It has not been easy writing this blog piece as new information keeps appearing. Thus, the drafts I put together earlier in the week have had to rewritten more than once to keep the piece more or less up to date. The main focus for this blog is a document published on the Church of England official website,122 pages long, entitled Independent Review of Case TT commissioned by the Interim Commissioner for Independent Case Reviews. I hope that this short summary of its contents in this post will encourage many of the Surviving Church followers to read it in full. In summary it contains a frank and detailed critique of the poor treatment of an abuse survivor by individuals and groups acting for the Church of England over several decades. When the document first appeared on July 15th 2026, the survivor’s name was anonymised but, since publication, other published references to the case have revealed her name. I understand that this survivor, Jane Chevous, is happy for her name to be used rather than the TT in the Review. This is in spite of the fact that the Review refers to some quite sensitive information connected with her personal life.
In urging my readers to persevere with a detailed study of the 31.8. Review of Jane’s struggles to be heard by the Church authorities over several decades, I am hoping that, like me, they will feel themselves also much better informed about the traumatic experience involved in being a survivor. They will also become more familiar with the protocols and processes employed by members of the National Safeguarding Team and other professionals doing this work. The detail in the Review helps us to understand how complicated is the task that professionals face in delivering safeguarding. From this current Review we gain a level of familiarity with the processes used by these NST officers, caseworkers and core groups. Attempting to deliver safety protocols to the church institution when there are competing interests and priorities in operation at the same time, can result in confusion. Even if the Review does not answer all the safeguarding queries that many of us continue to hold, this is a document full of good sense and clarity. Asking the right questions of safeguarding experts may eventually produce a system which is easy to understand and does not add to the pain of those who are victims/survivors of a dysfunctional institution. The current 31:8 published Review on the story of Jane’s experiences as a victim of both abuse and insensitive management is an important staging post on the way to a renewed system of safeguarding which will promote justice and healing.
In pursuit of a clear understanding of all that has happened to Jane over the last 40+ years, the Reviewer has consulted numerous document and conducted many interviews. From the documents, from emails to SAR requests, we get remarkable insight into the way that safeguarding is done. No doubt, as the result of this critical glimpse of the operation of core group meetings set up to examine Jane’s story, there will be a call to make changes in safeguarding processes all over the country.
Jane’s story can be told in a few broad strokes. Back in 1979 she was working in church youth work and she was involved with two ordained youth leaders who abused her sexually and spiritually over a number of years. As with many sexual victims, the behaviour of the abusers was not immediately recognised as abusive by the victim. It was only in 2001 that she made a formal approach to the Diocese of Southwark to report the abuse. This was resisted and she herself was subject to victim blaming. She later discovered that her claims of being subject to rape were dismissed in the belief she was a ‘gold-digger’ and also ‘hysterical’. The two bishops in the diocese and the archdeacon involved with her case seemed to have no interest in establishing the facts, all their sympathy and support being extended to the perpetrators. Jane, unsurprisingly, was seriously dismayed by this response and she abandoned her membership of the Church and her roles within it. Her mental health was severely affected, and she made attempts on her life.
The next stage of the narrative begins in 2019 after Jane had heard about the work of IICSA and the setting up of the NST in 2015. From the beginning, her approach to the NST was affected by a serious misunderstanding about what they were able to provide for her. In her words, ‘I entered full of hope and optimism in a place of relative healing and left distressed, broken and with no justice, accountability or healing’. As the 31:8 reviewer has pointed out, the NST had a protocol which was always focussed on the need to manage risk. If an accusation was made, the priority was not to establish responsibility or accountability, but to take steps to remove the potential risk of future abuses or harm. The reviewer gives quite a bit of space to this early misunderstanding that arose because of this protocol embedded in the NST that their task was to manage future threats. It certainty did not meet Jane’s felt need to be believed and to receive some kind of apology for what she had suffered. For the outside observer trying to understand other cases with similar misunderstandings, it is useful to see this discussed in the Review from both perspectives, that of the survivor and that of the church institution.
The following three years of work by the NST with Jane reveal a number of obstacles identified by the 31:8 reviewer which militated against smooth functioning at the NST. Jane herself was spending time abroad and the Covid epidemic was raging. There were also problems and serious mistakes at a practical level with some poor record- keeping. This was compounded by a number of changes of staff which made continuity hard to maintain. Long delays in communication with Jane because of these bureaucratic delays made her often feel disconnected from the NST process.
The misunderstandings that bedevilled the safeguarding process for Jane throughout her interaction with the NST from 2019-2022 should, we might feel, not have been unexpected when they occurred. The reviewer expresses some surprise that a leaflet to explain the meaning of ‘managing risk’ was not made available. My own observation is to express surprise that the leaders of the NST had not met a similar situation before like Jane’s. Her complaint, which any intelligent individual might make, was to question whether it was appropriate to use the word ‘safeguarding’ to describe a process that seemed to have as its main purpose the protection of an institution. This seemed to take precedence over caring for a wronged individual. If we examine the use of the word ‘risk’ in this NST context, we find that the most important thing being protected is the Church itself. Legal advice being given to the NST in its early days seemed to have suggested that any admittance of responsibility might involve the Church in huge financial liabilities. This prevented the NST providing the one thing that might have brought healing and closure for a victim – an apology and some accountability. That legal advice turned out to be completely wrong and, in an earlier blog, I have quoted the relevant legal evidence to refute the liability argument. This was provided by a legally trained relative.
The 31:8 Review consists of 122 tightly typed pages and the fact of its appearance at the beginning of the summer holidays and after a meeting of General Synod might seem to be an attempt to condemn it to a quiet burial. Were this very important Review to be forgotten, it would avoid some frankly embarrassing criticism of the Church’s leadership alongside some challenges to the official protocols for safeguarding practice. I am hoping that many who read this summary will take the trouble to read the full Review. They will learn a lot about the inner workings of the CofE and the way that it sometimes strays from its claimed high standards. The Review is extremely critical of the church leaders in the Southwark diocese who, in 2001, received Jane’s complaint and then treated her with such cruelty and disrespect. The Review records the later efforts by the NST to challenge the earlier behaviour of these church leaders in the 2001/2 period when Jane’s case had been brought to their attention. The leaders concerned, two bishops and an archdeacon are not named, but are clearly identifiable from the information that is revealed about them. The negotiations with these leaders were not concluded satisfactorily even though a great deal of effort and time was expended on meetings and contact with them. Ideally the breakdown in relationships that had occurred in 2001/2002 should have been worked through and somehow resolved. That never seems to have happened and the 31:8 reviewer accepts that this was the case. The DSA in Southwark did however accept, after the conclusion of the NFT process and its 8 (!) core group meetings, how deeply traumatising the original abuse had been for Jane and how the processes would have been far less disruptive for Jane if she had been allowed to tell her story on tape to avoid seemingly endless re-questioning and cross-examination. A further bright spot for Jane came as the result of the current Bishop of Southwark writing to her supportively after the end of the NFT inquiry. He was able to apologise and express his regret at what she had to endure, both in the early days and after she brought the incidents to the attention of the church authorities. Above all the Bishop of Southwark expressed his belief in her account. Seemingly he was unafraid of Jane initiating some massive lawsuit against the Church of England. The Bishops of Oxford and Dorchester also listened to Jane’s story and apologised for the abuse she had suffered. Both dioceses followed this up by agreeing to make financial provision towards the cost of her counselling.
There is much else in the Review in terms of good and bad practice to be mulled over, but I have to say that having reached the end with its descriptions of bullying and power abuse throughout the narrative, I am left feeling myself somewhat traumatised. The assumption that someone making a complaint is automatically a mischief maker and should be frightened off by a solicitor’s letter does not create a trusting mutually supportive Body of Christ in an area. The lack of any pastoral response or insight among church leaders when Jane’s original complaint was made, meant that the suffering that Jane endured continued for decades. Jane’s story and the failures in response are important and the Church of England will become a better place if even some of the lessons are learned from her story.