The question, ‘what is safeguarding within the Church?’ should involve a relatively simple response. After all, safeguarding for a variety of institutions has been going on for a considerable period. To find our answer we can examine the delivery of safeguarding which has now been honed by increasing levels of expertise over 20+ years. Then there is the word itself. It implies the task of keeping others safe. The hazard that was identified in the Church and elsewhere was the sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. Children and vulnerable adults needed protecting from sexual predation by others, especially those in positions of authority. Thus, everyone in the church needed to be sensitised to the possibility of such a crime taking place. ‘Together’, the slogan might run, ‘we can make sexual abuse in the Church disappear’.

So far, I have said nothing controversial. Problems begin to appear when we examine the actual minutiae of safeguarding practice. The question arises. Who are the people to make the vulnerable safe? Up till now the background discipline of most professional safeguarding officers (SOs) seems to be Social Work. That would involve a training well equipped to look at complex situations and offer judgments about what is going on. Assessing character and making assessments of risk has always been part of a social worker’s daily routine. Such a background covers many of the required skills for safeguarding including the training of others. But there are additional issues. People at risk may need legal protection and so SOs require some legal knowledge comparable to police officers. The assistant SO in my own diocese has a background in police work.

The potential skills that might be needed for SOs go further. Safeguarding work operates within the context of institutions. Do the SOs need some expertise in social psychology? Are they able to analyse the convoluted power structures that seem to lie behind many examples of abusive behaviour in church communities? Perpetrators also may have complex personality disorders. Do the SOs need to understand these and, more important, identify them before abuse actually happens? Then there are all the reports that have been written since the turn of the century cataloguing failures and weakness in safeguarding practice. Has the SO taken the trouble to read all of these to note the recommendations for the future? What about the needs of those who have been already abused? Are these needs part of the responsibility of the SOs? Should they be concerned whether such identified survivors are being cared adequately by the institution that abused them? Does their job description and the resources provided for the post allow them to hand on such victims/survivors to others for care? When the needs are not psychological but practical – housing, finance etc., are there accessible bodies to assist and deal with this side of things?

The questions I have asked would seem to suggest that safeguarding is now a huge and complex issue. In trying to answer my series of hypothetical questions about the skills required for SOs, the reader can see that it is not practicable to expect any individual, even at a national level, to be trained in so many disciplines. This is not a criticism of the individual integrity and ability of SOs. No one can operate to fulfil all the potentials demands of this job as it has evolved over the past twenty years. SOs did not exist until the 90s and they were then created to respond to a crisis within the church. It might be claimed that at the beginning of safeguarding, it was a job that involved few specialist skills beyond keeping a good filing system. Now the profession has become almost impossible to do unless, as sometimes happens, the job is tightly defined. The inability or unwillingness of SOs to offer support to survivors of abuse in many dioceses may simply be because they have neither the skills, time or practical resources to do it. If the SOs and the bishops who employ them try to keep all safeguarding activity within the diocesan structures, it is likely that some potential aspects of safeguarding will simply not happen.

One solution to the massive complexity and multi-disciplinary nature of safeguarding is simply to recognise that it cannot be delivered in all its aspects unless parts of it are outsourced to other organisations. Such an idea has been resisted and the Anglican House of Bishops seem unwilling to let go of any of their control over the process. This desire to keep everything ‘in-house’ was seen in the proceedings of the IICSA hearings. Bishops and other church authorities were clearly and painfully out of their depth in the way they had failed to manage safeguarding even over the past twenty years. When files go missing (or get flooded/burnt!), important information is not shared and unprofessional rivalries are allowed to interfere with the process of safeguarding, it is clear that something needs to change. No doubt the Independent Inquiry will have their thoughts on precisely what these changes should be. Clearly the present structures are not fit for purpose.

In July in York there is to be a debate on safeguarding in the Church of England. A major change that is needed is a clear recognition that the task of safeguarding overall is arguably too big for existing church structures to deal with. Some parts of it have been going well – the delivery of training to ordinary church members to be aware of the issue and how some members are vulnerable to abuse. Other parts of the safeguarding package are simply not working. SOs seem to be unable in most cases, mainly because they lack the resources, to help the victims of past abuse. To remind the reader of an earlier blog piece, the task of caring for past survivors should be made into an entirely separate effort – the ESTA initiative. The other main area that should be hived off from the bishops is their control of what happens to allegations of abuse. It is no longer appropriate to even pretend that Church possesses the necessary expertise to determine guilt or innocence in the case of abuse allegations.

As a footnote I have read through quickly the recent review concerning the convicted paedophile, Jeremy Dowling, in the Diocese of Truro. This was commissioned by the Diocese. Two things struck me forcibly. First the questioning of bishops seems to have been very selective and partial. Not only were some former bishops not questioned about what they knew, but the answers that were obtained from others suggested that the questioner was very deferential in speaking to them. A forensic inquiry would have pressed questions much harder than was apparently done. Also, all potential witnesses should have been pursued. The second point concerned a ‘fat file’ about Dowling which various bishops claim never to have examined. Why was the file not found by the investigators who supposedly did the Case Study Review of past cases in 2010? The Church spent millions in an effort to unearth such material. Both these questions suggest organisational unprofessionalism at the very least. A lack of episcopal curiosity also seems to have been prevalent in the Diocese of Truro.