January/February 2024 are months when a decisive shift may take place in the Church of England. The shift that is looked for is linked to the promised publication of a report by Professor Alexis Jay on C/E safeguarding. This report promises to take a hard look at this area of the Church’s life and make some recommendations for the future. None of us know what those recommendations will consist of, but we hope that they will be marked by the same fearless independence that Jay has shown up till now. After her lengthy exposure to the internal operations of the Church of England at the highest level during the IICSA hearings, Jay knows how the system works. It is likely that she realises that allowing the Church to continue to manage its safeguarding responsibilities in the future, without external oversight, will prove to be potentially disastrous. Her professional background and her understanding of church dynamics in the C/E at General Synod and Archbishops’ Council level, has prompted her to take a strongly independent line right from the beginning of her investigations. Jay has publicly stated that she will not tolerate any attempted interference which seeks to undermine or compromise the integrity of her investigations. This strongly independent line taken by Jay is backed up by her decision to see her interviewees only in locations that have no links with church institutions.
We still do not have the Jay report at the time of writing, but we do have hopes and expectations that it will be a thorough piece of work. What do we know so far? It became apparent early on in the process that Jay was not attempting to do a safeguarding survey of every diocese in the C/E. She decided to focus on six sample dioceses. I played a tiny part in the overall process by encouraging two individuals known to me, and who lived in one of these six named dioceses, to approach her. Both did so and reported back that they received what they felt to be highly professional and considerate attention. The fact that Jay was there to record what was truly going on and not defend an institution involved in safeguarding, meant that each felt heard in a way quite different from that received from church authorities. Good reports of other interviews have also been shared across social media and this gives everyone following this process good reason to believe that the eventual report will reveal truth and objectivity.
In this waiting period for Jay’s report and recommendations for the Church of England, it is natural for some of us to express our hopes and think out loud over what we would like to see. The main finding that I would like to see as part of the Report is a conclusion that the Church should hand over completely its safeguarding responsibilities to an independent body. Such a body would have to be financed by the Church of England, but it would be set up in a way that removed all control from bishops, Archbishops’ Council and the Secretariat at Church House. Dismantling the existing structures that have appeared in the Church since 2015 with a confusing plethora of acronyms, would be a major piece of work. If anyone were to propose and redesign from scratch a structure for delivering church safeguarding, it would be a very lengthy document. I have neither the ability nor interest in even outlining such a reconstruction. What I offer here are some thoughts on the broad areas that need to be covered by a comprehensive safeguarding body, able to do the work that needs to be done.
Long time readers of this blog will know my propensity for attempting to simplify complex problems or ideas by dividing them into three. Safeguarding in the Church is one such immensely complicated activity, but it does, to my simple mind, allow itself to be divided up into three distinct strands. The first manifestation of safeguarding is the point at which it touches almost every church member. Awareness of safeguarding hazards and dangers has successfully been made part of every church activity down to the parish level. If this process of teaching safeguarding awareness was the sole content of safeguarding activity, then the Church could be considered to have earned a ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ in an imaginary tick-box exercise. But safeguarding is of course much more than this and the Church cannot in any way be said to achieve even ‘satisfactory’ in these other two strands.
If the first strand to be identified comes under the broad description of training, the second tranche of safeguarding activity may be described as legacy issues. By these two words I am indicating the enormous amount of work that is still outstanding from the past to put right injustice and the appalling cases of neglect by the Church of vulnerable and damaged people over decades. The skills required to put right legacy issues are, of course, quite different from those used to manage the massive training programme already undertaken by the Church. We need a small army of legal experts, psychotherapists and financial experts alongside professional abuse-informed investigators to do the work. It will not be cheap, and I am not going to suggest how many people it will need to do this aspect of safeguarding. The main observation I make about this work is to say that just because safeguarding training and safeguarding legacy issues possess a word in common, it does not mean that the work and expertise required for these areas of urgent work should be done by the same people. The compilers of training courses for the Church cannot be expected to have the necessary skills to pick up the wounded from the side of the road and minister to their emotional and physical needs.
The third area of urgently needed work is a requirement for a skilled cohort to attempt the task of rebuilding trust in the Church as a place of safety. There has to be a huge effort in trying to wipe away the appalling reputationally destructive events of the past twenty+ years. We might call this the public relations strand. The Church has been employing reputation managers and experts in public communication for a long time, but it has been largely unsuccessful in convincing a sceptical public that it is doing a good job at maintaining high standards of transparency, justice and integrity. Indeed, like a political party that has been in power too long, the Church gives the impression of repeatedly being involved in covering up its own version of sleaze. This is linked to what looks like a complacent entitlement and an inflated sense of its own importance. Recent comparisons with the Post Office in Britain, and the way the Church has refused to support victims or thoroughly investigate the guilt or innocence of the accused, have left a sour taste in the mouth of many onlookers. Working for the Post Office proved to be a dangerous and costly choice for many of its employees. Working for, or in some way supporting, the Church of England appears to be sometimes equally hazardous. This public relations strand, which compels the Church to put considerable resources into the task of honest reputation repair, is a vital one. If the Church demonstrates further examples of destroyed trust, then its survival as a public institution will be under serious threat.
So far, I have identified three distinct strands of safeguarding activity which the Church must engage with even if they are hugely costly in terms of finance and effort. These strands, named as training, legacy issues and reputational repair, demand the skill and effort of highly qualified individuals and institutions. If the Church tries to take short cuts as, for example, using the services of inexperienced unqualified people, the long-term damage to the Church will be potentially massive. What I am hoping to see in Professor Jay’s recommendations is a move to greater professionalism as well as greater independence. One thing I have not attempted to set out here is a new structure for safeguarding within our Church. That is for others to do, and I would suggest that it needs to look quite different from the haphazardly evolved arrangements we have at present. The major point I have wanted to make is that the strands of activity that together make up the enterprise we call safeguarding, require an immense variety of skills. Lawyers are seldom trained in psychotherapy and managers are not known to be especially trauma-aware. Setting out all the tasks that need to be done and then identifying the skill sets required, will take a great deal of work and time. I am hoping that Professor Jay also will want to say some of these things to the Church. I am just an observer right on the edge of the safeguarding enterprise. Those of us on the margins are sometimes entrusted with information and/or insights that may help the Church get things right in the future as it tries to repair and move on from all that has gone so wrong in the past.
Thank you for this Stephen we may have to wait until they make a drama about the effects of spiritual abuse before some clergy and DSA’s even acknowledge it. Even then who will care, people care about the post office do they care about the church?
As one of the two people Stephen mentions as being interviewed by Professor Jay, I feel confident that she will be blunt and honest in her findings. These, hopefully, will rattle the people these findings are aimed at when the truth is exposed.
Yes, Stephen Henders I, too, would suggest that the next step could be a television drama/documentary on the lines of the Post Office story. Although there may be more people concerned about the Post Office than the Church, it would come as a shock to the public to learn what has really been happening in such a trusted institution. After all, I knew nothing of abusive safeguarding practices in the C/E until March 2020 when I started supporting Kenneth in the false allegations made about him. It came as a shock to me that senior clergy knowingly tell untruths, (which I told Professor Jay).
The discussions and debates in the news yesterday show the reasons it has taken a television drama to bring major attention to what has been an ongoing situation for more than twenty years. These discussions came to one conclusion which was that real people were brought into people’s homes and the audience could identify with them, helped by the excellence of the actors. The country has been taken by storm and it is by no means over yet.
The strength was in the four successive episodes over four evenings so the momentum was maintained.
I think indeed we may have to wait until a similar drama is made before full realisation is understood about the many years of abuse in safeguarding practices in the Church of England but, hopefully the Professor Jay report will have prepared the ground for such a drama/documentary.
“Such a body would have to be financed by the Church of England, but it would be set up in a way that removed all control from bishops, Archbishops’ Council and the Secretariat at Church House.”
Many thanks for this article, but that particular statement seems contradictory, and it also strikes me as being the Achilles heel in any plan of reform. This is why I have been arguing on previous threads for a national agency with responsibility for safeguarding all vulnerable people, and which would be financed by a mixture of exchequer grants and levies on those institutions with safeguarding obligations. That, then, would mitigate against moral suasion emanating from any single body. For if the agency is financed by the Church, then the Church will presumably retain control, however ‘independent’ the agency appears to be. The finance would come from the Commissioners, and the Commissioners are creatures of the bench, Archbishops’ Council and the Secretariat. They also have fiduciary obligations not to impair the value of their fund, and would presumably advise the rest of the central bodies not to provide adequate funding and/or to resist claims. On this basis, the agency could
However, I appreciate that the creation of a comprehensive national agency may not be practical politics, and there are perhaps occasions when it is better to accept something (even if imperfect) rather than nothing.
As I see it, the only basis on which a proper level of independence would be assured, is if:
(i) the Church grants the agency absolute title to a portion of its capital which then becomes the property of the agency;
(ii) the agency has the power to make determinations about abuse cases;
(iii) the agency has the power to levy fines on the Church and on office-holders, and is treated as a priority creditor, with the ability to levy interest on unpaid amounts at the statutory rate (8% above base);
(iv) the agency has the power to refer cases to the CPS, and that this power would prevail over any disciplinary power of the Church;
(v) the agency has the power to require the Church (or to recommend that the civil courts) discipline clergy and other office holders, or to impose restrictions upon them (or, contrariwise, to remove restrictions imposed by Church authorities), by way of a species of mandamus;
(vi) the agency has the power to require all Church bodies to provide written evidence, and to compel them to attend hearings and provide evidence under oath; and
(vii) the agency has the ability to appropriate further capital from the Church if and when its seed capital falls below a certain level.
Anything less than this, the agency will be neither independent nor of sufficient stature to be worthwhile.
I believe a National Body for Safeguarding is imperative for all faith groups. Let’s not settle for anything less. None of these groups have senior personnel with the independence, objectivity and competence to deliver fair justice. Trying to manage in-house safeguarding issues has been truly disastrous. The National Body or Agency would have clearly defined robust sanctions to impose and could be financed by a levy/fee from the participating groups. Regulatory bodies, MPTS, BSB, SRA, NMC are able to recruit suitable panellists for their work. Time now for ALL faith groups to deliver fair justice. The CofE could make a valid start on this.
I think you are right, although I am apprehensive about people in authority dallying (and finding the dallying all-too-convenient) whilst so many victims have been patiently awaiting redress for years.
Although I have mentioned this on previous threads, what I would personally like to see is this (or the next) government initiate legislation in which a new national agency – one not confined to the supervision of religious bodies but all bodies with the supervision of the vulnerable (that includes care homes and agencies for the elderly and those who have other impairments, where the scandals have arguably been no less severe) – is given statutory oversight, quasi-police powers and (to some extent) quasi-judicial powers.
I think that it might also be worth considering the creation of a specialist unit within the High Court, or a tribunal of specialists under the supervision of the High Court, which handles abuse cases referred to it by the national agency, so that these cases can be expedited and sanctions imposed. These could include custodial sentences, punitive fines and the imposition of disciplinary measures on faith bodies and the personnel of faith bodies which would override any internal disciplinary processes which those bodies might have – that would include the ‘courts Christian’, which are mostly the emanation of the authority of the bishops. No doubt there would be a lot of the customary whining which emanates from many faith groups, but if a tribunal included an assessor from the applicable faith group (an assessor, mind, who could always be outvoted by other members of the tribunal), then that might quell at least some of the usual special pleading.
In any event, I think this is an instance where the State must intrude upon the sensibilities of the Church, given that the Church must pay a price for its serial and rank incompetence, moral turpitude and gross dishonesty. It would be the Church which has brought this on itself, and it is the Church which would have to take its merited and highly overdue punishment. If some people would protest the creation of such disciplinary arrangements as ‘Erastian’, my view would be “so what!” and “who cares?”.
I should add that you may well be correct in noting that a Church of England-specific body will likely be captured by the Church (irrespective of what measures are put in place to prevent it). As with so many single-industry regulators, the officials within the regulators are invariably captured, as so many moths are drawn to a flame.
Moreover, if any regulator starts off being devoted solely to the Church, and then expands, it will already have become the victim of path dependency in its dealings with the Church, so if it is captured quite quickly (as I suspect it would be), that might have adverse implications for any other faith group or other entity which winds up falling under the jurisdiction of the captured regulator.
I venture the following prediction. The Jay Report will never be published. I suspect it will never be formally completed: that is, that some person or body within the Church will attempt to censor or rewrite it in a way which Professor finds intolerable, and she will repudiate it. If it is completed, and Professor Jay delivers a report to the Church which she is prepared to stand behind, then that report will not be published.
This might reassure you. We can only take what it says at face value and wait to see what happens:
https://futureofchurchsafeguarding.org.uk/
Please read what women are writing about – repeatedly – wrt the failures of safeguarding in schools, hospitals, and prisons before launching forth on some ‘national safeguarding authority’.