Safeguarding activity in the Church of England is currently a shambles; the Church needs to hand over all its power in this area to two new and independent bodies.
The sentences above are probably an unhelpful summary of Professor Alexis Jay’s skilled overview of the current state of safeguarding in the Church. For her report, The Future of Church Safeguarding published today (Feb 21st), Jay has spoken to dozens of individuals involved in this area of work. While she is impressed with the work and dedication of many of them, her overall conclusion is that the procedures and protocols that are in place for church safeguarding are not fit for purpose. She sums up her finding by saying, ‘the Church’s system of operational safeguarding is not compatible with best practices …’ A striking finding from her questionnaire data states also that 69% of the victims and survivors were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with the outcome of the safeguarding process as it applied to them. With only a mere 16% declaring themselves satisfied, it is clear that the Church is involved with a system which creates many unhappy customers. In spite of spending huge amounts of money, the Church authorities are presiding over procedures which let people down. In the process they inflict considerable reputational damage on the Church itself.
One important feature of the report is that the reader is allowed to listen to anonymous voices of some of the many involved in safeguarding. Some are those who are responsible for operating the protocols, while others are the victims and survivors. This focus on the lived experience of individuals caught up in the system is an aspect of the total picture that Jay wants to share with her readers. Her report is independent, and thus there is no attempt to gloss over some quite serious claims of institutional cruelty or incompetence being used as a way to protect the ‘system’. One major problem across English dioceses is the inconsistency of practice. One member of the clergy described the safeguarding instructions emanating from the centre as ‘opaque, confusing and complex.’ Different dioceses may treat an identical issue in quite different ways. Line management of Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers (DSA) can frequently prove to be a problem. Also, not every DSA had worked in a profession previously which valued a sensitivity to trauma. An absence of the skill of working with old-fashioned human kindness has the consequence that some of these survivors are forced to retreat into a hidden place where they are out of reach of the help of others.
One important way that Jay shows her helpful understanding of the negative dynamics of some safeguarding activity, is when she refers to ‘weaponisation’. This is the habit of making an otherwise lightweight issue of behaviour into a ‘safeguarding matter’ so that it attracts to itself a disproportionate weight of process. Most disagreements between colleagues or within a parish setting can be resolved by mediation. Instead, we hear that clergy can now be intimidated to the point of breakdown by lay people threatening a safeguarding process against them. Jay is clear that safeguarding is an area of church life which is about offering protection to children and vulnerable adults. It is not a method for disgruntled individuals to settle scores against others by defining the word vulnerable in a loose way.
Some of Jay’s report concerns itself with incompetent and less than professional breakdowns of communication and understanding between safeguarding officials. She notes the highly variable structure of personnel across the dioceses in England. Some employ up to six full-time staff (Chester) while others (Carlisle) have a single Safeguarding Adviser with some secretarial back-up. The key proposal in the report is to set up two new independent organisations, A and B. These would be to coordinate all the national safeguarding work and would have the effect of removing the ‘post-code lottery’. Organisation A would serve all the safeguarding work of the dioceses in a even-handed manner. Local Diocesan safeguarding committees would disappear. Organisation B would act as a supervisory body overseeing the work of Organisation A, thus removing responsibility from bishops to act as the place of last resort. Jay had noticed, not infrequently, that crucial decisions were expected of personnel who did not have either the interest or the professional skill to make such decisions. A house of Bishops, such as the one we have in the Church of England, which finds it difficult or impossible to nominate a Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, should surely not want to protest if the responsibility was removed from their control. It would be a popular change among the survivors I know. Most recent Lead Bishops for Safeguarding have appeared to become demoralised by the tasks placed on them. Some have responded to their role by becoming invisible while others have demonstrated all too clearly in their words and demeanour something of the toll that this responsibility has placed on them.
The basic message of Jay’s report is to indicate to the Church of England that it is out of its depth when seeking to provide safeguarding for those who need it. I have not attempted to give the detail of Jay’s Organisations A & B in this short commentary, but suffice to say, it is a radical departure from what is in existence at present. The suggestions of Jay would appear to be based on good common-sense, but, likely, they will be firmly resisted by those who exercise power in the Church of England. The power that has accrued to senior lawyers and senior church civil servants will not be surrendered easily to two independent bodies that cannot be controlled and bent to the will of William Nye and his circle. The management of safeguarding in the C/E currently seems to be all about power. We must hope that the evidence of mishandled power in the Church up till the present, will allow parliament and public opinion to force these necessary changes on the C/E. We need a safeguarding regime which will allow transparency and justice. Such a new system may help to provide healing for all who have suffered power abuse or institutional re-abuse at the hands of their fellow Christians.
“The power that has accrued to senior lawyers and senior church civil servants will not be surrendered easily to two independent bodies…”
Indeed, so it matters very much indeed how Organisations A and B, and the independent HR function, are funded. However, the report does not really deal with that crucial issue, beyond noting that these new bodies will need to be resourced adequately. This is very disappointing. As I have noted before (tediously), how these bodies are to financed matters very much indeed. Power grows out of the pen which signs the cheques. Moreover, the proposed co-operation agreement between the new bodies and the Church might even serve to amplify the effective suasion which the Church could exercise over the new bodies by dint of its control over their finance.
So unless there are adequate safeguards to obviate that suasion the Jay report and its recommendations could very quickly wind up being an expensive waste of time. However, I hope I am wrong. Of course, the report contains a good deal which is of merit, and highly overdue.
We need to keep an eye on the hypothesis that in practice not only funding but all-important appointments processes, if not under formal Church control, may become unduly shaped by administrative channels.
I think Stephen that what you describe as defining the word vulnerable in a loose way would apply to many who you have advocated for. Anyone over 18 who has no physical or mental illness will be seen as not having reached the benchmark for adult safeguarding. So many of the Soul Survivor and Jonathan Fletcher survivors will be dismissed as having had capacity to establish a consensual relationship with their abuser. Their only route to redress will be civil action if the police aren’t interested and ther abuser will be free to carry on. Experts in the field of coercion very much see it as problematic that clergy are allowed to have sex with adult parishioners and it be termed an affair. In the same way that a doctor should not have sex with a patient neither should parish clergy with the people in their care but the Jay report does not engage with this.
My feeling is it is a bit of a win for the church, peole in distress will be turned away because they do not meet the vulnerability test. Domestic abuse survivors can be beaten to death without ever having been classified as statutorily vulnerable is that what you classify as definining vulnerablity in a loose way?
Far better to have stated the professional skills required to be a safeguarding professional in the new proposal and let those professionals decide the vulnerability factors but though the expected required professional qualifications were clearly stated in my interview I note that Jay ‘chickened’ out of writing it!
Anyone over 18 in a codependent relationship with an organisation with no spiritual content, being run on solely political lines as the Fletcher enterprise / Soul Survivor / hysteria filled ambiguously-affiliated parishes I’ve known were – I’m not saying they (we) are intellectually inferior (a subtext to “disability” sometimes) but they (we) do deserve consideration given that we weren’t explicitly warned there wasn’t a (reliable) spiritual content.
After all, religious influencing is advertising and “everyone knows” that advertising is lies, right? In the eyes of religion bosses, wrongfooting by cognitive dissonance was always what this God bloke lark was supposed to be about, wasn’t it?
Can “belief in some hereafter” work, if attention isn’t given to the “how” of Holy Spirit-filled example setting?
The first two sentences of Stephen’s article are not an ‘unhelpful summary’ but a summary of Professor Jay’s report. Both Stephen and Froghole then outline the problems of implementing her suggestions of a radical change to safeguarding practices. The basic change is one of those in power relinquishing that power.
Those holding that power span the hierarchy of the C/E to the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers and Core Groups. My personal experience is that the DSA and Core Group will tell any and every lie supported by their senior clergy in order not to admit they are wrong about their decisions, decisions made in an amateurish and bungling way. They do not have the moral courage to admit they are wrong, being more concerned about their reputations and willing to sacrifice people’s lives to that cause. Even suicides of their victims do not shake them from their goal of ambition; take Father Alan Griffin as an example of that.
Professor Jay’s report coming out as it has done a few days before Synod has come at the right time, giving time to absorb the content and ensuing discussion. It seems to me now, that the power lies in the hands of General Synod. Surely, if they refuse to accept William Nye’s instruction to curtail discussion and anything else he or other members of the hierarchy might dictate in order to suppress open debate (thinking here of Gavin Drake), Synod members could take over, insist on free speech and bring about the change Professor Jay suggests?
Desperate times need desperate measures and we are very desperate. After all, only yesterday we saw an entire political party walk out of Parliament. This is not the forum to discuss the rights and wrongs of that but I am saying that it happened. Synod members, it is now up to you to bring about change. You know what needs to be done. Not to play your part implicates you in these, what now only be called, evil processes.
Take courage and do what in your heart you know needs to be done. My prayers are with you all this weekend.
I am probably in agreement with what you say about vulnerability. I wrote my piece under pressure of time so I did not spot that I was falling into the trap of agreeing with someone who wants to define vulnerability in a very tight way so that it excludes almost everybody. The weaponisation of safeguarding is another trap, declaring that every problem of disagreement is a safeguarding matter. We end up not being able to register differences without being accused of abuse over someone’s opinions. Somewhere there is a middle way which correctly identifies abuse for what it is without the words losing all meaning. Jay ‘gets’ weaponisation but she appears not to get the understanding that power abuse involving ordinary people may also be a safeguarding matter even though neither party is technically a victim or vulnerable. This needs discussion and I am sorry I did not pick up the implications of Jay’s words a bit quicker.
Jay uses the accepted definition of adult at risk that is in general use in organisations other than the church. The key issue is recognising that safeguarding refers to children and vulnerable adults tightly defined as adults at risk. There is some really helpful material that looks at this. The Church then needs, like other institutions, to have clear harassment and bullying policies that recognise the ways in which adults can be abused by other adults and provide for proper investigation of such incidents. It is not generally helpful for those making complaints of harassment to be treated as if they lack the agency to make such a complaint as is at some level inherent in the safeguarding process.
I think Stephen that though time would have been a pressure any of us who write, read or comment on a church safeguarding blog are heavily emotionally invested in the subject and that can make us see what we want to see or quickly pick up on things if what we want to see is missing. There are good things in the report but like you I feel it needs reflection and consideration and a less prescriptive way of safeguarding found within the independent structure professor Jay advocates. Not that I am particularly in favour of the very ‘internal’ review groups and would very much have liked to have seen Sarah Wilkinson in a review group for the Jay report which would seem to me to provide continuity.
https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/welby-acknowledges-complete-absence-of-confidence-in-safeguarding-as-report-author-says-failures-are-not-all-historical?utm_source=Premier%20Christian%20Media&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14351949_daily%20news%2025%20February%202024&dm_i=16DQ,8JM19,PJ10N5,ZD2W9,1
If you shade it and right click you can hopefully open the article from Premier Christian News.
How on earth can the recommendation to remove the form of abuse that is spiritual abuse from policy be anything but a backwards step?
We probably all agree that independence in safeguarding is the only way forward, but I share Patricia’s concerns about the comments on “vulnerable”, and Sarah’s concerns about spiritual abuse. Some of us have worked hard for years to get these issues better understood.
I was disgusted with Synod ignoring the Wilkinson & Glasgow reports, & delaying accepting Jay. All stakeholders will need to debate the details, but delaying independence will destroy any last threads of confidence in the church.
I can’t see how an internal response group can progress this. It needs to be led by an independent chair that has the confidence of majority.