William Crawley interviewed Professor Julie Macfarlane on Radio 4 on the Sunday Programme last week-end. The interview (transcribed below) follows the extradition, trial and conviction of her abuser, the Rev Meirion Griffiths. The interview makes vividly clear the mismatch, on the part of the Church, between protestations of ‘deep sorrow and remorse’ and the litigious games sometimes played against survivors who seek to bring their complaints of abuse against the Church.
William Crawley When reporting on child sexual cases as we often do on this programme, we try to hear from victims and survivors to understand their treatment and their experience both from the church and the legal system. What though if an abuse survivor is also a professor of law? What unique insights could they bring of being a complainant in our legal system and about the role of the Church in those very challenging circumstances.
This week a retired priest of the Church of England, the Revd. Meirion Griffiths who is now 81 was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager and another woman in the 1970s and 1980s while he was Rector of St Pancras and St John in Chichester. One of those women was Dr Julie Macfarlane who is now Professor of Law in the University of Windsor in Canada.
Julie Macfarlane It would have been devastating not to have convicted somebody who I have known for almost my whole life, did some terrible things to me and I also know to many other people. So, that moment when I heard he was convicted was an enormous sense of relief. It was not validation for a survivor to hear that there is a conviction because we know it is true but it is a huge relief to know that the process is finally over.
WC Can you tell me a little bit about how the abuse you experienced affected you throughout your life?
JM I spent the first twenty years afterwards really trying to just ignore it and get on with my life. I was ambitious – I was developing a career – I started to have a family and I really stuffed it down. But I knew that at some point I would have to do something about it because I knew that it was going to be a predatory pattern that I had witnessed and that there were other people out there and I felt a moral responsibility to stop it. It will always be part of my life – this abuse. It is impossible for a survivor to imagine what it would be like without having experienced that trauma and I do have chronic PTSD and I have learned over the years to manage that as well as possible. But it is an experience that stays with you for ever and affects your reactions to life and your feelings about things that happened to you for ever.
WC And many victims and survivors, as you know, have over the years spoken about burying their story and their fears about the re-traumatisation that they might experience going through the criminal justice system. Were you re-traumatised?
JM Oh, absolutely. The cross-examination process, even for somebody like myself who, you would say, William, understands the process – I have been training lawyers for forty years – is absolutely brutal. And it’s brutal because we continue to have at the centre of this process an idea of relevance and credibility that we associate with the evidence of victims which completely misunderstands the impact of trauma and what this is really like. So, I was asked repeatedly to relive a situation which was incredibly painful for me. Every single minute difference of description was seized upon. So we have this idea that any possible inconsistency, however minute, is relevant and that the witness should be taken to task. I sometimes compare this to asking somebody who ran out of a burning house 30 years ago what colour socks they were wearing. And, if they get the colour wrong then it is: ‘Aha you see, you are not credible!’ These are not issues that affect people’s credibility and truthfulness, but it has become an accepted part of the process that there should be a tearing down of a victim – what we sometimes call ‘witness whacking’. And I was asked over and over again during my cross-examination both times, ‘you’re lying aren’t you Professor Macfarlane’. Indeed, the degree of public humiliation and excoriation that victims have to go through in order to testify is absolutely insane. And, you know, I have some real advantages and privileges here and it was incredibly traumatising for me. I cannot imagine how we can expect people to do this.
WC Julie. What about your experience of the Church’s role, how things worked out, how things played out in the court.
JM. They were completely at arms’ length at the criminal trial. I think that that is wrong. I think that in a case like this where there has been a previous investigation followed by his resignation, then a criminal suit which was successfully settled. Where everybody knows that these things happened, I think that the Church should have been proactive in making a supportive statement towards the two complainants – myself and the other complainant. My experience over the years of talking to the Church about this issue is that they talk out of both sides of their mouths. In public they talk about their deep sorrow and remorse. In reality, in civil cases they are playing the most aggressive litigation game imaginable. I know this because I study and write about litigation games and they are not following through with what they say is their commitment to understand the truth of what happened. In fact, they are vigorously resisting the truth of what happened. If the Church really meant what it says about being sorrowful about the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands worldwide victims of clerical abuse, they would be finding a way to encourage people to come forward. They would not be resisting it. They would not be putting road-blocks in people’s way both in a civil case and in a criminal case, by simply allowing somebody to be torn to pieces as I and the other complainant had to be in order to convince a jury of the truth of what we were saying. And I don’t want to sugar-coat this. It is a horrifying experience. But here is the important thing. Unless we step forward, unless we talk about this, unless people are able to do this, nothing is ever going to change in this culture. This affects everybody from law professors across the board. And we need people to step forward and say that this happened. And you know, at the moment you do have to be very tough to go through this process.
WC Professor Julie Macfarlane
There’s a “not” missing from after “would” in the sentence that starts “They would be putting road-blocks in people’s way …” in the last part of the interview.
Thanks Peter
What a brave and (as she says, necessarily) strong woman. Really important to hear what she says about the processes and the church’s role. We need more action on reform and more proactive support from survivors
From survivors or for survivors? Or both?
Prof Macfarlane is an extraordinary woman – and what courage. Stephen, thank you for making this available.
I meant to say for survivors. But you are right, both are relevant
‘In reality, in civil cases they are playing the most aggressive litigation game imaginable’.
I heard this impressive interview whilst driving on Sunday morning. It led me to wonder who is the organ grinder and who is the monkey in this painful business? Who is ‘the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust’?
Over the last year or so this blog, and some of the most articulate representatives of survivors’ groups, have paid a considerable amount of attention to the role of Ecclesiastical Insurance, and this was rightly the focus of scrutiny for part of the IICSA hearings.
However, it seems to me that EI are very much an adjunct to the Church, and whilst their panel lawyers (Burges Salmon, Charles Russell Speechleys, DAC Beachcroft, Pinsent Masons, etc.) may be under the direction of the EI board (which includes the dean of Lincoln), I wonder whether policy is developed at a higher level.
EI is, as many readers of this blog know, wholly owned by Allchurches Trust Ltd, which has no share capital, and declares itself to be entirely independent of the Church, but which sports the dean of Norwich and archdeacon of Manchester amongst its trustees; indeed, its current chair (Sir Philip Mawer) is a former secretary-general of Synod, and the lion’s share of its disbursements are to the Church of England (their lawyers are Farrers).
It should be noted that neither EI nor Allchurches appear to have any in-house solicitors, which is not to suggest that they lack internal legal functions, but it makes it less likely and suggests that legal policy is formulated elsewhere.
This, in turn, suggests to me that relations between EI/Allchurches and the Commissioners might be intimate, and that policy about the treatment of survivors could be formulated within the bowels of Church House. I would suggest that the Legal Office of the Commissioners must be the lynchpin, working in tandem with the relevant finance officers. The Legal Office supports the national Church institutions and not just the Commissioners.
In this context, it should be noted that the current Official Solicitor of the Commissioners (i.e., the head of the Legal Office) is in orders and is an SSM at Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell. He is also chancellor of the Oxford diocese (though it’s possible that the Commissioners may have an actual, or at least oblique interest, in certain claims coming before the Oxford consistory court).
Perhaps the Legal Office should be the focus of a greater degree of attention. Are they the spiders at the centre of this web?
Of course, it is very likely that some readers may have a much better knowledge about how approaches towards survivors are developed at a policy level, and I apologise profusely if my suppositions are wrong (which they may well be). It’s just that I don’t really think it is plausible that policy is formed solely within EI.
i have no knowledge, but i suspect you are right. Hope to hear more information.
Sorry – I should add that I am not suggesting or insinuating that the clergy referred to above (or any specific laypersons) have formulated the policy of ‘aggression’ towards survivor/claimants. Indeed, some of them – such as the dean of Lincoln and the Official Solicitor – are new in post. It is also possible that they, and their clerical predecessors, may not have been on the committees that may have established any such policy. I certainly do not wish to cast aspersions upon the role of specific individuals or to assume that certain bodies have made particular policy decisions; it is an area might need further research.
Moreover, my comments may also have indicated that an active policy was formulated; it is also possible that it might have come about by happenstance: with lawyers and insurance officers taking the view that it is their professional obligation to realise the best immediate results for their clients (i.e., the policy tail wagging the policy dog). They might have been thinking about an immediate result without perhaps considering the wider consequences for the institution in the future.
That said, I wanted to note that there are clergy who might possibly be in a position to exercise some form of moral/Christian perspective, influence or oversight upon the formation of future policy in litigation (assuming the policy has not changed already, which it might well have done since Prof. Macfarlane’s evidently harrowing experience).
Froghole, unfortunately this sort of link is all too common.
I had problems in Norwich Diocese (though not strictly Safeguarding), I approached the Safeguarding Officer, who was very supportive initially, but because the issue was with the Bishops she backed off. I later learnt that her son-in-law was a member of the clergy in the Diocese.
To be fair to her, what Grandmother is going to want to pursue something that might pose a risk to her grandchildren?! Worked out well for the Bishop of Norwich and Thetford though.
Froghole, the more I hear about the way the church behaves towards those who do, the gladder I am that I didn’t complain!
Lawyers do what they are instructed to do.
The Church’s officers, the clergy, do the instructing, either directly or indirectly. The clergy are responsible for the actions and methods of those they instruct, however arms-length they would like to appear.
It appears to be very difficult to change the law. The adversarial nature of litigation, is the way the law appears to work. This is no excuse, but it is what it is.
There are many good lawyers and many have a conscience. Maybe now is the time for our good friends who are partners in the aforementioned law firms, to decide what truly matters to them and resign from this work which has caused so much harm to so many.
“We have bills to pay, mouths to feed” I hear you say. Yes you do. It’s a commercial decision though. We all have client grading methodology. Do you really want to be associated with taking fees from an abusive organisation? This could hit your bottom line as momentum builds in society to hold everyone involved to account.
Many thanks and, of course, you are right: the external lawyers will follow their instructions. However, some clients will say ‘just get the best result you can’, giving substantial discretion to the lawyers, whilst others will be much more controlling.
It believe it was DAC Beachcroft who were asked to the IICSA hearings, as I suspect the other EI panel firms are not involved in litigation to the same extent, or at all. Beachcrofts has a lot of experience in volume insurance work (from the old Wansboroughs Willey Hargrave, a regional practice); as I understand it the big insurers will often be very controlling, stipulating that certain categories of correspondence will be paid for at certain rates (sometimes regardless of the complexity of the matter), and they audit the files periodically as a matter of cost control. Whether the EI business came from Beachcroft Wansboroughs or Davies Arnold Cooper is moot.
However, EI is a relatively small insurer and may take a very different approach to a behemoth like Allianz, Aviva or Axa; it may not be as controlling (perhaps because of resource issues) and might just say ‘do what you can’ and ‘update us from time to time’.
Anyway, I don’t know; I’m just speculating about how EI manage things. Because, of course, if it is indeed the case that EI say ‘go for their throats’, it puts a radically different complexion on their bona fides and the general attitude of the Church and, insofar as EI might be construed as an adjunct to the Church, it would obviously be a negation of the principles the Church purports to espouse.
So, I very much hope (after hearing and reading about what Prof. Macfarlane and other victims have endured in open court) that EI do not tell their lawyers to adopt the most aggressive approach in litigation, for all that the English custom of adversarial justice encourages a certain degree of gamesmanship. I hope they counsel restraint, but something in the back of my mind warns me to think otherwise.