The Surviving Church blog has attempted to offer both summary and comment on many of the reports that have appeared on the topic of power abuse in the Church of England.  At times this has proved a near-impossible task.  In March, with the release of the thirtyone:eight report on Jonathan Fletcher, another report of equal interest and importance was largely overlooked by SC.  This was the redacted independent Review produced for the Scripture Union (SU) by Gill Camina, an independent safeguarding consultant.  She was commissioned to examine the response of the SU to the John Smyth affair.  On Monday 21^st June, a new statement from the SU has been released which seeks to criticise the Camina Review.  Superficially it seems to give a reader the impression that much of the commissioned Review has been discredited.   But, even if we are to agree with every counterclaim by the SU about the original Review, we can still find a great deal of real value and insight in the original research and questioning undertaken by Camina.  While it is impossible here to respond to all the detailed points raised by SU’s ‘counter-attack’, we are still left with a great deal of valuable material from the original report which SU is not trying to discredit.  The main points of the Review still need to be responded to.  These challenge the culture and integrity within parts of the administration of both organisations, the Scripture Union and the sponsors of Smyth, the Iwerne Trust, now known as the Titus Trust.  The Camina Review, even in its redacted form, also gives us a great deal of valuable insight into the history of both groups and their ways of working.  The Review sheds light on the way that two charities set about the task of responding to the grim episode of the Smyth abuse which affected so many, directly and indirectly.

In summary, the Camina Review, in a redacted form, reveals first of all how the knowledge of John Smyth’s nefarious activities between 1979-82 was not shared with individuals within the SU network.  It first became known among senior Iwerne leaders after the Ruston Report was prepared in early 1982.   The SU might have expected to receive information at that time as the SU was the main parent body of the Iwerne Camps, though the Iwerne Trust provided salaries for some Camp Officers.  This lack of communication between Iwerne officers and the SU Trustees body was a serious matter.  Technically and legally, all the Iwerne Camps were held under the auspices of the SU.  There was meant to be a relationship of oversight of the Iwerne Trust by the SU, but in practice this was not followed since the then Iwerne Trust had for some time effectively broken away from the parent body.

How did the SU and Iwerne ever come into an association? The original link was through the founder of the Iwerne camps, E J. H.Nash, who had been employed by the SU to run camps back in the 30s.  Under him the Iwerne project grew substantially, and, in the process, it became self-financing with its own accounts and trustees.  The relationship with the SU continued, not least for administrative reasons. In legal terminology, the SU was an ‘incorporated body’ which for many years the Iwerne Trust was not.  Legally this meant that the SU had the necessary administrative structures to employ individuals.  The situation for many years was that the leaders of Iwerne Camps were the employees of SU, while being firmly being loyal to an independent organisation, the Iwerne Trust.  The SU trustees at times had expressed unhappiness with this arm’s length relationship but it suited the Iwerne Trust.  Also, the SU officers seem to have found it difficult to stand up to ‘the highly educated and powerfully confident Iwerne staff’.  This was in spite of the fact that Iwerne had developed its own ethos, somewhat different from that of the SU.   To summarise, Iwerne was using the SU link as a flag of convenience.

In spite of the firm and jealous independence of Iwerne from the SU, there were overlaps, with the same individuals belonging to both organisations. This became a greater problem the closer to the present we reach. John Smyth himself was a trustee of SU from 1971 to 1979 but this had not apparently, even in retrospect, created a safeguarding risk.  When the scandal around Smyth broke in 1982 and a report made (the Ruston report), only a heavily redacted version was shared with the General Director of the SU.   From the testimony gathered by Camina, there is evidence that there ‘was not full and open disclosure of the facts’.  While the General Director SU was not comfortable with the situation, no real effort was made to find out the full details from the Iwerne Trust.  The other SU trustees were told nothing. 

Meanwhile the Camina Review reminds the reader of other horrific aspects of Smyth’s abuse which have not yet been fully explored.  There was among the other Iwerne leaders a tendency ‘to minimise the severity and scale of the abuse and (they) have still found it possible to justify failures to report and to protect.’  Further, ‘Victim blaming by those linked with the case, in the face of widespread rumours, is widely evidenced in recordings and documents shared with the Reviewer’.  Translating these alarming sentences into simple English, we hear the claim that Smyth was allowed to create as well be part of an overall environment at Iwerne which was toxic and harmful.  

During  the 90s, the Iwerne Trust formally changed its status to become a fully independent body, henceforth known as the Titus Trust.  In 2014, the SU were informed, finally, by Titus of non-recent abuse disclosures.  This information was shared with all the SU trustees.  It became apparent that although SU had not run the camps, there had still been an historic failure of oversight of the Iwerne Trust and its camps.  It was not as if SU had no understanding or experience of running activities for young people and the need for good protocols for their protection and welfare.  SU always had had the power to terminate their relationship with Iwerne, especially when it had been clear that Iwerne was being tardy in responding to requests for information. There was a sense throughout the period before 2014 that neither organisation saw the welfare of Iwerne young people as the focus of their concern.   The focus was on the reputation and flourishing of the organisations themselves.

In 2014, when information began to flow from the Iwerne camps to the SU and to the statutory bodies, including the police, Camina judged the initial actions of the SU to be timely and appropriate.    She was less impressed with what took place after that date.  The June 21^st SU response document contains a number of counterclaims that strongly contest Camina’s accounts of what went on at this time.  The claimed errors are seen to be detrimental to the work of Titus and James Stileman, its operations director at the time. It is quite difficult to make real sense of what is being discussed.  What does come over from Camina’s Review is severe, and so far uncontested, criticism for the then National Director of SU for a number of serious failings.  These are to do with weak professional behaviour, poor communication and record keeping.   Part of the problem is that this Director, an enthusiastic ex-Iwerne camper, was apparently more concerned in preserving the reputation of his former institution, the Iwerne network.  This seemed of greater importance than the reputation of the organisation he now worked for in the present, i.e. the SU.  In the early stages there were, on his part, some extraordinary lapses of ‘curiosity’ or apparent interest in finding out what were the real facts over Smyth’s misbehaviour.  The simple interpretation of what was going on through these lapses of communication, was that the Director simply did not want to know or hear anything that might impugn the integrity of Iwerne.  Not to see or hear anything, gave the Director the excuse that he needed for sharing only limited information with the Trustees of SU.  By keeping them in the dark he was seeking to control the narrative and protect Titus.  Titus had dirty secrets and the SU Director’s job seems to been to sanitise those secrets as far as possible by keeping them away from the SU Trustees.  One particular and extraordinary failing took place after the Smyth television programme in February 2017.  The Director told his Trustees that he had immediately forwarded information about another victim to the police.  The Reviewer tried to get details of this, but the police had no record of any report nor was any information to be found in the SU archives.  The Reviewer was also constantly finding examples of individuals ‘assuming’ that verbal assurances of documents being handed on were correct.  There was an assumption of good faith but little in the way of checking as to whether paperwork and reports reached their destinations.     The current June 21^st SU response document responding critically to the Camina Review, makes no mention of these serious criticisms of its then General Director.  The quibbling about who released which report to whom pales into relative insignificance when stood alongside the failures of ‘curiosity’ and high-grade professional bungling of the SU General Director.  There is no doubt that he alone could have done much to bring Smyth to justice earlier if he had shown a little more professional integrity in his role. 

Titus Trust and the SU both come in for serious criticisms from Camina.  If the outsider can summarise those criticisms which apply to both sides, it is that each seemed, overall, to place the needs of their respective organisation above the needs of the individuals wounded by Smyth.  The June 21st response to the Review by the current SU trustees focusses on apparent inaccuracies in the report over relatively minor details.  The most striking feature of the 4 page response is its failure to engage with the chief criticisms that are stated or implied in the Review.  These centre on the fact that individuals and institutions hid information and failed to show compassion for victims (here and in Africa).  This is still a major finding of this whole Review.  One commentator has claimed that the response by the SU to the Camina Review has somehow vindicated the SU from all the accusations in the Review.  All that the comments from the June 21^st response document succeed in doing is, from my perspective, to throw sand in the eyes of the reader.  The original Camina Review is a powerful and courageous attempt to hold two organisations to account.  An individual who writes such conclusions in a Report is likely to see their work criticised and challenged.  This is what seems to have happened.  It does not, however, devalue the overall thrust of the Review.   I hope that the Review will be read by those who wish to understand more about the institutional aspects of the Smyth scandal.   The original Review may have had flaws and even inaccuracies, but overall I am impressed. It is a worthy addition to the library of documents written by genuine independent researchers into the murky world of individual and institutional abuse within the Church.  

The original Executive Summary  https://content.scriptureunion.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-03/Executive_Summary_of_SU_John_Smyth_Independent_Case_Review_March_2021.pdf

Scripture Union’s Response on June 21^st 2021 https://content.scriptureunion.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-06/Statement_21-06-21_0.pdf