compensation, it persistently loses files on these cases and is rude to the complainants.

    The media and health authorities become interested in the Good Fish Co.’s problem, and the company adopts a new tactic. They classify their customers into 3 groups:  Group A, customers who have never had food poisoning; Group B, customers who have been made ill but are happy with the way their complaint was handled; and Group C, those whose complaint was not dealt with well and are still not happy about it. Groups A and B have the company’s approval, and the Good Fish Co. are happy to talk about their experience with the company’s seafood. Group C, however, are labelled as troublemakers. They are ‘not representative’, they are ‘persistent complainers’, their complaints are ‘not constructive’. Good Fish Co. refuse to meet with those from Group C or with their representatives, or to deal with the issues they raise; nothing changes. What’s the result? The whole company suffers, of course. The bad managers remain in post serving bad shellfish to customers who then get ill. The public lose confidence about the restaurants being safe places to eat. Sales decline and the Good Fish Company’s position becomes shaky. But it’s not their fault – the problem is with Group C.

    The Good Fish Co. is rather like the Church of England; it doesn’t want to hear bad news and won’t engage with its critics. Worse, when there is a genuine matter of complaint which is dealt with badly by the local branch, there seems no way of putting the matter right or gaining redress. The situation goes from bad to worse, and the reputation of the whole suffers.

    Simon Butler, in his recent blog, spoke of the ‘polarisation’ between some survivors and the institutional Church. I welcome Simon as an ally, and concur with his assertion that the anger some survivors feel is justified.  Some survivors of abuse within the Church have been treated shamefully – and despite attention being drawn to the issues there has been little or no effort to make things right.  In my own case, the written complaints I made in 1995 and in 2017 appear to have gone missing from the files. This is not, regrettably, an isolated instance.

    There are others, thank God, who have been heard and cared for, and steps taken to see the abuser does not harm anyone again. I rejoice with and for them, and for those who take seriously their responsibility to care for survivors. It’s good to know the Church can get this right. However, it would be easy to comfort ourselves with that fact, and not go on to do the hard and necessary work of learning from the cases we have got so wrong. If we do so we make the same mistake as the Good Fish Co.. The result is that bad practice will continue to flourish and the number of disgruntled ‘customers’ will multiply.

    Nor is this just a matter of some survivors ‘feeling’ they have been rebuffed – they actually have been rebuffed and turned away. That’s an objective fact we need to deal with. It isn’t right to expect those survivors to ‘find a better way to engage’, or to ‘make supportive and constructive criticism of the institutional church’ (I quote Simon’s blog here, with the original italics). The Church has done the damage, both in the original abuse and in the re-abuse of a damaging response or lack of response.  It’s entirely the Church’s responsibility to put this right – to apologise, make restitution, and offer genuine care and concern. That’s where the process begins, before we expect anything at all from those we have harmed.

    I have written on the Church’s treatment of the abused on several occasions recently – and each time I have heard from more survivors who have thanked me for speaking up. They say that so far their voices have not been heard and their concerns not taken seriously.

    Soon General Synod will debate Safeguarding; a debate in which it isn’t planned for survivors to be heard. I understand that there will be a fringe meeting, however, at which Synod members can meet survivors and hear something of what they have to say. I hope that meeting will be very well attended – and that, finally, those ‘difficult’ voices will be heard.

    Picture – Archbishop Justin Welby at the IICSA hearings on March 21st 2018