‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger Isaiah 52-.7

by Fiona Gardner

This welcome messenger is one who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, and who says that God reigns. The messenger who brings news about safeguarding concerns may not be bringing peace, but is certainly bringing good news in the sense of alerting the church to the danger that may be present to children, young people, or the vulnerable. The same messenger is also helping the church towards salvation in the sense of deliverance from danger or difficulty, and alerting people to the supremacy of love and compassion over destructive abuse. The messenger might be the victim, or might be a professional in safeguarding, or a concerned member of the laity.

However, and seemingly almost inevitably, news of a safeguarding concern is generally treated as ‘bad news’ and the messenger immediately associated with this – and so often responded to with hostility – whether through passive but aggressive silence, or an active refuting. We know this through many previous safeguarding situations, where attempts to contact the hierarchy have been met with at the best reluctant acceptance and at worst indifference or denial.

Hearing of two recent experiences, has prompted me to try and understand once again what is going on. Both situations required raising a concern in local churches where no one wanted to hear; both situations meant that what could have been an opportunity to learn, change, and improve, largely led instead to defence and avoidance. In both situations barriers were raised, and the messenger in one situation treated with hostility, and in the other by largely ignoring what had been passed on. The church family shut the door, drew the curtains, tried to ignore the messenger, and for as long as they could pretended nothing was happening, until they absolutely had to respond and do something.

The psychological phenomenon of the backlash against someone who gives unwanted news is well researched; some of the findings have special relevance to situations where concerns about a potential perpetrator are raised in the church setting. Perhaps this has to be qualified – in all the situations I know and knew about where this happens, it is when the potential abuser is seen as influential and as an established part of the local church hierarchy. The sad reality invariably used to be that if someone about whom there was a concern was then described by their supporters as ‘a pillar of the community’ and ‘so good with children’ so it couldn’t possibly be that they were in any way a problem, it was right to ring alarm bells.

When you pass on information that nobody wants to hear, you often have no role whatsoever in the events other than raising the issue. But who wants what seems like bad news and, as messenger, you become the target for a misplaced backlash in the form of people liking you less, and seeing you in a negative light, even when you may be a part of the community. The news is not seen as ‘good’ in any way, although it is good news as it could make the church a safer place. It is not the potential perpetrator who has become a liability, that title has instead been attributed to the messenger.

This scenario is so familiar and so destructive to those seeking to disclose abuse, and sadly also familiar to those trying to wake the church up to the damage being done by this ‘head in the sand’ approach. How many times in the past has the person about whom concerns are raised been seen as the ‘victim’, whilst the actual person who has been abused and injured somehow becomes the oppressor. Recall the now infamous King Charles’ letter to Peter Ball in 1997 referring to the late Neil Todd:

“I can’t bear it that the frightful, terrifying man is on the loose again, doing his worst. . .

“I was visiting the vicar. . . and we were enthusing about you and your brother and he then told me that he heard that this ghastly man was up to his dastardly tricks again. . . I will see-off this horrid man if he tries anything again.”

Why turn against the person who raises safeguarding issues? Clearly raising a concern within the church once again threatens the sense that the church is a safe and benign community – a belief in the church as a sacred and holy space is violated. The messenger in disclosing what appears as unwelcome and bad news is associated with what is seen as this negative message, and so the almost immediate response is to dislike the person for disturbing the recipient’s belief system. It seems that when we hear something we’d rather not know about, we try to make sense of it, but having to do this disturbs all our accepted and established views, and so things begin to feel out of control and unsafe; this breeds a dislike of the person who has caused this disturbance to our equilibrium. Once the messenger is disliked because of the disturbing news they bring, then the actual ‘hearing’ of the concern is also tainted, and so the information is somehow muffled and distorted, so that the messenger and message are both consciously or unconsciously denigrated. In situations where supporters, a small group, and/or the congregation have been groomed by the potential perpetrator it is even harder to deliver the message, let alone get it heard.

In the recent experience where a professional in safeguarding brought news of an unwelcome situation, rather than learning something important and changing various procedures, those involved at the local level experienced the messenger’s motives as unnecessarily trouble-making, and so the expert advice given was largely ignored, until the very last moment when it had to be implemented. In the second experience, a member of the laity raised a worry about something they had seen; the main person contacted did not respond, and the ‘whistle blower’ was led to understand from another contact who did listen that there were issues of loyalty that seemed to be more powerful than the safeguarding issue.   

Generally, the attitude to people who flag up concerns and problems is ambivalent; with many who do so experiencing highly negative responses to their actions. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the pressure we were probably all exposed to as children either at school or with siblings not to ‘tell on someone’, to be a ‘snitch’ and ‘to grass on someone’ – it’s seen as a betrayal, a disloyalty to the group. It seems as if we learn at a young age that exposing wrong-doing is in some way untrustworthy, and letting the immediate peer group down.

The response to revealing wrong-doing is largely dependent on the culture of the organization, and here there are added problems in the church. More important than policy and safeguarding procedures is the culture of the organization, and the culture is driven largely by the senior leadership. It has been said that the culture of an organisation flourishes when there is an openness, where the leaders aim to and largely do the right thing, and people feel cared for, then, in turn, the people are more communal and look out for their organisation. If the leadership is right on safeguarding, then this affects the whole culture. If the church hierarchy appears uncaring and complicit in some ways with re-traumatising survivors through their negligence, then this response unfortunately trickles down one way or another to affect us all. If the culture is right about doing the ‘right thing’, then people feel able to make disclosures without fear of reprisals and repercussions.

When I was working as diocesan safeguarding advisor there were some occasions when as messenger I was treated with disdain, contempt, and sometimes downright hostility. Two experiences stick in my mind as particularly upsetting, and both when bringing some information from the police about a highly respected ‘pillar of the community’. In the first I was initially given the silent treatment, in itself a form of psychological manipulation, finally I was excused as ‘just following orders’; in other words, the defence used by Nazis to avoid taking responsibility for their terrible crimes. In the second instance I was likened by a furious group from the PCC to the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Neither group would or could hear what was being said – the ‘news’ I was bringing was beyond bad – unforgiveable, a betrayal. A number of years later I foolishly thought the messenger bringing a safeguarding concern might be treated in a more open and positive way – but in these two experiences I have heard of the poor messenger was once again shot – though fortunately not fatally wounded.