Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action Between the Lines, by Julie Macfarlane 2020

Reading the sorry history of the Church of England and its response to sexual abuse survivors over the past 10 years, one detects some profound failures of understanding and communication. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the account given us by Professor Julie Macfarlane in her chronicle of her fight against the legal forces deployed against her by the Church.  The book details these struggles, when she sought to obtain justice for herself as a victim of sexual violence perpetrated by a member of the Church of England clergy.

Macfarlane’s early story needs to be told in an abbreviated form.  As a child growing up in Chichester, she was sexually abused by a priest for several years from the ag of 16.  Her life was naturally seriously affected by the abuse.  Nevertheless, in spite of later suffering from repeated bouts of cancer and the typical PSTD symptoms experienced by many victims, she managed to build a successful career in the law, eventually becoming a Law Professor in Canada.  It is Macfarlane’s legal background which gives her account of her struggles a particular power and distinct perspective.  When she found out that her abuser was still operating as an Anglican priest in Western Australia, she used her professional contacts and know-how to ensure that he was prevented from ministering as an Anglican.  She later discovered that he simply joined another denomination.  This inability of the church and the law to put a block on an individual who was a known abuser stimulated her into further action.  Her motive was simply that this priest, Meirion Griffiths, should cease to be a danger to other vulnerable people.  The book that Macfarlane wrote, Going Public is her account of costly struggle to achieve this.  The story concludes with Griffiths sent to prison in England for eight years at the start of 2020.

The shocking part of the book, which must have had considerable impact among the higher echelons of the Church of England, is the account of what can only be described as her ‘hand to hand’ combat with the expensive lawyers employed by the Church.  There is in her story confirmation of the tactics that Gilo has reported of the Church and its insurers, using aggressive and bullying questioning by lawyers to try to avoid paying more than nominal amounts in compensation. The methods to attempt to discredit her testimony on the part of church lawyers were similar to those used in rape trials.  In summary, the defence lawyer or here the insurer’s lawyer, attempted to trash her reputation as an abuse victim as much as possible.  This is apparently considered normal practice in these kinds of hearings.  We also heard about the use by the Church of a ‘tame’ psychiatrist with no professional experience of dealing with child sexual abuse.  He was prepared to write reports, sometimes without even meeting the victims, that would suggest that there were other episodes in a victim’s life which were responsible for the present mental anguish caused by the abuse.

Professor Julie Macfarlane’s legal and moral victory over the legal forces ranged against her, was not just a victory for herself.  It was a victory potentially to be shared by all survivors who are seeking to hold the Church to account for what they have suffered.  As part of her financial settlement, she has, with the help of her students in Canada put forward suggestions for a new protocol for these kinds of cases.  This protocol was published in 2016 as a statement by EIO of their new guiding principles.  I am unclear whether this initiative has been followed through with an external appraisal.   Macfarlane has also succeeded in correcting the assumption, apparently held by senior officials in the Church, that it has no say in the methods used by its lawyers in compensation cases after abuse.  This has been shown to be untrue. We certainly never again want to see the nadir of church non-responsiveness to abuse victims which was reached when two archbishops publicly failed to engage with Matt Ineson.  Both men had been invited to say a word to Matt who was sitting near them at the IICSA hearings. Both declined.  This was, no doubt, on the ‘advice of lawyers’.  The Church has been in thrall to an understanding of the rules around compensation which suggested that it is necessary to withold all communication with victims when there is some kind of legal case pending.  In fact, the Compensation Act of 2006 says the complete opposite.   Words of apology do not and cannot affect the outcome of compensation cases.

I am going to make an assumption that the Church of England is in the process of adopting a number of new legal and pastoral protocols following the Macfarlane case.  I have no knowledge of whether that is in fact the case.  All I can say is that, from what I am hearing, the appetite for aggressively defending the Church against abuse claims seems to have changed in tone over recent months.  What still remains to be done? if there is a will to reform the protocols and make it easier for victim/survivors to receive a hearing and a just response, how can the church authorities show that they mean business?  The short answer is that there is a need for the Church, as any large institution, to communicate in writing with victims/survivors to offer a meaningful apology   To get a hint of what it might look like, we need to look at the actions of the Australian government towards the tens of thousands of unmarried women who were forced to give up children for adoption.  The Australian government has written to each of these women expressing its sorrow, regret and apology.  The impression I get from reading about this decision, which dates back to 2013, is that it has been much appreciated by the women concerned.  A government apology, according to one woman, lifts the stain of quasi-criminality that has hung over her throughout her life.  The letter represents a kind of judicial pardon, even if no crime had ever been committed.  These mothers had been marked with a kind of taint which made them feel less than complete members of society. 

In Britain there is now a movement to obtain something similar from our government.  Once again it would mean an enormous amount to women who have suffered the trauma of losing their children and the taint of illegitimacy to receive such a letter.  I am unclear whether financial compensation is due to be paid, but the general impression is that such payments are not to the fore when the women come forward seeking to receive recognition for what they have had to suffer over decades.  They want a written apology as it will substantially contribute to a measure of emotional healing as they approach the end of life.

Readers of this blog will have probably already anticipated where the discussion is taking us.  At a time when the appalling extent of institutionally enabled sexual abuse and bullying has been acknowledged by the Church, perhaps the institution needs to get ahead of the game and think creatively about how they are going to respond to so many who have been doubly harmed – by the abuse and the crass church treatment that came afterwards.  The Australian example indicates to us the power of the apology.  Apologies are not only appropriate gestures by actual perpetrators of crimes but they can also be made by those who preside as leaders of the institutions that allowed the criminals to exist.  The Canadian government deemed it appropriate to apologise to the members of the First Nations groups who were forcibly placed in boarding schools, destroying their languages and culture.  There are presumably experts who have studied this issue of the effectiveness of such apologies.  Certainly, the Church should have a contribution to make in this area with its access to an understanding of forgiveness and the restoration of relationships.  To judge from my interactions with survivors, I would express the belief that apologies, if they are made with the right words and the right motivation, could do an enormous amount to change the atmosphere in the Church as it faces up to its appalling record in the safeguarding disasters of the past ten years.

What would an apology look like?  I am not in  a position to offer a blueprint but I would suggest that it needs to attempt at least the following aims. It goes without saying that such letters should be prompt and not give the impression of unwillingness and endless delays.

• Any written apology must communicate integrity.  This means that all cliché must be rigorously avoided and the words chosen extremely carefully.
• The survivor should have control over whether their apology will be shared and made public by them (ie no NDAs).
• Reference to biblical material may be inserted, but quotations from the Bible cannot be the ‘shut down discussion’ type.   They need to illustrate and fill out central Christian concerns for truth and justice as well as forgiveness.
• A letter of apology will need to involve the insights of survivors to assist the writer in avoiding insincere sounding phrases.  The survivors are the experts in language that avoids cant.
• The way that the writer is involved needs to be spelt out.  A bishop of a diocese is in an indirect way identified with the good and bad of his predecessors.  This relationship may be tangential, but it is still there.  A bishop of Gloucester is, for good and for ill, the inheritor of Peter Ball’s abuse.  The diocese carries that terrible story in its history and in its blood stream.  Anything said by a current bishop must reflect that sense of retrospective shame in some way.  When it comes to Archbishops or leaders of religious networks such as ReNew, the critical task is to find the correct level of identification with the horrors of the past.  Where guilt exists, it needs to be owned up to.  This will include the guilt of cover-up, secrecy or the dismissive demeaning treatment of survivors.  The best thing for everyone is to have a thorough understanding and sense of the history of abuse.  This will come from listening to survivors and reading the reports which are now numerous.  Knowing the past is to ensure that that past is properly respected so that the abuse cannot easily happen again.  Denying the past or trivialising it is a certain to communicate a lack of sincere sorrow for everything which has happened.  Survivors will sense very quickly if a leader tries to distant him/herself from the past we all share..

The story of Julie Macfarlane is in part an account of deeply destructive attitudes put out by church leaders and their lawyers which did so much harm to a generation of survivors.    Her story was only published barely a year ago and there is still a great deal to be done to respond to her story by the whole Church.  In the words of Psalm 51 ‘shame (still) covers our face’.

The path towards institutional healing for the Church of England in its appalling failures over safeguarding will not be completed over night.  When the task of absorbing the lessons of Makin, the Christ Church debacle, in which senior members of the Church have played a less than honourable role, and other similar stories is done, the final stage of reaching out to survivors can begin.  It could, of course, begin sooner, but I sense that there are perhaps still too many ambivalent feelings among the potential authors of such letters to make the task straightforward.  The church institution and its leaders need time, but in the meantime there are many would-be volunteers able to help those leaders plan for this final and crucial gesture of reconciliation to its suffering abused members.