Safeguarding scandals, whether they involve bullying or abuse, have hit the Church of England over the past 15 years with sickening regularity. These have cost the institution staggeringly large sums of money as well as reputational damage.    I am not privy to most of the financial details, but an event like the ‘retirement’ of the former Bishop of Winchester, a few years ago, was only managed and concluded after a great deal of money was made available to fund the whole process and the settlements that were reached.  Bishops and ordinary clergy hold offices which are protected by strong legal rights.  You cannot say to a clergyperson with a licence ‘you are fired’, even if there is a scale of offending that is blatant and obvious. The old consistory courts that used to preside in cases of clerical malfeasance have been superseded by new forms of church legislation, but the processes involved in removing a clergyman from office still involve the Church expending a great deal of labour and money.

As part of the financial education of the lay people in the Church, it is regularly being explained that the cost of one stipendiary priest is around £60,000.  Readers of this blog will understand something of how this figure is made up.  This is not anything like the salary level of an ordinary parish priest, which comes in at around half this figure.  Most church-goers have taken this financial figure on board, and the majority realise that giving to the church has become a serious obligation.  No longer do ancient endowments provide anything near a sustainable standard of living, as they did until fairly recently.  When I was a curate in Croydon in the early 70s, I managed on a salary of around £1500 p.a.  I was then unmarried, so it was possible to save quite a proportion of this income.  In the local deanery I picked up information about the stipend of incumbents, and there was some variation, thanks to the historic incomes of the individual parishes.  One Vicar in the centre of Croydon received the princely sum of £4k from the fact that the parish was well endowed.   Most of the other parishes that I knew about provided far less than this but were topped up from central funds to a level of around £1800.  On average, the endowments would have typically provided around two thirds of this sum. 

I raise this topic of finance because I believe that money, or lack of it, represents a substantial threat to both the morale and survival of the Church of England today.  The main fact about the finances of the CofE back in the 70s is that the institution was then to a considerable degree kept afloat on dead men’s money.  Endowments meant that ordinary church people could think of the church as the material provider, allowing them to have paid incumbents, living in Vicarages which had been bought by the church in earlier decades.  This mentality of the church having all the money to provide for ministry costs is now, of course, hopelessly out of date.  Inflation has almost completely destroyed the value of the historic endowments attached to individual parishes.  Also, the pattern of church life today has resulted in many, many new ways of churches spending money, especially at the level of the diocese and new national institutions.  One expensive add-on for the church is taking financial responsibility for training new clergy.  I was trained under a system which saw the local education authority pay for everything from my undergraduate course to my residential theological training.  The authority even redirected my college fees over two terms to pay for my course in Switzerland at the Ecumenical Institute.  In contrast. every clergyperson today, coming through the system, has had, in most cases, thousands of pounds spent on their training by the Church.  If ever a clergyperson ceases to follow the path of ordained ministry, they become, in an accounting perspective, a lost asset.   From the point of view of a management perspective, every member of the clergy is a valuable commodity.  He/she has cost the institution a substantial amount of money to train and is difficult to replace.  Every trained clergyperson is a precious asset, and everything must be done to protect and defend them.  They are valuable and allow the church to exist as a functioning organisation.

One of the perennial complaints of those who try to understand the problems around safeguarding is the claim that the victims and survivors of clerical and church abuse are treated less well than the perpetrators.  This is one of the claims of Stephen Kuhrt in his recent book, Safeguarding the Institution. Institutional bullying by senior members of the Church is illustrated from his own story.  There are many others who have encountered the hard edge of the Church’s self-preservation mode as it acts in harsh ways, trying to preserve its reputation as well as its assets.  These assets are found, as we have indicated, not in merely in buildings and endowments, though these are important, but in its trained leaders.  The human assets are precious, not only because of the expense of training them to fill the incumbency posts up and down England, but because of the acute difficulty in replacing them when they are no longer available to serve.  This shortage is a serious threat to the church’s long-term survival but is not discussed very much. The current shortfall in clergy available to fill posts is not information that is published.  My estimate, based partly on a scrutiny of the advertisement pages of the Church Times, is that there are some serious shortages in clergy manpower in some parts of England.  I also suspect that some Diocesan bishops have quietly accepted that some of the parishes in their sees will never again be able to maintain anything resembling the structures of the traditional parish system. 

I have some sympathy for the C/E bishops who are burdened by the responsibility of overseeing a system which, for financial and manpower reasons, may never again be able to function as intended.  In a situation where able clergy are thin on the ground, needing to be encouraged and supported like some rare, almost extinct creatures, it is not surprising that bishops and those in authority will have a distinctive approach to safeguarding.  This perspective might seem to be, sometimes, over-generous and forgiving to clerical perpetrators.  Such an approach might also appear less than sympathetic to the survivors who challenge the system by demanding prompt action against abuse.   When a bishop has finally to exercise his authority by expelling an individual from ministry, he/she must negotiate numerous time-consuming financial and legal obstacles along the way.   At the end of this process, she/he will then need to find a replacement. Taking over a parish where there has been a serious safeguarding issue is seldom a straightforward challenge for a newcomer.  The outside observer does not see all the hidden processes that have been gone through.  The bishop and archdeacon will view the problem from a broader perspective and try to think of the long-term interests of the whole area affected by the abuse. The outside observer is properly focussed on the victims/survivors.  The church officials, in contrast, will possibly be taking a view that provides for the possibility that the perpetrator may eventually resume active ministry in due course.  The flawed failing clergyman remains a potential asset within the system.  If there are possible means to allow him/her to continue at a future date when the offence may have been forgotten by those involved, the bishop may well seek to make it possible.  

So, to summarise, we have two understandable ways of reacting in a Church that is plagued by a series of abuse scandals.  It is clear that there is first the moral/legal approach.  This is the one that most people, especially victims and survivors, feel should routinely be applied.  This demands that, in dealing with safeguarding cases, the path of applying strict justice should be followed.  The guilty must be held to account, and the wounded bound up with healing balm.  For most survivors and those who support them there is no other possible way forward.  Yet as we have seen there is another (pragmatic?) perspective to be considered.  This is the view of church authorities that is aware of the dire current financial and manpower shortages in the church which makes them unwilling to let them go unless absolutely necessary. They have looked at the future and possibly seen that the whole parochial system is under threat and even unsustainable over a fifty-year period.  The financial assets of the C/E are probably robust enough to face this crisis for a reasonably long period, but other assets – money poured into training individuals to serve as clergy – also need protection.    Every time a clergy person is lost to the system through premature retirement or misconduct, that is like a dagger wound to the whole church.  It also represents a loss to the whole Church in financial terms. One other possible reaction to this crisis of trained manpower is to allow the standards of training to slip so that the whole process becomes cheaper and less thorough. Lowering standards beyond a certain point would, I fear, bring is own set of problems, some touching on the area of safeguarding.  

The current decade in the Church of England may well be remembered as the safeguarding period.  The question that is being asked is whether these safeguarding issues will ultimately overwhelm the Church financially and morally.  Can we find a way of affirming compassion and safety alongside a keen protection of justice and honesty in a way that meets the demand for fair-play among church people and public alike?

Whenever I speak to another person about safeguarding in a church context, I am aware of an enormous number of variables which affect the way I understand and present the topic.  The other person may be a victim/survivor and, if that is the case, I may find myself brought face to face with the issue of trust and how an abusive experience may have undermined the ability to feel safe within a church.  A safeguarding conversation with someone who is a church employee will likely be different.  It may be important in our exchange to consider the issues around reputational damage.  I might enquire, for example, whether the steps taken to manage an abuse or harm episode have done something to mitigate the threat to the church’s reputation?  Conversations that consider this whole area of institutional damage are probably extremely common. but I usually only hear about them second-hand. 

My present situation as a retired clergyman looking at the institution from the outside, for the most part, means that for me the first type of conversation is more typical.  People are regularly contacting me about their individual experiences of abuse.  Many sufferers also want to talk about their prolonged and frequently unsuccessful attempts to achieve any degree of closure from church authorities.  Nevertheless, it is often possible to have a measure of sympathy for the individuals who have some authority in this situation, since they are often themselves victims of an unwieldy and unresponsive system.  A bishop with a substantial in-tray of incidents of safeguarding failure must feel sometimes close to despair when he realises that few of the pastoral, legal and financial demands of a survivor can be met.  Those officials who have safeguarding responsibilities within the institution, have an unenviable and well-nigh impossible duty to support all victims of abuse.  At the same time their position within the church structure requires them to defend the institution from the accusations of inadequate or incompetent pastoral care.  I am in fact quite relieved to be in a place that does not require me to justify or defend the church institution whenever, in my judgement, it has failed in some way.  

Every victim of a safeguarding catastrophe is looking for some kind of resolution or solution to their suffering.  Often all that is required is sympathetic emotional support provided by pastoral listening.   Close attention by a sensitive listener to what is being shared of abuse or bullying, is vital to help the sufferer in knowing, perhaps for the first time, that their pain is being heard.  The conversation with a survivor may need to go up a gear and offer practical help in pursuing the complaints process that the Church of England has made available.  This is not a level of support that I offer, but sometimes I can suggest names of people to talk to.  One option that I do have is to invite the survivor to write up their story and publish it on this blog suitably disguised.  The stories that have appeared from time to time on Surviving Church have allowed my readers to support the anonymous survivor, at the same time gaining insight into the enormous range of scenarios that are present in the word safeguarding. 

The sheer range of stories and episodes that are covered by the word safeguarding is important for us to embrace. As I have already indicated, much will depend on who is using the word and what perspective they have, either as a sufferer or as a manager.  Another way of thinking about the meaning of the word is to suggest that it is a notion that operates along a continuum.  In using the word at one end of the continuum, I may be speaking about the support of someone experiencing abusive behaviour.  At the other end of the continuum, the word is describing something less personal and more formal. While the word ‘safe’ normally refers to the needs of a vulnerable individual, it could also suggest the instinctive response of institutions to defend themselves from accusations of incompetence or worse. Communication will be impossible if, for example, one side in a conversation is talking about safeguarding in terms of the pain of victimhood while the other side is aware only of the word in the setting of legal process or schemes of training.

The ability to move quickly up and down the spectrum or continuum of the different meanings of safeguarding is perhaps one of the most important skills we would ask of anyone working professionally in this area.  The skill of deep empathy is required alongside the ability to enable the formal legal processes to operate smoothly.  This is particularly important for the newly minted category of church employees known as Diocesan Safeguarding Officers (DSO).   In the space of the past fifteen or twenty years we have seen this creation of a totally new church profession.  Every Diocesan bishop in England has appointed an individual to operate a local structure.  This is concerned simultaneously for the welfare of abused individuals and preserving the reputation of the institution. Part of the task of these officers is to provide safeguarding training for clergy and church officials as well as administer core groups to manage suspected transgressors in the area of sexual and physical abuse.  None of these DSOs is known to me personally, but I think it is safe for me to observe from conversations I have had, that the quality and competence of these individuals is varied.  The best dioceses for safeguarding seem to be those where the bishop has taken a personal interest in safeguarding and takes care to ensure that pastoral support is offered to both the individuals known to be the victims of abuse as well as the accused perpetrator.  The atmosphere in dioceses where senior clergy are less willing to get involved in the complexity of safeguarding can be chilly in the extreme.  Clergy may feel exposed and vulnerable if they sense that their bishop is indifferent to their plight when they are abused or accused of a misdemeanour.  The same thing goes for a lay person who fails to get a proper hearing or the opportunity to raise a complaint. 

In writing these comments about safeguarding, I want to repeat the suggestion that everyone involved in its implementation should recognise that the word always has at least two meanings.  At one end of our imaginary safeguarding continuum, we find one form of its implementation that focusses on compassionate protection and care.  In other words, the safeguarding that is being practised here is an expression of what Christians call love.  Christian safeguarding is, or should be, an expression of the same quality of care that that Jesus commended to his disciples as they seek to serve and care for one another.  While this love, expressed in compassionate safeguarding, exists at one end of the continuum or spectrum, there is another use of the same word which, at the opposite end, aligns itself to the notion of justice.  Safeguarding can be seen, not only in the story of the Good Samaritan but also in the story of the unjust judge who was pestered by the widow demanding to be heard.  This latter story is the typical narrative of many safeguarding sagas.   What a story of this kind tells us is there was initially a failure of justice and fair dealing.  What is needed to resolve and complete such a narrative is a successful appeal to the institutions of justice.  We want to see vindication and justice provided for the complainant.   In this case safeguarding involves the pursuit of truth, transparency and honesty.

Safeguarding, if it is done correctly and properly, will respond to these two Christian imperatives -the call to love and the call to provide justice for the discouraged and down-pressed.  At any one moment the task of safeguarding will necessarily prioritise one of these, but both will always need to be present in any proper display of safeguarding within the Church.   When either love or justice is taken from the safeguarding process, what remains is something hollow and empty.  The church as a whole must ensure that a one-dimensional safeguarding is never allowed to reign supreme and that both ends of the safeguarding continuum are permitted to have equal emphasis in making our church safe for all its members.