Many years ago, when I was an incumbent, I was the victim of a crime. The St George’s flag which flew outside my church was stolen. While most flags of this kind are flown from the top of a tower, the church in Lechlade boasted a spire and so we had to use a flag pole in front of the church building. The churchwarden and I reported the crime to the police and we were assigned a case number for the purposes of an insurance claim. A few weeks later I received a letter in the post from the organisation called Victim Support. Was I, as the victim of a crime, in need of support? At the time, it seemed rather amusing that I might be traumatised by the loss of a flag, but I quickly realised that it was important to respect this approach. Many, if not most crimes, affect people quite badly and it is good to know that there are volunteers prepared to care for individuals who are victims of a criminal act.

The crimes/misdemeanours that I am concerned about today are those that have damaged individuals in a church setting – the abuse, the bullying and the things that so easily go wrong when power is misused. Followers of my blog posts will be already familiar with the numerous permutations of the evil that can be perpetrated on the innocent, even by church people. IICSA and the Press have made us all familiar with some now notorious episodes of wrong-doing and the Church’s weak responses to many of them. Now the Church of England has set up comprehensive safeguarding structures in an attempt to put these incidents firmly into the past. These structures embrace every level of church life, from the local parish church to the House of Bishops. They are designed to offer safety and protection for children and vulnerable adults and protect them from the scourge of sexual abuse. To help us understand how the whole system is supposed to work in practice, the Church published an explanatory booklet last October. It has the uninformative title of Key Roles and Responsibilities of Church Office Holders and Bodies Practice Guidance. This title does not give away its purpose in relation to the Church’s new safeguarding structures. One wonders whether the obscurity of the title was a deliberate ploy to keep this valuable information away from all but those professionally involved in the complex world of Church safeguarding and its implementation.

Why do I bring this document up for examination in my blog? It is because I am curious to see whether the new profession of safeguarding in the Church, with all its various committees, really understands the experience of survivors and victims of sexual abuse. Does the Church propose to parallel Victim Support? Is there anything that responds to the testimony of those who contributed to Andrew Graystone’s powerful booklet, presented to members of General Synod in February? The overall message of that booklet, We Asked for Bread, was that the experience of being ignored by the Church and its officers was far worse than the original experience of abuse.

I spent a hour or more reading Key Roles and I did find some scattered references to survivors and victims. The bulk of the text, however, talks about setting up good professional practice for safeguarding in dioceses and parishes. When speaking about the National Safeguarding Team there was one strange statement. The role of the NST is to ‘develop and implement national survivors engagement and support work’. I am not clear what this pithy statement actually means. It is mentioned alongside twelve other statements about the NST role, none of which mention victims of abuse. The Bishop of the Diocese is required to ‘ensure that the diocese provides arrangements to support survivors of abuse’. Obviously, such arrangements would require funds. But, when we look at the role of the Church Commissioners we only find a reference to funding legal costs ‘for litigation relating to safeguarding cases.’ One wonders why the litigation funds are needed. Are they by chance for funding QCs to defend the Church when survivors begin to seek legal redress in the absence of any other kind of support?

It is when we get to the description of the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers (DSA) role that we first find some real engagement with the existence and needs of survivors of past sexual abuse. A diocese is required to have in place ‘authorised listeners or an externally provided service to support victims/survivors of church abuse.’ A footnote links this requirement to an earlier document published by the Church in 2011, Responding Well to those who have been Sexually Abused. This earlier document represented a real effort by the Church to spell out a response to the needs of the sexually abused. It was not just focused on survivors of abuse by church leaders but any who had suffered such abuse and who now looked to the church for help. Because this kind of abuse was then not normally linked to church leaders, the 2011 document has none of the defensiveness that has descended on the more recent responses on the part of bishops and senior church people. This earlier document is also not hedged about with the concerns of lawyers and insurance companies. It is able to take a compassionate, pastoral look at abuse and show real concern as well as professional competence in this area. There is insight into such things as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the way that listening is an essential part of responding to a survivor.

The situation is further explained in the appendices of Key Roles when the ‘duties and responsibilities’ of a DSA are spelt out. There are 14 of these. No 5 states that the DSA is to ‘give advice, information and support to victims/survivors of abuse and ensure that the diocese responds well to those who have suffered abuse.’ This requirement, when placed alongside all the other 13, seems to allow some wriggle room for those who do not want to engage properly with the needs of survivors. I have heard of some excellent work by individual DSAs who, without extra funds or professional resources, work hard for victims/survivors. Equally I have heard of DSAs who are so buried beneath the requirements of risk assessments and training courses that they find no time for the care of real survivors.

The sentiments of the 2011 document read like a Church which wants to reach out in compassion to victims of abuse. The 2017 booklet reads like a bureaucratic attempt to tell the world that the Church is behaving legally and correctly. Sadly, what is in fact revealed in 2017 is an institution lacking in soul, one which is desperately trying to defend itself from legal liability and other criticisms such as those that it expects to receive in due time from IICSA.

I began my piece with an example of the way that a secular institution responds to victims of crime. Can the Church really hold its head up high when it cannot better the Victim Support letter that I received all those years ago? In retrospect, even though it was not needed, I honour and respect the efforts of those who reached out to me in this way.