I have a dream for the future. In about twenty years an enterprising university in the UK will set up a department dedicated to the teaching of safeguarding for churches. It will probably only be aimed at post graduates but however it is set up, it will be available to those who believe that safeguarding is a worthwhile career choice. At the moment no such qualification exists in the UK as far as I know, even though the professional practice of safeguarding has been with us for around ten years.
Twenty years or longer is a long time to wait. Why do I not think it can be accomplished sooner? The simple answer is that in the year 2019, safeguarding ‘experts’ seem to be in no agreement yet about what the profession is supposed to do. This has been one of the drawbacks for the discipline; it has come into existence so quickly that there is no consensus about what should be covered either in training or in actual practice. There would be no agreement currently among professionals over what topics should be covered in a hypothetical curriculum for my fantasy MA qualification.
Looking at the qualifications of many of the top professional safeguarding personnel, especially those working for the national church, we find a preponderance of individuals with social work and management qualifications. This is hardly surprising, as social work is a good solid background for many of the tasks required of those who work in the safeguarding industry. Social workers, through their training, will have a capacity to work with dysfunctional situations and sort them out. Chaotic families are helped to get back on to an even keel. Drug users are supported as they let go of their addiction. The social work training will involve a large dose of sociological theory so that the trainee will know how society and human groups work. I hope I am not too much short-changing the nature of the training given to social workers. They are effective people in a world which needs order and decisive action to mend broken situations.
Alongside the crucial contribution and insights of social worker training, my future MA course would also need to explore the therapeutic dimensions of safeguarding. Most current social workers will not have had this exposure. I detect in social work a bias towards sorting out people’s outward circumstances (housing, money and family relationships) and that will be the key to their long-term well-being. The therapeutic approach is on quite a different level. Instead of focusing on outward chaos, the safeguarding professional should also have the tools to meet or refer on the psychological confusion that may have been caused by abuse. Referral work and cooperating with other professionals active in the therapeutic world, will be a vital aspect of our university trained safeguarding officer of the future.
From the psychotherapeutic perspective there are a whole variety of potential symptoms that can arise from abuse. One particular approach that I favour is to see abuse as being an episode of acute trauma. There is a recent branch of psychology, ‘traumatology’ that explores how survivors experience and attempt to deal with such episodes. Untreated acute stress can develop into actual mental illness but more typically most survivors are left coping with symptoms of extreme stress known as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I have a special interest in looking at survivors’ experience in terms of trauma, since the one training I personally possess is in a method to counteract trauma and the PTSD that follows it. Over the past twelve months I have begun to use this type of treatment, known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) with survivors. I have mentioned it before and any reader is welcome to contact me on the topic.
The way that abuse survivors often experience PTSD symptoms (such as shame, triggering and dissociation)draws in many other therapies and treatments that are on offer today for those who suffer, sometimes decades later, from the effects of abuse. No single person can possibly offer all these therapies. But it should however be possible for those in the safeguarding world to have some overall acquaintance with many of them. At the very least, anyone who sets him/herself as knowledgeable in the field of safeguarding should at the very least care passionately about the healing of survivors. When the Archbishop spoke about putting the survivor at the centre of concern, he might well have been telling safeguarding officers at all levels to become familiar with whatever is available to help them- therapy, patient listening or simple loving care. Telling survivors to ‘go away’, the response of some officers, is not therapy
My notional MA will not just include a working knowledge of therapies available; it will also help a student to understand the legal, historical, cultural and spiritual background of abuse. This might even involve a crash course in the way the Bible can be used as a tool of abuse. One would hope to see other theological themes explored – getting to grips with guilt, reconciliation and the oppressive Christian theories of suffering that can burden many survivors.
A final but crucial dimension I would like to see tackled for my MA course would be a study of the mind-set that allows abuse to happen in the first place. Institutional power and narcissistic behaviours all need to be explored and understood. If there is no time for some of these topics to be tackled during the course, a student could be mentored by someone who was familiar with such issues. Perhaps, over a ten-year period the safeguarding professional working in a team might be able to claim the status of ‘expert’, having mastered to the best of their ability the multiple aspects of the discipline. The claim of this blog post is a simple one. To understand safeguarding, one needs professional training but this is nowhere being provided. Worse still the content and scope of such training is not, as far as I know, even being discussed. The current default method, that is offered by the ‘social work’ institutional/management approach, is the nearest we have to a model. From the perspective of survivors, it is, on its own, damagingly and dangerously incomplete. Such an approach seems to care little for the actual therapeutic needs of the victims. Those who do reach out to survivors in a caring way do so in spite of the training they have received, not because of it. Every human being has the capacity to reach out to another who is in need and that is what, thankfully, many local safeguarding officers do.
Although I have been blogging on the broad topic of the victims of church power abuse for over five years, I have had no direct contact with any of the professional providers of this service who work for the Church of England. I have kept myself informed by keeping in touch with survivors both here and in the States. The message I receive almost universally is that the more important in the hierarchy and ‘professional’ a safeguarding official is, the less helpful survivors find them to be. Part of the problem I suspect is that, as I have already hinted, the senior staff at the centre are over qualified in some branch of social studies and the organisational skills required by complex institutions. This V.I.P status cuts them off from people at the bottom who should be at the heart of their concern. They seem completely at sea when asked to respond to the therapeutic needs of survivors. One senior safeguarding personality working in London described themselves to a survivor as an ‘expert’. As far I am concerned there are as yet no experts. Not a single individual among the powerful in the safeguarding hierarchy appears to have crossed the crucial bridge between management and therapy/simple care. The balance between management and care might theoretically be preserved by every safeguarding officer working collaboratively, but the discipline is still so young that models for working effectively together do not yet exist. Instead of working together, we find the usual power games that undermine the effectiveness of many organisations, including the church. Team-work? The church has never offered a model as to how this should work in other areas of its life.
Safeguarding as a discipline does not have a coherent standard of practice or theory across the board. This may be because we do not have an agreed understanding of what safeguarding is. I ask once again. How can you talk about a joined-up approach if senior safeguarding officers are reported to be pushing aside and ostracising the victims and survivors who approach them? Something is wrong and I suspect that until all the big names in safeguarding can sit down and agree on what they are meant to be doing, the world of safeguarding will continue to be dysfunctional and even harmful. One of the most powerful things that the Church has to offer is to be a place of healing. Let us demand that every part of the safeguarding enterprise starts to put healing right at the top of its agenda.
In my last diocese a new safeguarding advisor was appointed, with fanfare about her excellent qualifications. We were all required to attend a training session she gave, and I duly turned up. The ‘training’ turned out to be simply a talk, in the course of which she discussed a case currently under way in which I was a witness. Naturally this stirred things up for me and I needed to talk about how I felt about it, and hearing a case very personal to me discussed while surrounded by professional colleagues who knew nothing of what I was going through.
In other safeguarding training I’d been to (in other dioceses) it was made clear that people present might be affected by the subject under discussion, and the leaders made themselves available to chat if so. This high-flying ‘expert’ did not. There was no acknowledgement that any of us might be survivors or have personal involvement in the cases mentioned. At the end she announced that she would be working for the diocese for 3 hours a month and would not be available for direct contact by us. Her phone and email were kept confidential.
It was all very difficult and I have been baffled as to what was going on with her. Stephen, you have aptly explained what sort of ‘expert’ she was, and what her background and training must have been. She seemed very sure of herself but I experienced that as another harmful episode.
There were discussions going on between the University of Lincoln and various dioceses including both Lincoln and Chichester to set something like this up. This may still be in the pipeline or it may now have fallen by the wayside, hopefully someone will be able to update us about it.
My experience suggests that the effort to pass people on to experts simply comes across as rejection. If you are told to see a counsellor, plainly the person talking to you doesn’t want to offer tea and sympathy themselves. A counsellor can’t do anything. An Archdeacon might be able to. Training is a problem, too. I have experienced training of a number of largely retired volunteers, by a woman in her early twenties who couldn’t work the sound system (some of us were deaf) and kept us all waiting quarter of an hour while help was sought. It wasn’t the first such session! Afterwards, several said they hadn’t heard a word, most thought it was just common sense, with no understanding of the legal ramifications, and one or two were still talking about “health and safety” ! You need much better training than that!
I think in order to really comment about DSA’s you do actually have to get to know some, not through survivors’ but personally Stephen, I really wish you would make that effort.
I think the problem with safeguarding in the church is that the workload is impossible. As publicity becomes more negative the solution from the NST is to make more people undergo training and that training to go on for longer and be more intense, so DSA’s have to arrange training for literally thousands of staff in their diocese. Many DSA’s work part time and have only one or two assistant DSA’s and to request new staff takes over a year to be granted by diocesan secretaries and is sometimes refused depending on the budgeting.
There are some dreadful DSA’s but there are far more really lovely DSA’s that work for dreadful Bishops who belittle, minimize and generally treat them like rubbish and make their work of caring for survivors almost impossible, sometimes even with a threat of disciplinary proceedings attached. Low morale, burn out and mental health problems are rife within the DSA community.
Lisa Oakley is more akin to the type of person you are referring to, an academic with all the ‘bells and whistles’ but according to Premier Radio she closed down a support group for spiritual abuse survivors after only a week because she was overwhelmed! Yet she is the person the church uses to instruct DSA’s on how to respond to spiritual abuse survivors!
DSA’s read this blog Stephen because your writing is often very insightful so please try to get to know some personally, I guarantee it won’t be time wasted.
I tried to make it clear that I am not critical of individual DSAs, many of whom do a fantastic job of caring for survivors with limited resources. What I am critical of is a professional structure that seems out of its depth. What do you say when someone who suffers abuse is offered £200 for counselling after years of trauma? As the cost of psychotherapy can cost a minimum of £80+, this seems to denote a total lack of imagination at best, or grotesque neglect at worst. My job is not to tell the DSAs how to do their job, having none of the training or relevant skills to be able to help them in what they do. I simply am the one who wants to reflect back to the centre what is being said to me by survivors, simultaneously possessing some powers of analysis and reflection. This information (we are ignored, forgotten and pushed away) will not be news to those in the industry, but needs to be heard constantly by senior people, including bishops, who employ people to practise safeguarding locally or nationally.
Your Lisa Oakley anecdote is telling. It perhaps confirms the point that the system is cracking up because it has not got good foundations either of theory or practice. The recently published Andrew Graystone letter makes the point that whatever is done will be very expensive to implement. Perhaps there is a lack of seriousness precisely because the Church is fearful of the financial implications of re-laying the foundations of the building so quickly put together.
Thank you Stephen, I am not fundamentally disagreeing but I do feel it is important to understand how the the structure works. DSA’s do not offer any money for counselling diocesan secretaries do, in spite of their lowly name these are the CEO’s of the diocese and have more power almost than the Bishop. Have I ever met a nice diocesan secretary -no – they are a real problem, many running the church as they would a business and survivors being seen as a financial drain. DSA’s often advocate fiercly for survivors but to no avail and then are the ones that have to deliver the bad news and take the anger of the survivor. I am sure that you are as aware, as I am Stephen, just how many ‘open’ cases are on each DSA’s work load, it is a frightening number, so delivering bad news time and time again leads to ‘burn out’ but few survivors’ tackle the diocesan secretary, because often they are unreachable and survivors’ don’t realise that is where the challenge lies.
Training for diocesan secretaries is fundamental to providing good responses because they even have the power to stop a DSA actually talking to a survivor. Their power is frightening and as great as the huge salaries that goes with this role.
I understand your thoughts about Diocesan secretaries but they aren’t all that bad, I’ve experienced a couple of really good ones and several bad ones but I’ve also experienced a really good DSA and a really bad one! The problem is that you are in a postcode lottery depending on which diocese you happen to be in. It’s also worth noting that a Diocesan Secretary is often the only voice of reality in a senior staff team of totally unrealistic clerics.
Good points from Trish. You have a nack for drawing us to areas that need further exploration. And you score a direct hit with your points on diocesan secretaries. A can opener needs taking to the way in which many diocesan secretaries and other diocesan officers have acted to stymie proper responses. The DS, registrar, and bishop’s chaplain have tended to act as gatekeepers to the bishop and to a diocesan structure in general. Gatekeepers have immense power by proxy and can draw on the same deference due to the overlord. It can be a remarkably feudal culture. And there is certainly one situation that someone brought to my attention where the DS seemed to have far more power and greater awareness, than the bishop. And acted bullyingly as a result, and with no accountability. In a feudal structure it’s the factor who wields the ledger – not the lord.
Btw, I’ve not been on here for a while. We’re in final stages of getting our book together. Letters to a Broken Church. Plus starting work on another book. But as always I really admire the quality and depth of these articles. A little envious that they appear so fast and often – and wish I had the ability to write as well. More importantly I hope they get read by those with the power to make structural changes happen.
Talk of culture change is empty without structure change. You can look at a lumpen potato and ask it politely to turn into chips. It won’t happen. At some stage you have to get the board out and make chips happen! Structure changes required are profound and the Church needs to move past the reliance on smoke and mirrors which seems to dominate many of their current changes. They need to get real and get serious. They can start by addressing the worrying dysfunctionality and cognitive dissonance within the NST. I believe this can happen by TUPE-ing the NST out of the control of Church House and into the hands of an independent management and supervision structure. So that the plant begins to develop a new vision of itself and its role and purpose. I have a fear that anyone coming into this structure at present, no matter how senior, will easily be assimilated Borg-like into the groupthink of Church House. It’s not enough to create a new ‘independent’ director of the NST. Given its problems and the harm it’s caused too many survivors – the NST needs root and branch re-training and reorientation with the guidance of survivors and other experts. Its own ‘expertise’ has been found by too many survivors to be flawed at best, and often chaotically dishonest. Its time that the Church addressed this incompetence properly. I think it has little control over its own work – but as soon as it is taken out of the control of key people who determine current outcomes, it might begin to flourish and be the flagship it should be. One person I know has said it almost needs taking geographically out of Church House. She may be right?
Gilo, you write very well. I shall look out for your book. In the meantime, I will steal about four useful turns of phrase from this post! Keep up the good work.
I agree Gilo that more of a spotlight needs to be placed on the enormous amount of power invested in the DS without perhaps, as David reminds me, focussing so much on the individual as their remit, and whether it is appropriate for them to have so much authority over so many people when their skill set is usually only in management. Completely agree about independence needed in the NST and the very quick assimilation of new people into the group mind set.
Wishing you a lot of luck with the book and hope any further projects are well received. I actually thought of you when I read the absolutely stunning book ‘Sea Prayer’ by Khaled Hosseini, a book dedicated to the plight of Syrian refugees and particularly Alan Kurdi. The topic is dreadful, heartbreaking, yet this book is beautiful. That takes real talent because then the reader can engage quietly, gently and at their own pace. After ‘holding’ it inside me for many weeks I thought Gilo could write a book like that for survivors, beautiful, engaging prose and lyrics for a dreadful situation. So there’s another project for you!
Interestingly I read a twitter conversation with Meg Munn about this post, which she said she would read, but I felt it very appropriate to the topic when at one point she said ‘when I was a social worker.’ It has always puzzled me that the church felt it was appropriate to place someone in such a prominent and significant position as Meg Munn has, who is not only retired from the profession but is no longer even on its professional register (HCPC) meaning that she is not accountable to any registering body but is also not obliged to take part in any continuing professional development in order to keep her skills relevant and herself on the register. Her confusion regarding mandatory reporting is perhaps evidence of this.
I work in very low grade social care but all those who advise, even if they are retired, have put in the stautory hours of CPD to remain safe and relevant.
So why did the church consider this appointment either appropriate or respectful, was it lack of choice, her connections with the church and its partners or maybe the fact that she was one of the MP’s that voted to keep their expenses a secret demonstrating that she could easily be assimilated into the group mind set.
To be clear Meg Munn and I do not see eye to eye and I am not talking behind her back, I have raised concerns with her personally only to be told by her that she only does the job part time and therefore only has limited capacity for it.
‘maybe the fact that she was one of the MP’s that voted to keep their expenses a secret demonstrating that she could easily be assimilated into the group mind set.’
Wow. That’s a very interesting point – and a worrying one.