What do we mean by Redress?

by Andrew Graystone Part 2

In October, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse published a coruscating report on the Church of England’s treatment of victims and survivors of abuse. In November we expect a similarly damning report into the work of the Roman Catholic Church. The focus now turns to the provision of redress for survivors.

The Church of England’s General Synod has already committed itself to providing redress – but I wonder how much thought has been given to what that actually means. It’s important to get this right. In recently-published research to accompany the inquiry, IICSA discovered that 74% of respondents said that their overall experience of the process of seeking redress was negative. Survivors consistently said that organisations underestimate the significant emotional and practical cost of seeking redress…especially where it is long and drawn out. Presumably the church doesn’t want this – especially given that survivors have already said that the process of disclosure and investigation is in itself deeply abusive.

As an aid to getting this right, it might be helpful to start by setting out what redress does not mean. 

Redress is not compensation

Travel insurance policies often come with a gruesome table of compensation payable for physical harm that might occur to the policy holder: so much for the loss of a limb; so much for the loss of an eye, and so on. It’s brutal, but practical. When an individual has been physically or spiritually invaded, as happens in abuse, there is no way to undo what has been done. Like insurance policies, some forms of address might attempt to put a monetary value on the loss that has occurred. But of course, money can’t make up for the loss of a limb, and nor can it pay for the loss of childhood, physical integrity or mental wellbeing that is caused by abuse. To put a cash value on a rape, for instance, is abhorrent, and ignores the context in which it happened, and the betrayal of trust involved. Redress may include compensation, but it is certainly not limited to it.

Redress is not a fine

Break the speed limit and you may be punished with a fine, or even the deprivation of your driving license. The fine is both a punishment and a deterrent to re-offending. The deprivation of your license is intended to guarantee that you won’t do it again, at least for a while. Redress for victims is intended neither to punish nor to deter the church. If it was, then current church leaders might feel aggrieved that they were being asked to accept punishment for what others had done, maybe in a previous generation. Of course, costly redress may well encourage the current generation of church leaders to be even more vigilant to stop contemporary offenders. But redress is not primarily intended to be punitive.

Redress is not ‘one size fits all’  

Part of the nonsense of the travel insurance tariff is that it doesn’t take account of context. The loss of a leg is terrible for anyone, but for an athlete it is also career-ending. Redress needs to take account of context. And whilst for one victim, their abuse may have robbed them of job, housing and pension, another victim might have independent means, so that monetary compensation isn’t so important. Redress will require different things for different people. It won’t be possible to produce an off-the-peg package. Bespoke solutions are needed for every individual harmed by the church.

Redress is not all about money

Until now, the church has assumed that redress simply meant giving a victim an appropriate amount of money. What’s more the church has assumed that the right amount of money is the amount the insurance company is prepared to pay. (It never seems to have occurred to church leaders that they might be under-insured, or that insurance companies have an incentive to minimise payments, using means that might go wholly against the church’s values.) Redress comes in many forms, and looks different for every victim. Some need to hear an apology from an individual, or from an institution. (Here it becomes obvious that a meaningful apology cannot be issued by press release A majority of IICSA respondents said that an apology was the most important aspect of redress.  General or weasel apologies are easily recognised.)  Some need the church to  acknowledge failings in the management of their case. Some victims do need financial compensation for losses they have incurred. Others need money for support services, such as the provision of counselling or paid medical care. For some victims, non-monetary actions like the provision of explanation or information is important. They want to know who knew what, when, or how something was allowed to happen. Some victims might need opportunities for their creativity to be validated, whilst others might need funding for a holiday with their family to start to draw a line under what has happened. There are endless other components that might make up a redress package. Some require funds, but others don’t. Last but not least, some survivors need spiritual support – which may of course need to come from outside the offending church.

Redress is not an event

It will be obvious by now that redress cannot be a single event. The damage suffered by a victim might have occurred on a particular day, (though in the vast majority of cases it occurred over an extended period,) but the trauma suffered by a victim is chronic, and may well be lifelong. Redress cannot be delivered in a day, or fulfilled by the writing of a cheque, however large. The church has a duty of care to its victims that is lifelong. In practice, this means that redress needs to be approach on a stipendiary basis. It is clearer to see it as a form of pension rather than a redundancy payment. Need and trauma revisit a victim regularly, and the monetary, practical and spiritual support a victim receives will need to continue for as long as it is needed.

Does all of this seem overwhelming – like a debt that can never be paid? It is. This is not a ‘problem’ like a leaking church roof, that can be ‘fixed’ by a special offering or a single act of contrition. The cost of abuse to a victim is immeasurable, and the cost to the church will be equally huge, not only in money but in time, detailed care and…well, let’s say it, love.

Having identified what redress is not, let me outline briefly some of the factors that need to be considered in determining what it is.

There are two main dynamics of redress: compensatory and restorative.

Compensatory factors

The first dynamic to be considered in relation to redress is compensation. This is effectively the debt owed by the church to the victim. It comes in several forms.

Compensation in respect of the abuse itself 

Notwithstanding what I have said above about the impossibility of making monetary recompense for abuse, money is one of the ways we can provide some comfort to a victim. Natural justice suggests that if an individual’s life has been made unbearable by abuse, we should do what we can in other ways to make it more bearable. This type of compensation can never equate to the abuse itself. How could it? How much money would make up for a child having been forcibly raped by an adult?  A ludicrous question. We can’t put a figure on such an awful experience – and yet from sheer compassion we owe it to those who have been injured to make them as comfortable as possible.

Compensation for the loss of earnings, savings or status. 

Abuse has physical, mental and spiritual consequences. They may express themselves in mental breakdown, depression, addiction or loss of confidence. It is common for individuals to lose their job or their business, or to be unable to manage their finances well.  As a result, many victims have suffered tangible losses as a direct result of their abuse. Redress needs to take full account of actual losses. This will certainly mean that the church will need to pay off debts or medical bills, or whatever else has left the victim indebted. It may mean repaying the costs of therapy, which may have cost the victim many thousands of pounds over many years.

 But a proper redress scheme might go further, and include compensation for the loss of a potential future. Imagine that a child suffers appalling abuse, and is so damaged that they go “off the rails” and miss out on much of their education. Perhaps they could have gone to university, or had a significant career, but as a result of the abuse they ended up in much reduced circumstances. Should they be compensated for what might have been, as well as what they actually lost?  If so, how can that be measured?

Compensation in respect of the mishandling of the process

For many survivors, a great deal of the pain and suffering associated with their situation comes not only from the experience of abuse itself, but from the ways in which they have been dealt with by the church. We now know that many have been lied to or discredited; some have been made to wait for months or years for help.  Redress needs to include not just the repair of the original abuse, but compensation for this experience too.  In this case it is important that compensation in respect of the mishandling of the process should be sufficiently costly as to be punitive to the church. If compensation in this area doesn’t cost the church dearly, there will be little incentive to get processes in order for the future. Conversely, if failings on the part of the church make a real difference to those who are responsible today, there will be a strong incentive to handle the process of disclosure well and justly. 

Restorative factors

The second aspect of redress is the restorative dynamic.

If the compensatory dynamic is characterised as debt-based, the restorative dynamic is characterised as needs-based. The key question is, what does this individual need to restore them to a good place, a healthy place, where they can flourish in the years left to them? Again, this aspect of redress might take many forms, and will be different for each survivor. For some, their overwhelming need is for security. If the trauma of abuse has left you feeling insecure about everything, the restorative process needs to address whatever it is that will make you feel secure. In this instance, a redress process that is conditional, or that continues to drip-feed resources to the victim at the whim of the church will only add to the abuse. A victim struggling with insecurity needs a sufficient guarantee from the start that they will not be left wanting in the future.  A victim who is left with overwhelming shame might need some form of public validation. A victim who feels that they lost their vocation because of their abuse might need help to rediscover and realise it. All of this is complex, deeply pastoral, and a million miles from the approach that simply looks to sign a cheque and send the victim away.  Time and again in the gospels, we see Jesus not only healing people’s physical wounds and disabilities, but more importantly, restoring them to society in ways that allow them to flourish.

In conclusion I need to add three small but highly significant points. 

The first is that for every primary victim of abuse, there are any number of secondary victims, whose needs also need to be taken into account. Partners, children and friends may also have suffered hugely as a direct result of the original abuse and the church’s subsequent mismanagement. The family and congregation of the offender may also be counted as secondary victims. Any worthwhile system of redress must be relational, taking into account the needs of the victims in the context of their family and community

The second point is that in the case of church-related abuse (or other kinds of abuse for that matter) we need to take account of the spiritual damage the victim has suffered. We can hardly expect IICSA to comment on this in detail, but the lack of care from the church for the souls of victims is perhaps the most incomprehensible and reprehensible aspect of the church’s failings in safeguarding. Church leaders seem to find it very difficult to look this challenge in the eye, but it is starkly obvious to the general public, and it is amongst the primary factors in the decline in church adherence in the UK. Spiritual repair, at an individual and corporate level, will be the truest sign of a sea change in the church’s attitude to safeguarding.

Finally, a practical suggestion for those who find the whole business of redress overwhelming. I commend the notion of “snapshot” restoration as a starting point for the church’s approach. This model defines a fixed point in the victim’s story, and attempts as a start to restore them to where they were financially, spiritually and socially to where they were at that fixed point. It’s a bit like those computer programmes that will restore your data to a fixed point in the past, before it went wrong. One obvious snapshot to choose is the moment at which the individual disclosed their abuse to the church. The church’s duty to restore a victim as best as possible to that point seems unarguable, since surely we can’t justify a survivor being worse off for having disclosed their abuse.  That doesn’t define the totality of redress. It doesn’t begin to address the debt owed for the original abuse, or the deepest needs of the victim. But it is measurable and manageable, and it answers the oft-heard cry of the victim that “I wish I could go back to where I was the day before I disclosed.”

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

9 thoughts on “What do we mean by Redress?

  1. Oh yes. Another brilliant and thoughtful post. Will it happen? I may open a book.

  2. Thank you very much indeed for this excellent and humane summary of the issues! I agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be a sophisticated and dynamic approach in providing redress for victims.

    However, I am not certain that the Church has the competence or credibility to undertake such an analysis of any one victim. I would also query whether even an expanded NST would have the expertise to do this.

    It would be useful if you could provide some of your own insights (perhaps in a part 3) about how this compensation could be provided from administrative and ‘process’ perspectives. My starting point is that this should all be handled by a completely independent agency, but that is just a presumption of mine, and perhaps a flawed one.

    Many thanks again!

    1. Understandably, we are discussing a situation in the context of the Church of England, and in the aftermath of the interim IICSA report.

      Sadly, the problem is far more widespread than just the church, and the “structured settlements” which I described on the previous thread have been around for a long time. But I stress that these are highly specialised and in substantial cases, in my experience, have always been ‘settled’ (drafted) by specialist counsel (a barrister) taking account of all of the factors mentioned by Andrew Graystone. Only the personal apology and pastoral care (as distinct from independent paid-therapy) puts the Church in a different and additional category.

      Providing for future and continuing financial losses is seriously compromised by current interest rates. The formula, which has been in use for decades relied on interest on a lump sum yielding an income which in present circumstances is unlikely to remain adequate. As I said on the previous thread, index-linked periodical payments overcome that particular difficulty; they might represent only part of a unified package.

      Who will administer such a scheme? It seems to me that the specialist skills will have to be sought and employed externally of the Church, at the very least by instructing counsel in substantial cases. Of course the Church remains responsible for all the other elements of redress: apology and continuing pastoral care, just to name two.

      How can the two different roles work alongside? That seems to me the nub of the matter to be resolved.

      1. Thank you very much indeed for this, Mr Wateridge, and for amplifying your previous – and very useful – comments.

        I would add only that there will presumably be a significant number of victims who will reluctant, if not antipathetic, to receiving pastoral support from the Church (which, of course, is not to suggest it should not be offered).

        Also, I note your remarks about interest rates (above and in your previous post). This will presumably place insurers under great strain, as they have conventionally been highly dependent upon compound interest. Of course, ‘real’ interest rates are already negative, since Bank rate is 0.1% and RPI (in August) was 0.5%, i.e. -0.4%. I am belabouring this point in various places, since it is a disaster for savers and banks (who, like insurers, risk becoming decapitalised). Interest rates have been in the gutter for almost the entirety of the last two decades, which is the longest period of near-zero or negative rates in the three thousand years or so we have – admittedly patchy – records (https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/A+History+of+Interest+Rates%2C+4th+Edition-p-9780471732839). So you are so very right to call out this massive problem.

        Many thanks, again!

  3. Thank you Andrew for this wonderful contribution coming from profound thought on the nature of the matter. Froghole, I fully understand where you are coming from with regard to the competence of the Church and I agree but the Church has to take full ownership otherwise I don’t know that the issue is fully addressed. If someone destroys my greenhouse I don’t want someone else (father or mother?) to come along with a restorative package, I want the contrition of the culprit to be evident. For ‘culprit’ don’t just read certain individuals but all whose role served to assist, cover or protect.

  4. Redress is no good to you when your dead they need to help those older survivors historical abuse like myself and others I know from the iiicsa have very little time left in life

  5. Thank you for your encouraging comments. A few random thoughts:

    I agree with the points being made about the need for redress to be managed independently. As you say, that there is a lack of competence in the church to run a redress scheme. There is also an understandable lack of trust from survivors toward the church, even though many church leaders seem to find this hard to believe or accept.

    We often hear the argument from bishops that the church must retain its responsibility for safeguarding. This is a canard. In fact, what the church calls safeguarding is two very distinct things. Preventative safeguarding consists of training, vetting, vigilance and so on, to ensure that abuse doesn’t happen. Of course the church needs to retain the responsibility for this, just as a house-holder needs to retain responsibility for their household security. Dealing with safeguarding failures, and the care of victims, is another matter entirely and requires a wholly different approach. Allowing the church to be responsible for safeguarding failures is like asking horses to clean out their own stables. They can’t; they messed them up in the first place; they are ill-equipped to muck them out, and frankly, they have them the way they like them.

    The only obvious source for very large amounts of money is the Church Commissioners. I’m not an expert, but I suspect that the law wouldn’t allow them to transfer a very large sum into a separate, independent fund without an act of parliament. I don’t know how this can be resolved. The National Safeguarding Team has said that it expects the redress scheme to be up and running in 12-15 months – and I know that some survivors are hanging on for that. But bear in mind that eight months have passed since the unanimous motion of General Synod, and even the infinitely smaller Interim Pilot Support Scheme remains unfunded. The far smaller Safe Spaces project has stumbled into life seven years after it was promised. I think that without government intervention, 12 – 15 years is a more likely timetable for a redress scheme to be in place. I don’t know how to resolve this.

    I do have one practical suggestion for the future, though it may be too radical to get much traction. I suggest that all clergy should be required as a condition of employment to carry professional indemnity insurance, in the same way that doctors and lawyers do. Anyone who had been abused by a clergy-person could make a claim for clerical malpractice against the individual, which would be assessed by their professional body and its insurer. Those who had legitimate claims against them would find themselves unable to get cover, and therefore unable to practice.

    I guess this would cost clergy something like £1,000 each per year, which would need to be met by dioceses as part of the stipend. Dioceses would see their employers’ liability premiums fall by a corresponding sum.

    I’ve never heard this idea before, and would be interested…

  6. I’m not at all certain that it would be possible to insure against liability for having committed a crime such as sexual abuse. I think it would be deemed contrary to public policy to indemnify a criminal. It’s quite different from, e.g., the professional negligence of a surgeon for a bodged operation, or an architect for a defective building design (although those might lead to prosecution in cases of gross negligence), the distinction, surely, being the difference between the deliberate criminal intention of an abuser and negligent breaches of duties of care and of contract by the surgeon or architect.

    We have previously discussed here, and on TA, the State Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority compensation scheme which does compensate victims of sexual abuse, but of necessity it operates a kind of tariff similar to the scale of benefits for travel insurance which you mentioned. As an example, I believe the figure for a single act of rape can be £11,000, but the scheme’s scope is much wider than that. Provisional quotations of benefits can be searched online. Of course the CICA doesn’t afford redress against the church or the offending abuser (incidentally not necessarily clergy). I don’t know whether the CICA seeks to recover its payments from the party responsible for the abuse.

    The job description for the proposed C of E Redress Scheme Development Manager requires him or her to consider the CICA scheme and how it might impact on Church redress payments; similarly any separate claim made for damages relating to the same subject matter. Clearly the intention is to avoid double-compensation.

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