Although the final report of IICSA has been published today (Thursday 20^th Oct), I recognise that it needs more time for reflection before I am ready to make any comment.  I hope to present some observations over the coming week-end.  This piece looks back to the earlier report PCR2 which was a distinctly CofE document.

When I was a child, our family possessed an old brass telescope.  Like many of the things in our home, it did not work very well.  The effort to make a far-away object appear slightly bigger seemed hardly worth it.  I believe this struggle by a six-year-old to create an image may have made a later comprehension of lenses in physics lessons a little easier.  As an object able to perform any useful function, the telescope failed and was thus useless.

Struggling to make a telescope work was not only useful as a background to a later grappling with the physics of optics.  The other outcome was a ready comprehension of the expression which speaks of looking the wrong way down a telescope.  Instead of objects coming closer, they go much further away.  In addition, the view is narrow and lacking depth.  The expression looking down a telescope the wrong way is a good description of any investigation where those involved find it difficult to see things in a coherent ordered way.  Reading further the Past Cases Review 2 (PCR2), there seems to be a considerable element of getting things the wrong way round and thus not seeing them with any degree of clarity.  How does the enquiry fail?

In reading the report of the main section, one comes to see quickly that there are some obvious, even glaring, shortcomings.  In spite of all the protestations of recent years that the Church wants to put survivors right at the centre of their concerns, this report seems uninterested in their well-being and their interests.  Rather, the emphasis is on uncovering from the files any existing unresolved cases and perpetrators who might still be able to do harm. If potential perpetrators have died, it seems that the PCR2 process shows no interest in these cases at all.  This stance of ignoring cases where the perpetrators have died, but their victims may be very much alive, seems an inadequate way of bringing justice and healing to survivors.  It certainly does not point to these survivors being at the centre of anything.

How does one search the past to bring healing and justice to survivors?  If the survivor is indeed at the centre of the process, then you would begin the enquiry by asking survivors what they want.  I would imagine that most survivors want their cases to be opened up and explored from every angle.  The needs of those who have perpetrators still alive would not differ significantly from those whose abusers have died. For both groups the metaphorical telescope needs to be in operation, working well in focusing on and enlarging all the relevant information.  Survivors of abuse of course know a lot about their own cases, but there is still much that they do not know.  They might want to know why a bishop in charge of their case years before had ignored or mismanaged the original disclosure.  Who else had known what was going on and who, if anyone, had shared their misgivings about a perpetrator?  The questions in each case will be numerous and survivors need to feel that all these questions are being taken seriously.  Only then can we call an enquiry about abuse cases ‘survivor-centred’.  Even if some of the questions now have now no means of being answered, at least they need to be articulated and made part of the opening up process.  By contrast, what we find in PCR2 is a document that concerns itself more with correct application of church process than the questions and needs of survivors.  Preserving institutional reputation and fulfilling the requirements of legal processes seem to be at the heart of this lengthy document.

The Smyth case is perhaps one episode that illustrates well how important it is not to lose sight of salient information just because an individual perpetrator has died.  The law may declare that an individual who never stood trial is technically innocent, but this legal stance brings no comfort or closure to his many victims.  The Church of England recognises, in commissioning the Makin report, that the death of a perpetrator does not close down the need for victims to understand the total context of an act of abuse.  We hope that this report will help to make sense of all the many strands around this episode.  One conclusion that the Makin report will clearly demonstrate is that there are many others involved in the Smyth drama.  Smyth may be at the centre of the action, but there are numerous enablers and bystanders who are implicated in some way in the appalling events spilling out of Iwerne Minster to Winchester and Zimbabwe.  We hope that those carrying guilt in this case will be named.  In contrast, the PCR2 process seems to be taking a different approach.  Because Smyth has now died, all the other information about his associates and his crimes is now of no interest and not even mentioned in PCR2.  Thankfully this PCR2 approach to the Smyth horrors (which is to ignore them) is not being followed by those commissioned the Makin report.  It remains to be seen whether there will be an attempt to bury all the bad news that the Makin report contains when it is finally published.  We look for, with not a great deal of hope, someone to accept some responsibility for the additional pain experienced by survivors.  Many senior individuals in the Church of England saw what was going but chose to pass by on the other side.

The single fact that PCR2 has no interest in the files or records of clergy who have died makes it clear to any reasonable person that the whole review cannot claim in any way to be survivor centred.  Survivors know that they have a just complaint, not only against an original perpetrator but often against the organisation.  All too often the response that they have encountered resembles the turning away of the priest and Levite on the Jericho road.  The infliction of pain against a survivor is multi-layered.  If the Church, or its representatives, want to do something about this pain, it needs to recognise all these contributing factors within each episode that have accentuated the survivor’s suffering.  All stories of abuse have these many levels.  We dishonour the survivor/victim if we do not patiently uncover as many of them as possible.  It would of course be convenient for the church institution if everything could be laid at the feet of just a single perpetrator.  The reality of abuse cases is that things do not work like this.  Recalling our telescope analogy, this contrasting approach is like the two ways of using a telescope.  The survivor is using the telescope correctly.  He/she sees all the facets of the case.  A church leader, by using the telescope the wrong way round, sees only the one thing.  Having identified what, if any, legal obligations are required by a victim from the church, this leader will then want to find a way of burying the episode as fast as possible.  Looking at these cases of power and sexual abuse through a telescope the right way round might well prove to be a painful and costly undertaking for the leader.   

The PCR2 is not without its good points as it identifies a large number of things to be done in the realm of safeguarding by the Church of England.  The review at one point mentions the need for a ‘sustained delivery of high quality, trauma-informed, survivor-focused standards.’  But there is no indication that such delivery has been achieved anywhere.  Our criticism and the criticism of survivors remains.  When are the bishops, those overseeing the process, going to provide the kind of justice that survivors require and indeed justly demand?  How does the PCR2 help in this process?  It probably does little or nothing for survivors since, as we suggested, it is looking at the problem from the wrong end of the telescope.  Instead of bringing the complete picture into view, PCR2 is focusing on only one small part of the whole story.  Perhaps this blog piece is inviting our church leaders to do a bit more to look at the full setting of an abuse event.  We want them to see the whole picture in a completely focussed form.  To get that picture, they should join survivors and start looking with them from the other end of telescope – the correct way.   Then they will be able to see what they, the survivors, already see.