by Stephen Parsons
Among all the stories of terrible abuse that have occurred within a church setting, there are a few which follow a different narrative, that of a false accusation. All abuse accusations need to be responded to professionally and well. But, when, as in some accounts, a false accusation has been made, the one accused turns out to be the actual victim. The implications for the health and well-being of the accused are life-long. Some of these stories, like that of Bishop Michael Perham, are in the public domain, while others, unknown, blight the lives of those accused while continuing to protest their innocence.
Any individual burdened with the accusation of committing a sexually abusive act is in a very difficult and sometimes impossible position. Sexual activity, abusive or not, is done in private and if an accused individual is unable to prove that he (normally he) was elsewhere when the attack was made, his protestations of innocence may be unheard. If a child is involved, many people assume that a child is incapable of telling a lie about such matters. Even though an allegation from a child should be taken extremely seriously and never trivialised, this does not take away the need for detailed and careful questioning. Assumptions of guilt should never be untested and unchallenged. Anyone who is accused of a crime should always have the opportunity to be properly heard and recover their reputation, if innocent
Any accusation that gets through an initial inquiry, one that may sometimes be based on amateur guesswork or homespun psychology, can still be the cause of enormous damage. Also, requiring a teacher, a priest or a bishop to ‘step-back’ for months, even years, while enquiries are made can be a time of extreme mental torture for the accused. I knew of a case of a head teacher at a special school who was accused by pupils of some kind of abuse. He had to go on paid leave while the accusation was assessed and rejected. The experience broke him, and he died from a sudden heart attack in his late fifties. Equally tragic was the story mentioned above, that of Bishop Perham. I knew him fairly well in his curate days near Croydon. This was before he started to move from one important job in the Church to another, ending up as Bishop of Gloucester. As a liturgist, Perham had a huge part in the creation of Common Worship and it was in the early 80s that we met at conferences for the study of liturgy. The accusations that surfaced during his time at Gloucester emerged from his time in Croydon. I have no doubt that protocols were correctly followed but there is something wrong with a process that takes many months to deliver a verdict. The accusations were withdrawn, and Perham was then allowed to return to Gloucester to receive proper farewells before retirement. These had been denied him while the accusations were being examined. Sadly, he was soon to develop terminal cancer, and he never lived to enjoy a long well-earned and productive retirement.
Having brought up two accounts of false accusation and the devastating damage they can cause, I want to raise the question of why anyone might choose to make such an accusation. The points that I bring up are not based on a single case, but long-term readers will recognise that some of the questions I ask could be appropriate to the ‘Kenneth’ case. My assessment of why his case has proved so difficult to resolve is first to point to the institutional refusal by the Church of England to allow any kind of independent appeal process which might challenge the amateur assumptions of a Core Group. Possibly his case might have been dealt with differently if he was a cleric, but the Kenneth’s lay status seems to have worked against him. Declaring him guilty by placing him in the ‘high-risk’ category has created damaging effects for him and the cathedral concerned. In addition, confidence in the safeguarding protocols has been undermined in his diocese, as I understand. There still seems to be no resolution in sight.
Having thought for some time about accusations of bullying and abuse and the motives for making them, I find myself in company with the vast majority in believing the bulk of such accusations to be true. But there will be exceptions, and a group has always to be open to the possibility of a false accusation being made. A child may normally be truthful, but the same child may be attention seeking. Many children know that one way to get attention is to say something outrageous. In the village where I served my first incumbency, the Headteacher routinely asked at assembly if there were any birthdays to be celebrated. One small boy from a poor family would raise his hand on every occasion so that he could be the centre of attention for a moment. It was sad to behold. Was a response every time to this cry for importance the right way forward or would it have been better to ignore his hand shooting up? Being the centre of attention is strong motive for behaviour, and what is true for children is also true for some adults.
In our attempt to make decisions about who is likely guilty and who innocent, people at the top of an organisation can call upon the expertise of people we refer to as professionals. A professional is someone who has received a relevant training in such things as law, psychology and sociology. Such book knowledge is backed up by proven experience and expertise. One of the problems about church safeguarding has always been the lack of a generally accepted path to professional accreditation. Who should occupy this space, able to lay claim to safeguarding professional expertise? My own reading into the subject suggests that anyone who claims to be expert in this area without continuous professional development over 5-10 years is probably engaged in an act of self-deception. Merely listing some of the disciplines that contribute to a proper understanding of safeguarding – law, criminology, psychoanalytic theory and practice together with sociological insights. – makes one aware of that there will be probably serious, even dangerous, gaps in the so-called professionalism on offer from a typical Diocesan safeguarding ‘expert’. A multi-discipline team might overcome some of these skill problems in cases like that of Kenneth, but we will quickly hear the cry that such expertise is expensive. Allowing contested cases to reach no conclusion is also expensive, both financially and in terms of reputation. Who knows how much damage is sustained by a cathedral, even the wider church, when such cases come into the public domain? The lack of competent professionalism operating, as in Kenneth’s case, results in reputation damaging consequences for institutions and leaders alike.
In writing about professionalism and the way that is sometimes absent in safeguarding cases, I am minded to suggest a few ideas about how we might begin to change the situation. Being ‘unprofessional’ implies one of a number of possible lapses in judgement and behaviour. It is clearly unprofessional to indulge in such things as bias, favouritism and partiality. Such things are routinely found in the school playground. All of us have memories of our own childhoods where we had to negotiate our way through fickle and unreliable relationships. The constant shifting of moods among children means that a child’s best friend one day can sometimes become overnight the worst enemy. One of the gifts of adulthood is the ability to enjoy relationships that have stability and are not subject to constant changes of mood. The adult human does not cease to be capable of some serious lapses of judgment, involving possible regression to childish responses to others. There is also the danger of groupthink and unacknowledged prejudices can still pervade the way we think. There are, we find, many ways that we can get caught up in primitive ways of thinking about other people. Primal feelings of dislike often seem to be fed by memories of childhood rivalries; we may also be guilty of lapsing into child-like attention-seeking behaviour. In this way a non-professional group (PCC?) will also often be full of primitive dynamics. A chairperson of a committee or Core Group may need to be constantly reminding the individual members not to get swayed by such things as the memory of a school bully who resembles candidate B at the interview. Rising above subjectivity is something to ask of everyone in a quasi-judicial role, whether deciding on a candidate for class teacher at one’s local school or forming an opinion of someone accused of a sexual offence.
When the Church judicial processes get things wrong, the follow-on damage is appalling. When a Bishop can survive the credible claim that he told, without evidence, a female abuse survivor that she was victim of a false memory, many of us feel deep shame for even being associated with an organisation that can incubate such distorted thinking. The persecution of Fr Griffin is still recent enough to be a malignant wound in the Church of England. Where was the professional competence able to get the bottom of the rumours and leave an elderly priest in peace?
Safeguarding in the Church will continue to focus on the protection of the vulnerable. At the same time, the Church must learn to offer protection to the small number of individuals who fall into the category of falsely accused. When such accusations are made, we must not allow untrained individuals to have the final word. These beliefs may be mere prejudice, based on encounters many years before. If we do decide on the guilt of another, there must be the opportunity for an independent third party to review the case. Millions have been spent on safeguarding in the Church of England. The case for spending a small proportion of this money on the protection of the falsely accused would seem in order. They are victims too.
