Dear Meg Munn
I was very grateful to read your ‘first reflections’ https://chairnsp.org/ in your role as Chair of the National Safeguarding Panel. Like you, I approach this whole area of safeguarding as an outsider, though my status as a retired Anglican clergyman means that my relationship with the Church of England is different from yours. Outsiders are sometimes in a privileged position to see things that others miss. My only formal contact with the world of organised safeguarding is to have obtained an attendance certificate from attending a morning session for retired clergy like myself here in the Newcastle diocese. But I have also had my perspective formed by reading some of the massive amounts of material available online, particularly over the past twelve months. This access to this detailed information has allowed me to function as a commentator. I fulfil this self-appointed role through the medium of my blog, survivingchurch.org. There has been no shortage of material on which to comment recently.
Allow me to say a little more by way of personal introduction. I have had an interest in power/abuse topics for some twenty years since researching for a book during the late 90s on the topic. My perspective on the current sexual abuse issue is to see it primarily as the extreme expression of dysfunctional church dynamics. To put it another way, I believe that we should see sexual abuse of children and vulnerable people as being at one end of a continuum of power abuse in the Church. My blog has had as its aim helping people to think about the variety of ways that power can be mishandled and abused in church settings. Sexual abuse of children is criminal, but there are other ways in which the Church can become a place of harm and danger for its members.
In your reflections, you referred to the various safeguarding organisations and structures you have had dealings with recently. Some have been created by the Church, such as the National Safeguarding Team in London,and others are on the outside, as with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). At a point later in your piece you refer to ‘survivor groups’. I ask myself the question whether you have internalised a picture that there exist two entities in the safeguarding universe,the Church, struggling to make good the mistakes of the past, and its victims. These two realities need to be reconciled through the safeguarding industry. I wonder whether in our thinking we are creating in our minds a classic ‘us-them’ scenario.
I would like to share with you a different perspective on this issue. Space does not permit me to give a full account of all the things I have learned in my studies on abuse issues. Neither can I share here all that I have learnt from church and cult survivors especially over the past five years of my blog. In summary I would like to suggest that we are dealing with three realities which are present when we think about the overall practice of safeguarding. The first entity is the organised church body which is active in creating structures to prevent the incidence of sexual abuse. It does this mainly by sensitising everyone in the Church to the dynamics of abuse and the importance of making the church a safe space. The second reality is the existence of survivors/victims. The Church’s record of care and support has been, in many cases, poor but the Church must not be allowed to forget them. Further to these two, I want to point to a third reality which needs to be named and discussed. The overall descriptive word for this entity is ‘culture’, a word which sums up the environmental factors which can give birth to the possibility and reality of spiritual abuse as well as the sexual abuse which is sometimes found within it. I do not believe that sexual abuse or exploitation ever takes place in a vacuum. There are, in the Church’s life, certain assumptions about theology, power and custom that may help to make possible this spiritual/sexual abuse. If we want to successfully eliminate the sexual abuse of children and others, we must, when necessary, identify and face down those aspects of church culture that help,even indirectly, to incubate it in different ways. To give just one example, the Church seems tacitly to encourage a culture of competition among its clergy. Often clergy seem to care more for their status and power within the organisation than the people in their charge. The Church also does little to discourage a manipulation of texts from the Bible which puts a minister in a place of real power over a congregation. In such settings, real spiritual harm can take place. When undue power and control in a congregation are not just tolerated but normalised, we are on the path to a place of danger. That danger may include sexual abuse.
I would suggest that considerable resources need to be placed in making sure that the Church begins to understand far better the dynamics of dysfunctional power that commonly exist within it. I have written a lot on this blog about the Church and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). I would suggest that many of the power issues that ultimately result in sexual abuse can be linked to narcissistic disorders of various kinds. But that is a huge subject which cannot be opened up here.
Meg, you mention in your piece that a number of your assumptions have been challenged. Can I challenge at least one of those revealed in what you have written? You speak about survivor groups. This understanding of the way survivors normally operate is open to question. There are of course some survivors who ‘go public’ but it is at great cost. Due to the trauma they have suffered, most survivors I know (not all Anglican) are not linked to any others. I am in the privileged position of hearing from survivors who contact me privately with an account of their experiences. They are mostly isolated in their pain. There must be hundreds of others out there who have been loaded down with the shame of their experiences and who do not reach out to anyone. Even though these individuals are invisible, they are there waiting for the Church to reach out to them. They will never respond to the cruelty of being subjected to legal or psychiatric examination as part of some compensation deal. The issue of survivors reporting that the treatment by the Church post-abuse is worse than the original episode, is something that urgently needs addressing.
If Meg, you find this Open Letter, I hope you find something in it helpful for your work. My main advice to you is to allow all your assumptions to be challenged not once or twice, but many times. Safeguarding and doing the right thing for survivors and the Church is a massive project. You need help in this and that help is to be found in many places.
Stephen Parsons
I remember a licensing where the Bishop became caught up in the topic of how young the incumbent was. By the time the Bishop had gone through all the bits about Timothy, he had given the guy permission to do what he saw fit without reference to anyone else. You won’t be surprised to hear that he figured in my on line case histories of bullying. He got rid of an unwanted female reader in training just by telling everyone she was giving up!
>>>Even though these individuals are invisible, they are there waiting for the Church to reach out to them. They will never respond to the cruelty of being subjected to legal or psychiatric examination as part of some compensation deal. The issue of survivors reporting that the treatment by the Church post-abuse is worse than the original episode, is something that urgently needs addressing.<<<
Stephen, your words here reminded me of wo many things that Judith Herman writes of in her book, “Trauma and Recovery.” She discusses the isolation that trauma creates which contemporary neuroscience now validates. In her model of recovery, community for the traumatized is so difficult that she devotes the third and final stage of healing to recommectiom with others. Perhaps it would be helpful to Ms. Mum.
Your words also remind me of an experience that I had after leaving my abusive church and relocating half way across the US. My husband chose a Presbyterian Church to attend, and In retrospect, it was more functionally unhealthy in terms of community than the church we’d left. We did not join there because I did not feel at ease with all of the doctrines and the risk of being willingly subject to yet another set of abusive presbyters
After a life-altering set of events including a physical trauma that landed my husband in the hospital for a week, I learned that our reluctance to officially join the church made us basically unworthy of any expression of concern and care from the church. About two years after leaving and under the pressure of another trauma, I returned to the church on a weekday and spoke to the new pastor. We hadn’t returned to the church when my husband was well enough again because we felt abandoned. I’d hoped that I could work through my hard feelings with the elders to find community with them again.
The new pastor took my contact information and said that he would contact me to follow up, as I’d shown up there as a weeping woman on the church doorstep. I waited and waited for a phone call for six weeks until a friend said to me bluntly that he never was going to call if he had not done so right away. I was used to such poor consideration from churches and clergy that I still held out hope that someone from the church would contact me.
I decided to write a letter to the pastor to ask why I was not worthy of even the smallest amount of kindness. For my troubles, the pastor sent a horrible response on church letterhead stating that by transferring membership” to another church and not regularly attending elsewhere, we were in open sin of resisting authority— I guess just for the sake of it.. The pastor went on to say that we were not welcome to return there, instead including the names of two other churches where he’d called the pastors to inform them in advance of our need for repentance. We needed genuine concern which I expected to find, but instead, I was condemned and wounded again.
Cindy. It is good to hear from you after a space. You have shared other parts of your story on this blog and it is good, if horrifying, to hear this account of your journey. I would love to be able to say that is the way things happen only in the States, but I know that such things as you describe happen here as well. The way that power is sometimes combined with utter cruelty is a mystery. That particular combination is a likely indicator of a narcissistic personality but merely to point this out is not always helpful. Meg Munn to whom this open letter is addressed has tweeted to say that she has seen the post. Perhaps she has also seen your contribution which will help her to understand the appalling ‘culture’ of cruelty and exploitation that reigns in some congregations. We are, as my post suggests, dealing with something much bigger than sexual exploitation alone.
Stephen,
I kept the letter — now floating about with other papers that I deemed important to keep when I relocated a few years ago. (My mother wanted me to burn it.).
Do you know that I was too afraid to scan it and put it online before now? That is another element of spiritual abuse — as those people who cared nothing about us would care. Without looking at it, I believe that I received it in 2003. The first time that I mentioned it in an online discussion, I panicked in fear. I’d forsaken their assembly for a different house of worship than there own, but I received a rebuke that I’d expect to better fit an unrepentant criminal.
Writing about it in this context, .I hope that my experience emphasizes the element of hypervigilance that accompanies this type of trauma. It takes such great bravery to venture back into the memories of a trauma, even ones that are not so tragic. Heightened irrational fear and paranoia pose yet another impediment on top of the sense of isolation that trauma creates. While I am glad that those who haven’t suffered this kind of experience don’t understand what wounded feel and how it distorts expectation and confidence, ignorance about it doesn’t help anyone.
May this discussion birth new understanding so that the bruised might find liberty as Christians can improve upon their skills of binding the wounds of the broken. May we all learn to make the most of every opportunity to minister kindness beside still, safe waters of healing.
I am really sorry to hear your experiences Cindy, but not surprised.
It sounds as if your experience is much worse than mine, Cindy. But being afraid to tell rings a bell with me. Thanks for sharing. It helped me, and will probably help others.
Thank you for your kind words, everyone. I left my shepherding/discipleship church in ‘97 and had excellent exit counseling. The Presbyterian Church experience taught me much about how I fit or don’t fit within certain church governments. They are “elder rule” churches, and that particular place seemed to only share those they judged as “the elect.”
I suppose that as someone who was raised under the influence of a few aberrant Christian movements in a dysfunctional family, I’m vulnerable within certain settings. Service organizations and some professional groups that are run like oligarchies without good accountability and ethics among the leaders trigger me still. I think that a part of me is still searching for that closeness that I felt as a child that I watched my parents enjoy as adults who used wishful thinking to cover up the problems. I think that it will always be a weakness for me.
And I did several years of EMDR, too. 😉
Cindy – My jaw drops, words fail at such behaviour. Whatever happened to kindness, gentleness and care? The Peace of Christ be with you this Season of Immanuel, God with us and for us.
What a dreadful experience, Cindy, I’ve had some rather similar experiences and can identify with the scars they leave. What you say about Judith Herman’s book and community makes sense. I’ll put the book on my (long and getting longer) reading list.
Your comments reminded me of a modern hymn from the Iona Community which I’ve found very helpful. Here’s a link which gives you both tune and lyrics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3Xkj0320A8
I’d like to see Judith Lewis Herman’s book, “Trauma and Recovery”, on the reading list of everyone in ministry but particularly those of the Bishops and anyone responding to any form of abuse.
As we are seeing in the C of E, it seems that the Bishops are mostly still at a loss in how to respond helpfully to people who have been abused. They need to understand what is involved in RECOVERY, not just how best to prevent abuse in the first place, although this is likely to involve focused training as well as reading.
They wouldn’t “get it”! At least many wouldn’t.
Senior managers often seem to have been selected on the high IQ, low EQ axes (bright AND thick-skinned). I simply don’t believe that they would be able to conceive that any trauma around them could be anything to do with them. Some wouldn’t even read the book. My copy, which I bought second-hand from across the Pond, was pristine when it arrived. I don’t think it had been read.
For those of us who have been affected by trauma, I thoroughly recommend Judith Herman’s work. She demonstrates a path to healing and her ideas will be a valuable adjunct to treatment. Obviously a book alone is rarely enough, and no substitute for a good therapist, if you can find/afford one.
My thanks to JayKay8 for pointing me in her direction.
I’d like to add the film “Philomena” (available on iPlayer for another 29 days) to their viewing list too! A heart-breaking example of missed opportunities for some healing as a result of the nuns deliberately continuing to lie.
How many more missed opportunities for recovery/healing of abuse survivors are the current church leadership willing to let happen?
May I wish everyone a happy and peaceful Christmas? Joy to the world!