The sheer length of the recently published IICSA report was intimidating when I started reading it last Thursday. How can anyone summarise a piece of work with 483 pages, and which has been some seven years in gestation?  The focus of the report, the issue of child sexual abuse (CSA) in Britain, is, of course, by no means just a church matter.   CSA stretches its evil talons right across British society, as this report makes clear.  But whether CSA takes place in the home, school or a church, its cruel effects on victims are going to be the same.  To quote the report: ‘the devastation and harm caused by sexual abuse cannot be overstated’. Why should our children have to endure devastation of this kind? No one in society can completely escape the shame of what is revealed in this report.   For those of us who are members of the Church of England, we find that we have been part of an organisation where cover-up and denial have been practised for decades.  So none of us can say that this is outside our concern.  All of us to a greater or lesser degree are caught up in the guilt and the shame of what has been done, not only by individuals, but also by the institution itself.  The sheer seediness of an institution, like the Church, practising power games in order to protect its name and reputation has diminished us all.  Long after IICSA and its reports have been forgotten, there will be a lasting impression about the CofE in some people’s minds.  That is the group where CSA took place, and the main concern of leaders was to put up barriers preventing the discovery of the truth.  That may be a thoroughly unfair judgement, but we cannot blame the public for picking up such an impression. The task of safeguarding and protection of the young has taken a long time to become a priority matter in our Church; even now we find it hard to listen to the witness of victims/survivors.  We have also been guilty over a long period of time of failing to hold to account those guilty of abuse.

One of the striking features of the report is that it does something that in-house church reports seldom do. It gives the victims of CSA an effective and compelling voice right at the beginning of the narrative.  So often in our church inquiries and reports, victims and survivors are not at the centre.  Even if a narrative is clearly recounted, there is still an apparent reluctance on the part of the institution to learn from what is being said, let alone suggest providing the help that is needed for the purpose of helping a victim’s/survivor’s recovery.  It has always been a complaint of mine against the National Safeguarding Team that they seem to regard it as unnecessary to employ a trauma-trained member of staff for the purpose of listening to the abused.   The last time I looked at the professional background of those employed by the NST, there seemed to be an emphasis on legal and social work skills rather than anything from the psychotherapeutic professions.

The expedient of recording verbatim some of the words used by the 5,000 + victims who came forward to tell their stories to the Inquiry through the Truth Project is powerful.  These words are thus unmediated by the prism of any interpretation.  They stand out starkly and convey to us the horror of the experience of CSA.  The report also shares with the reader the range of the other types of abuse, some to do with neglect or physical violence.  The headings of part C in the report give us some of the flavour of what was shared with the Inquiry about abuse right across the board, especially in children’s homes or in a domestic setting.  ‘I became a punch bag’, ‘I was neglected and surrounded by chaos’, ‘I had a deep sense of loneliness’.  Many of the victims quoted in Part C seem to be victims of a Care System functioning poorly.  Others had to live with inadequate or absent parents.  But, for whatever reason and in whatever context the child was made to suffer, the testimony influences the reader.  No doubt the Inquiry wanted to ensure that everyone reading the report would not remain unaffected.  The more that an evil is identified, the greater the chance that those among us who have the power to create change will feel moved to do so.

The Section D, which deals with what is at the heart of the report, the experience of CSA, is also hard to read.   Not only does the child have to cope with the awfulness of the original experience, but the legacy of the attack remains.  The report acknowledges the variety of the ways CSA manifests itself after the original event.  We too easily forget the subtle ways in which CSA can attack the personality of the young person.  It affects many aspects of behaviour, such as the ability to trust and make relationships.  Also, all too easily the victim becomes addicted to self-destructive behaviour, such as alcoholism or drug abuse.  Although CSA takes place right across a variety of different settings and institutions, there is nothing about church abuse that makes it any less harmful and negatively life changing.

This IICSA report does what few reports have successfully done before.  It makes sure that the child victim is placed firmly at the centre of the entire narrative.  If we were to divide the report into three sections, the first one would be telling the story.  The second could be summarised as the consequences of these grim events.   The third section concerns the societal and legal attempts to respond to the awful betrayal of so many innocents within our society.

Beyond the deeply shocking and revelatory tales of abuse, are the attempts, some successful, to reach out for help.  Some victims found therapeutic support which was timely and effective; for others the help offered was inadequate or out of its depth.  There seems to have been something of a postcode lottery in this respect.  Mental health services are much stretched in this country and privately available counselling is an option available for only a few. Perhaps one of the biggest blockages in the past was finding therapists who understood that the abuse of a minor was not in some way consensual.  This ‘myth’ about child sexual behaviour was apparently current among the police investigators in Rochdale.

My comments about the IICSA report are admittedly subjective and do not attempt, for example, to do justice to the extensive legal material.  Of relevance to church interests is the question of mandatory reporting.   IICSA does recommend the imposition of an obligation, enforced by criminal sanction, to compel the reporting of incident of CSA to the relevant authorities.  This is a demand that has been sought by the organisation Mandate Now for some time.  While strongly supporting this proposal, I find myself more drawn to what the report has to say about the provision of support to victims/survivors in Part H.  Existing regulations, under the Code for Victims of Crime in England Wales (Victims’ Code), already state that victims and survivors have the right to be referred to services that support victims. We learn, from the report, of the existence of specialist independent sexual violence advisers (IVSAs).  Such helpers work within the criminal system and help victims/survivors negotiate their way through system of justice.  They can also access therapeutic support.  Other models are mentioned including the Barnahus model originating in Iceland.  One issue that IICSA identifies is the way that a victim has repeatedly to tell their story to a succession of investigators and social workers.  This can be very taxing   Therapy from trauma-trained counsellors was found to be beneficial, but it is not widely available.  One individual had to travel 200 miles to receive this form of specialist support.  Funding, waiting lists and time limits all undermined the possibility of suitable help going to any but the few.  It is clear, according to the report, that the current system for commissioning support services is not working well. There is scope for the UK government to require the introduction of a local commissioning partnership to coordinate support services for CSA.  In summary, after noting the current failures of support and provision for child victims, the report makes as Recommendation 16 ‘the introduction of a national guarantee that child victims of sexual abuse will be offered specialist and accredited therapeutic support … fully funded.’

The task of safeguarding vulnerable people is enormously complicated both in terms of practical action and of legal process.  Most of our bishops and church leaders have been reluctant to get involved in the minutiae of what is involved. There is nothing particularly rewarding about setting up structures to do the necessary prevention work. The safety of children should be something we take for granted but doing all the hard work to make that happen has no obvious sign of a job well done. You cannot measure success in this area when it is something which should be there anyway. It seems clear that many who take on this area of responsibility do not feel much appreciated by others in the Church.

Reading (or more accurately in my case skim reading) this very long IICSA report reminds us that church CSA is just one manifestation of an extremely serious social evil.  The idea that the Church is not a particularly safe place for children comes as no surprise to those of us who have been observing the scene for a number of years, but this report may help to undermine the complacency that has prevailed in so many.  We need alertness to the dangers of CSA together with a passionate desire to support the survivors among us.  Once again we are alerted to the fact that it is only by dint of the hard work of many that we can hope to preserve the cause of justice and prevent the reputation of our Church from being completely destroyed.

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/31216/view/report-independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse-october-2022_0.pdf

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. 

When writing about the ‘Kenneth’ case on this blog, I had cause to wonder whether any other justice system, apart from the Church, could be so indifferent to the cause of truth so as to believe an allegation of abuse without a proper investigation.  Are other organisations so incurious that an uncorroborated allegation of abuse will be left unresolved and unexamined?  Do other legal organisations or structures within British society allow the assumption of guilt to be upheld so that an accused can be left in a state of despair and trauma?  Was it possible that the old principle in British law, that the accused are deemed innocent until proved guilty, is thought not to apply? 

The Carl Beech (otherwise known as Nick) affair resulted in the most appalling set of allegations of abuse being made against prominent people in Britain.  This created untold suffering and vast expenditure of resources of time and money.  It had a massive effect on the trust that people felt overall for the police service and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in particular.  Was it possible that the police could get things so wrong?  Could the unsubstantiated word of a single disturbed individual ever be allowed to exercise such power to corrupt the thinking and the common sense of so many in a normally well-respected institution?

I recently had my attention drawn to a document that helps us to look at the blunders of the MPS and the way that the original false claims of Beech were not more quickly picked up by the police.  The document examining these failings is one written by Richard Henriques, a prominent retired High Court judge.  He looked at the police culture that was then current nd which had enabled the claims of Carl Beech, to be accepted as true for so long.   Henriques noted the way that belief in the testimony of ‘victims’ was not just the bias of certain individuals; it had become institutionalised in the policing culture that was prevalent right up to 2016.  A published policy of the College of Policing, dated 18^th March 2016, stated: ‘When someone makes an allegation of crime, the police should believe the account given and a crime report should be completed.’  This follows another report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in 2014 which put the requirement to believe the victim more strongly.  It declared: ‘The presumption that the victim should always be believed should be institutionalised’.   

The College of Policing recognised the importance of detailed investigation of allegations, but Henriques points out that if investigations go on over six months with a built-in assumption of the truthfulness of a ‘victim’, this will affect the way that evidence is gathered. To quote the report:’ Was the obligation to believe the complainant to continue over a six-month period?’  In other words, it is very hard to gather corroborating evidence to support or undermine a claim, when the one investigating has internalised and assumed the truthfulness of one party from the beginning of the enquiry.  While it is of vital importance to make victims of sexual assault feel believed and listened to when making a complaint, this does not stop the one listening having an open mind as they investigate.  Objectivity and impartiality can and should prevail throughout the process of enquiry. 

The preservation of objectivity and impartiality during the process of interviewing victims in an abuse case should not be incompatible with providing support to these complainants.  It should be possible to say to the complainant, ‘I support you and take your complaint very seriously.  At the same time, I am investigating what you say without fear or favour’.  If assumptions are made and a complainant is ‘believed’ at any point of the investigation process while evidence is being gathered, that will mean that the other side is, at that moment, being disbelieved.  Just because a complainant (typically a rape victim) was often treated in the past with suspicion and distrust, it does not mean that the system has to swing to the opposite extreme of treating every complainant as having to be believed as a matter of course.  Henriques sums up this point rather elegantly when he says: ‘Replacing an unsatisfactory state of affairs with a flawed system is no solution.’ He says further that ‘any process that imposes an artificial state of mind upon an investigator is, necessarily, a flawed process….  The imposed “obligation to believe” removes impartiality.  

Although it might be argued that complainants have no reason to make up their stories, the possibility that there are fantasists and liars among those who complain to the police must be allowed for.  If a questioner at the outset of an enquiry has to ‘believe’ the complainant, this will affect the way the questions are asked.  If the police questioning process does not allow for some element of doubt about what the true situation is, the questioning process would seem to be biased.  A policy of ‘believing victims’, Henriques declares, ‘strikes at the very core of the justice process ‘.  These are strong words; they can be seen to be true wherever forms of justice are being applied in various walks of life.  Outside the police and justice service we have individuals working in such areas as social work, HR and employment tribunals.   All of them would be failing in their responsibilities if the impartiality required in the legal process was abandoned.  This is what evidently happened in the Carl Beech disaster.  That case was not just catastrophic for those immediately involved, the falsely accused.  It was a disaster for others in further cases where individuals have been at the wrong end of an obligation to believe by investigators.  False accusations do occur, and it is here that impartiality and good judgement are not just desirable qualities in those who administer justice.  They are literally a matter of life and death in situations like the one in London which involved a priest taking his own life.

I began this blog piece with a mention of the ‘Kenneth’ case where things continue with no sight of proper resolution.  Although no offence has been proved and none admitted, the case cannot be resolved with the existing system in place.  Those with oversight of the core group apparently declared at the start of the process that the complainant must be believed.  They maintained that this mantra is required in the House of Bishops’ advice on safeguarding. I have no means of knowing whether this is a misunderstanding or genuinely episcopal guidance.  Whatever the situation, it has led this core-group into taking no further action in proving or disproving the allegation.  Thus, the case remains in a state of limbo because someone has been infected by the same faulty reasoning as that which was infesting the MPS in the Carl Beech case.  No one seems to have thought to share with the NST or the Diocesan safeguarding teams the excellent legal reasoning of Richard Henriques report. This compelling report has exposed the damaging and even dangerous way of thinking that has infested the safeguarding reasoning of much of the CofE. Because of it, Kenneth’s case, and maybe others, remain in a state of limbo.  There are no obvious ways of moving forward.  The truth of what really happened in the Kenneth saga seems to be of no real concern to those who sit as judge and jury in his case.  Although Kenneth is now no longer being actively pursued and can now attend church, the cloud over him has no means of ever being removed.

It would be a good thing if the internal justice system operated by the Church of England – the one that creates phoney risk assessments, allows bishops to ignore complaints against individuals when it suits them, and keeps cases unresolved and without any decision being made for years at a time – could receive a thorough reform.   A justice system which, for some, is experienced as corrupt and not fit for purpose is hardly conducive to the good name of the Church in the wider society.  Do the Church of England and its leaders really care so little for its reputation, that it tolerates the poorly functioning legal system that we have created, to deal with safeguarding issues?                                                             

by Anonymous

Ed. This is a third contribution from a well informed anonymous writer who wrote two earlier articles on the topic of Safeguarding in the Church of England.

I had better come clean at the start. I woke up the other day to find that I was part of Liz Truss’ Anti-Growth Coalition. Or rather, I am part of the one that the Archbishops often refer to.  In the CofE, you cannot move for chiding, chivvying or church conferences dedicated to growth, growth, growth. Apparently, Truss is “getting Britain moving”. That is odd, because where I live, nobody is standing still at the moment. We all have jump around on the spot just to keep warm.  Meanwhile, Welby’s chums are “unleashing the laity (etc)”, because as you may recall, the CofE is being held back by its own clergy and needs to be “freed from [such] limiting factors”.

I am against growth for the sake of growth. I protest when Conservative Evangelical churches and HTB plants get all the money and grants for becoming “resource churches” or “missional hubs”. That means all the other churches just pay much more for getting far less. I think lots of these new church ‘start-ups’ cost a lot to set-up, and pay nothing back.  Most of Welby’s experiments have been expensive foibles that we’ve all been forced to fund. But now he’s spent all the money, he’s even taken on £500m of fresh debt in the form of a “growth bond”, which we’ll all have to pay back sometime in the future. Kwasi Kwarteng went to Eton too, you know. Personally, I’d rather see our cash go into much needed repairs and maintenance for churches, vicarages, and perhaps a decent holiday for the clergy. But I am part of that Anti-Growth Coalition. And I have come to realise that the CofE is being run by the Conservative Party at prayer.

The question is, what kind of Conservatives are todays Bishops and Archbishops? Socially, politically and theologically they are conservative, for sure. Gender and sexuality remain difficult issues for any Bishop to speak out on.  They stick to safer terrain: climate change, Ukraine and the other matters that don’t require episcopal attention. It is sad, if not tragic, that at precisely the moment when we might need radical and brave Bishops to speak, we have a bench that is permanently ‘on mute’ until the Comms-Team tells them what to say. 

OK, the Bishops are conservatives with a small ‘c’, but in terms of conduct, this is very much like the current Conservative government under Johnson or Truss. We estimate that over 40 Bishops have CDMs against them at the moment. But like Partygate, the rules they helped make don’t apply to them. They just carry on.  Yet the rules do apply to rest of the clergy, who have to step aside from ministry with the presumption of being guilty-until-proven-innocent. Even if found innocent, your Bishop might decide that you no longer enjoy their favour or confidence. A kind of ‘one-strike and you’re out’ approach.

Other similarities come to mind. General Synod will be briefed about new national CofE initiatives through the media, just like party MPs. The inner-cabinet running everything for the CofE may not bother to consult with the majority of Bishops about policy changes, new initiatives or major expenditure. There is no democracy or accountability, and anybody breaking ranks is swiftly disciplined. Nobody knows when the House of Bishops acquired a system of Party Whips, but nobody is allowed to be “off message”.  General Synod, and most Bishops running their own Diocesan Synods, have far more in common with a Party Conference run by Truss or Johnson. Even fringe events are checked out for potential dissent.  If all else fails, there are still three ways to deal with dissenters from the Handbook of Political Arm Twisting. First, promote the dissenter – so they have to behave. Second, sack and banish them, and remove the whip. Third, smear them, so they have to resign.

So, I choked when I saw that the CofE – Truss-like – was now publishing something called ‘Promoting A Safer Church’.  This was the CofE’s take on over 800 recommendations made in Past Cases Review 2 (PCR2).  When you read PCR2, you have to ask who in the CofE hierarchy pared the 800 down to a couple of dozen, editing them into a very weak set of national recommendations, and by what authority they did this? Somebody pasteurised, skimmed, filtered and strained these 800 recommendations. Who did this, and why?

Bishop Gibbs was on hand to trot out that we are all on some kind of “change-journey”. So like Truss “getting Britain moving”. It is good to know that Gibbs is finally cranking up the safeguarding engine. We have no indications on speed, direction or destination. Gibbs also noted the CofE is “putting in place scrutiny of diocesan safeguarding operations”.  That will be surprising news to many Dioceses. But as Gibbs is a Welbyite speaking to the media, there was no need to check whether anybody was ever consulted. That’s government for you.

Meanwhile, the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) is apparently ready to roll out their website. But it has no independent Information Sharing Agreement logged with the Information Commissioner’s Office, so is not GDPR-compliant. Yes, a small detail, but it does mean that the ISB cannot handle data securely or independently.  Gibbs told General Synod the ISB was completely independent of the Archbishops’ Council.  The ISB says it isn’t, and has no legal personality or any kind of independent financial identity outside the Archbishops’ Council. Amazingly, the National Safeguarding Panel and the National Safeguarding Steering Group, both chaired by Meg Munn, claim that the ISB is not a governance issue for them.  So that’s OK then.

So who is running safeguarding in the CofE? But before I answer that, let me point out some of the issues that now bedevil safeguarding in the CofE. First, it is plain common sense (and obvious legally) that in terms of safeguarding, the category ‘vulnerable’ refers either to a child, or to an adult who is known to require protection, and for whom safeguarding measures are already in place. Labelling any other adult as ‘vulnerable’ only after an event would render all adults as potentially vulnerable, with safeguarding then simultaneously becoming everything and nothing.  Yet hundreds of clergy have been hammered by a retrospective and invidious Catch-22 scenario, in which the last visit they made, a sermon they preached or conversation they had is now treated as a “safeguarding matter…because someone has complained”.

Second, whilst I think churches should not be treated differently to other bodies, there is such a thing as proportionality. Many, many church events never have employees or licensed persons present, and so there are no contractual arrangements in place. A church outing to a zoo is an entirely voluntary day trip. It is not like a school trip. If all our church events now need a safeguarding risk assessment, here are some events we currently don’t risk assess: funerals, weddings, baptisms, parish lunches, visiting old people’s homes, coffee mornings, home groups, and more besides. Would we risk assess our home group leader inviting their group to a lunch, or out for tea on a National Trust daytrip? Who would that safeguard? Church is an inherently multi-generational gathering, and it is voluntary, not compulsory. By all means prosecute people who exploit children and vulnerable adults in civil and criminal proceedings.  But nobody can make the context of church “safe”, let alone promote a “safer church” for everyone.

Third, I predict that there will be no safeguarding in 10-15 years. It is a voracious industry-concept, and the churches will not be able to afford it. With fewer paid clergy in the future, reliance defaults to the laity. Bluntly, they won’t do it. It’s time consuming and fraught with huge risk and responsibility – yet no reward. It has no job satisfaction such as maintaining buildings, visiting or hospitality. The laity will just refuse to manage this.  It will eventually dawn on the CofE that:

A: Most denominations outside the British Isles don’t do safeguarding or anything like this. Common sense with due regard to civil and criminal law suffices for everyone else.

B: There is nothing at all to show for safeguarding – teaching, preaching, pastoral care usually produce gratitude and growth – whereas safeguarding literally produces nothing.

C: The actual people being safeguarded are mostly children – with very, very few exceptions. Most children grow up. They seldom record debts of gratitude for their crèche or nursery school.

Social Exchange Theorists would take a cold sober look at this and begin scripting the last rites. Safeguarding is what sociologists call a high-investment-low-reward activity. They would also concur that it is high-risk-low-yield.  Mostly, what we want from our churches is low-investments with high-rewards. You turn up to church, hear a great homily, and experience fabulous liturgy, numinous worship. There is no price on this.

Safeguarding is the opposite: huge outlays of time, energy and work (labour), and literally nothing to show for it at the end (no measurable result), other than a meaningless slogan that has no quantifiable outcome. “Promoting a Safer Church” is akin to “getting Britain moving”. As churches have found to their cost, you can plan as much as you like, but you are still stuck with no power or predictive skills to prevent anyone who exploits your trust. Yet you are left with total responsibility for anything that goes wrong. The answer simply cannot be to adopt the premise that we trust no-one. But that is the ultimate trajectory of safeguarding. No-one is safe. Everyone is potentially vulnerable. Nobody can be trusted. In Welby-World we all need to be risk-assessed, policed, checked and re-checked. If you don’t agree, you can leave. Or you’ll be dismissed.

None of this undermines the fundamental  imperative for redress, justice, truth, repentance and integrity, and the urgent need for victims to be fully compensated. That really is a proper task. Safeguarding culture is of its time and has a limited shelf-life. Yet more worryingly, it belongs to a certain kind of hysteria that stems from ‘moral panic’. That is another concept from sociology, that helps to explain how “safeguarding the American way of life” in the 1950s meant every single town searched harder for the Communists, left-handed folk, homosexuals, student radicals and other (so-called) deviants that apparently threatened to undermine the very fabric of American society by brainwashing the unsuspecting into changing their political beliefs or identity.

Child sexual abuse was hidden in our churches for many years. Churches colluded in cover ups, and still do so. But a culture of predictive correction can swing the other way, with the unwary and accused quickly caught in a drama-trap akin to Kafka or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. McCarthyism found very few reds under the beds of ordinary Americans. Believe me, they looked hard, and frequently in places that had no registered democrat voters, socialist-sympathisers, or any other people to be suspicious of.

Cynics might say that ‘Promoting a Safer Church’ – uncannily reminiscent of  “safeguarding the American way of life” in the 1950s – is just another example of our cultural captivity. Of the church being a slave to contemporary culture. That is probably true, but it comes at a price. We need to remember, and as Jean La Fontaine’s anthropological study discovered, when push came to shove, there were no cases of satanic ritual abuse in places as far apart as Shetland and Nottingham (see: Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England, 1998). Yet a plausibility structure and a culture of ‘moral panic’ had prevailed, and put the innocent through hell. We also forget that it really rather suited the Conservative government of the 1980’s and early 1990’s to support that kind of moral panic and fear. In the same way, only an innocent would see no evidence of intentional political guile in ‘Promoting a Safer Church’.

Meanwhile, today’s ecclesial culture is being worked over and water-boarded by re-branding the identity of the churches, whose sole purpose has now been reduced to a safety-first machine geared for growth, growth, growth. Take a look at your Diocesan HQ the next time you visit.  It will be open-plan, replete with board rooms and breakout spaces, like some churchy version of Ricky Gervais’ The Office (2001-2002). Episodes in our ecclesiastical adaptation can stick closely to the original, and cover mergers, annual appraisals, company awaydays, growth targets and the like.  (I wish I could say I have never met a version of Bishop David Brent, but in truth, every Diocese has at least one Bishop Brent).

Alas, I do not think this ‘safeguarding culture’ is quite the unfortunate accident it can masquerade as. Like McCarthyism’s campaign against Communism and all-things-deviant, safeguarding is a serious tool of political oppression, and an instrument for intimidation. It stems from a bullying culture that can be quite sadistic. It uses punishment, terrorising and harshness to keep order. It factors in its own randomness. Now anyone could be found wanting. This reflects the elite public school ethos we have seen in our political leaders, and it’s now baked hard into the CofE. Most bishops behave like compliant-cruel prefects.

Most of our Bishops are no longer allowed to care, and have more in common with the brutal chums of Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays [1857]. It is a measure of our bullying culture in the CofE that a Bishop known to be an uncompromising bully effectively destroyed a diocese, but still got ten years’ tenure in post. Elsewhere, a bishop silences critics through ‘lawfare’, destroying colleagues who speak out, and using his comms-team, senior staff and lawyers like some kind of regional mobster with muscle. Critical clergy, or those daring to openly complain of his bullying, will get the threat of a CDM by return. This will destroy the church. But the fish rots slowly from the head.

This bullying culture stems from a school-based context rooted in elitism, class and entitlement.  This culture flows from the God of Wrath that was drummed into heads at summer camps like Iwerne.  God is some Big Headmaster who dwells on high, ruling distantly and possibly benevolently, provided you keep your head down and do exactly as you’re told. Dissidents and troublemakers will be made an example of, and publicly shamed. Bullying is tolerated, even though the edicts against it will pinned-up every week on the school noticeboard and be re-issued at assembly.  The tasks that keep the pupils in order are often repetitive, numbing and pointless. Punishments can be random and cruel. But if you dare to question the system, you are in line for a suspension. 

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of all this is that it you can see it so clearly. Tens of millions of pounds are being wasted every year on ‘Promoting a Safer Church’.  Yet few victims of abuse are ever helped. The keyword is ‘promoting’. This is an exercise in the dark arts of spin and PR. But the money spent on this “change-journey” could be given to victims of actual abuse who are not being compensated.  We know that the CofE entirely lacks a leadership with wisdom, courage and compassion. Yet the ‘safeguarding culture’ grows evermore obese with each passing month.

Herewith a fine example.  The Makin Review that deals with Smyth’s abuse, so touches on what the odd Archbishop and a few Bishops may or may not have known, said and done to stop this.  The Review is around 850 days late. Mr. Makin was only given two days per week in the published Terms of Reference to get to the bottom of this barrel. He started in 2019, but is known to have increased his time commitment to three or four days per week. The combined cost of him and his associates is estimated at around £1400 per day, plus VAT.  Add in transcription costs, lawyers fees and the like, and the costs might rise to £2500 per day. The total cost of this Review is coming in at somewhere between £1.25 to £1.5 million.

The punchline in this is Makin has yet to interview Channel 4’s Cathy Newman, and most of the investigative team who broke the story of John Smyth’s abuse. It is also believed that in the three-plus years of the Makin Review, the relevant Archbishop and Bishops have yet to be seen. As Churchill might have said, never in the field of ecclesial conflict has so much money been spent on defending the few – yet at the expense of the many.  The many victims of Smyth won’t get a fraction of what the Makin Review costs.  And there is, as yet, nothing to show for this. Where successive Conservative governments have gone with whitewash and exonerating ‘independent internal tribunals’, the CofE has followed with their ‘lessons learned reviews’.

One primary function safeguarding is maintain the position of those in power, so Makin’s Review will never see the light of day if it so much as dares to criticise an Archbishop or Bishop. The Comms-Team will never let that be published. The other primary function of safeguarding is perpetrating processes and perpetual terrorisation to keep the clergy in their place.  But as their numbers thin-out, age, and many just leave, it is only the laity that remain.  Yet the laity don’t have to do as they are told. The laity don’t have to put up with uncaring prefects or headmasters who preside over this toxic version of Erving Goffman’s total institution, or Michael Foucault’s carceral system and panopticon. The laity can vote with their feet and don’t have to submit their CV’s into some safeguarding portal just to help out the Vicar with home visits, or serve on another rota.

I predict the laity will vote with their feet. By the time we get 2050, you will have to look up the term “safeguarding” in a dictionary. People will scratch their heads and ask “what, who and why?”. In the meantime, we are set to be run ragged by this Conservative Party at prayer.

Choosing which part of the lengthy recently published PCR2 report to comment on was not easy.  I did, however, find myself drawn to the section of the report that discusses the culture in the Church of England and the way that this culture can worsen safeguarding failures. This section listed, under nine headings, various aspects of church life that are thought often to be impeding good safeguarding practice. These nine headings help us to appreciate the current problems faced by the CofE as it tries to undo the legacy of the past.  In my judgement there is one named aspect of the CofE’s culture that stands out.  This particular heading in many ways sums up and largely encapsulates all the other eight themes that are listed.  The word is protectionism.  In my view, attempts by the CofE to preserve reputation, status and privilege have led to many, if not all, of the problems that the CofE is now facing as it seeks to drag itself out of the mire of the past safeguarding catastrophes that the PCR2 report is describing.

The current culture of the CofE, as described by PCR2, seems to be one that seeks to promote, above all, good public relations and also to preserve a wholesome reputation in the eyes of the world and of its members. Avoiding the appearance of scandal and side-stepping any suggestion of corruption within its ranks seems to be – understandably – a major preoccupation.  Church leaders have found it difficult to face squarely the catalogue of abuses and safeguarding shame that has been a feature of the past decade or two.  From leaders downwards, there has thus been a notable reluctance to listen carefully to survivors and what they have to say.  The report names ‘disbelief’ and ‘blaming the victim’ as two of the nine aspects of a negative church culture.  These have made it hard for the church to move forward to deal with the toxic legacy in its past.  The report counts almost 400 cases of abuse discovered in the files.  These are new in the sense that they are not listed, according to church records, as having reached some kind of resolution. In the overall atmosphere of reputation protection, how many more other cases brought to the attention of leaders disappeared into the shredding machine or on the bonfire in someone’s garden?  The report also indicates the existence of bullying within the hierarchical structures of the church.  How many cases are there of bullying or coercion of victims into silence?  We don’t know the answer to this question, but I would not be surprised if other new cases appear – the ones that were shredded or bullied out of sight and now only live within the memories of the suffering and still traumatised survivors.

The very first heading, in describing the culture of the church, is the word deference. This is a word we have discussed on the blog more than once. It often creeps into discussions about power in the church. Deference to those who are important in a hierarchical system is part of what keeps its structure intact. For that reason, it is likely encouraged by those with power in an organisation. Institutions, like any product of human invention, have built-in survival mechanisms.  An institution comes into being, not just to exist but to maintain and extend its influence and power.  Those who are at the top of the pinnacle of power in an institution will have a natural interest in making sure that lines of obedience and deference are preserved unchallenged. There will also be personal psychological reasons at work among organisational leaders.  Being considered important and receiving the deference of those lower in rank will be a strong boost to the self-esteem of many. Deference can be expressed in a variety of ways as, for example in the correct use of titles. I remember an ordinary parish priest who received the title of honorary Canon from his local cathedral. From what I could tell, his main achievement had been to have stayed a very long time in his parish. Whatever his achievements, from the day of the announcement, he insisted on being addressed as Canon by all his parishioners. I detected in this demand for deference, a self-aggrandisement which was far from being healthy.  Unfortunately, the Church does sometimes operate in a way that encourages this appetite for deference among those who crave importance and status.  In this environment the free and honest exchange of information may be inhibited. People may treat the one who is the object of deference as having power and no one finds it easy to speak truth to power. The flatterer, the smooth speaker may hope that he/she may somehow be rewarded for never being the bearer of bad or challenging news. The individual in authority will naturally prefer to hear information that does not cause discomfort or pain.

The safeguarding scandals of the last 20 years have caused a great deal of discomfort and pain to those in positions of authority in the CofE. Indeed, it might be claimed that this pain is so great that there may be some among our bishops who regret ever having taken up the responsibility of episcopal office. Learning about and being confronted with events from the past connected with abuse must be harrowing for those who hear these stories. It is likely that those in authority will want to do all that is possible to shutdown painful information of this kind. PCR2, in the section on culture, identifies several ways the church sometimes behaves in order to deny and avoid this type of pain. Those who do have official safeguarding responsibilities, and this is true of all the current leaders of our churches, must have a hard and difficult task looking objectively at what is presented to them. The PCR’s list of 9 cultural factors shows how the Church, and especially its leaders, attempt to push away the pain of confrontation with the suffering of others. The following are mentioned: disbelief, inertia, inaction and blaming the victim. All of these are classic avoidance techniques. We can say as a summary that, when anyone hears painful information, there is often an attempt, an instinctive attempt, to sidestep the full emotional toll that comes from listening to that other person’s pain. That is something that all of us can understand at a human level.

The pain that is the consequence of a safeguarding disaster operates at many levels.  There is the pain of the original abuse.  In many cases the individual concerned has not even begun to deal with, let alone heal, the resulting trauma. That pain needs resolution and requires the resources of money, time and compassion. The second level of pain is felt by those who hear about the pain and distress of the victim. Many of us find it just too hard to sit with the wounded person on the road. We hurry by, hoping that no one will notice that we failed to offer human compassion to the one in distress. The third level is the pain experienced within the institution itself. It is the pain of unresolved evil, damaged reputation and a total lack of will to set in place the strategies needed to deal with it.  Meanwhile the Christian Church teaches that there is a way through the most appalling pain and suffering as well as the evils of deliberate cruelty by one person towards another. The way that does not resolve such horrors is the way that the Church so often chooses.  It continues down the path of denial, deflection and sometimes outright dishonesty.

I encourage my readers to look at the section on culture in the PCR report. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Past%20Cases%20Review%202%20-%20National%20Report.pdf  Each one of the nine identified themes are areas of failure in our Church today.   Each one needs facing and dealing with over the next 20 or 30 years. Protecting the Church and her leaders may seem on the surface to be a good and honourable thing to do. Respecting and always supporting the men and women who lead us in the Church of England may help to preserve institutional stability.  On the other hand, this automatic protection of leading individuals and the institutions they preside over, can be, in reality, deeply harmful. When people on the outside of our Church see a panicky self-serving response, one that puts the task of protecting reputation as being the most important thing, they quickly lose respect for it. The Church of England is in danger, not because people do not hear the words it utters, but simply because they fail to see integrity in its leaders and the way the same leaders are refusing to follow the costly task of facing and dealing properly with the horrors of the past.

By

Stephen H.

For 3 years I have been subject to the painful experience of being bullied with attempts to drive me away from my parish church.  Here I have served for 27 years, 6 of them as Churchwarden. My role within the church and the PCC has been deliberately eroded by a bullying culture in the PCC.  This was led by an interim minister and his actions infringed my human rights. As a result of this treatment, I took out a CDM against the interim minister. The local bishop who reviewed the complaint, described some of his actions as shocking. It had also prompted the comment ‘painful reading’ from the President of Tribunals.  In spite of this, my complaint did not meet the requirements of the Measure and the minister was moved and promoted! Thus, though breaking the priest’s code of conduct several times, the minister was rewarded.  Meanwhile the bishop agreed in a letter that the situation in the parish needed to be addressed and she offered mediation.  This I agreed to. The situation came to a head 2 weeks ago when I attended a meeting at the bishop’s home.

I met the local retired Archdeacon outside the bishop’s home before going in to meet her.  This former archdeacon had acted as my support person throughout the CDM process which I had brought against the interim minister. He asked me why I thought the diocese safeguarding adviser (DSA) was included in the meeting. I told him I hoped it was because they were at last recognising the issue of spiritual abuse in this case. Three months had elapsed since the first meeting, and I understood this was to be a follow up. The support archdeacon had written to the bishop on my behalf on the 16^th August requesting that she move forward on her offer of mediation because the bullying and discrimination was continuing.

We went into the meeting, but God was not in the room. Instead of an opening prayer, the bishop started to attack me in a premeditated way. She opened by saying that her PA had informed me, by email, that the mediation was not proceeding.  Neither I nor my archdeacon supporter had received this email so the change of mood in the meeting was unexpected.  The bishop’s diatribe against me was connected to a complaint I had made to the Charity Commission about failures of administration over the church building.  Whistleblowing is a legal activity and protected under the 1998 Public Disclosure Act. I could not convey this at the time because the attack was too relentless as well as unexpected. I was also accused by the bishop of wanting to damage the church when in fact I had been trying to make the church ‘fit for mission’, addressing such issues as disability access.  This is the slogan for the whole diocese as it faces the future.

The bishop went on to taunt me about the failure of the CDM which I had submitted about the interim minister. I believe that this minister had contravened the code of practice for clergy and that his actions towards me were discriminatory and against my human rights. He had also enlisted the support of the present Archdeacon in his bullying actions towards me. This has had a devastating effect on my mental and physical health. I responded that my first CDM was a hard copy and had not been actioned because it had gone missing(?). The bishop then claimed I had submitted a CDM against her Archdeacon which was untrue. I wanted to tell the bishop how I experienced the behaviour of the minister and others in the church as spiritual abuse, but she scoffed at that idea.

At this point the bishop invited comment from the DSA.  He claimed that he had a raft of safeguarding concerns about me.  I could not gather what these concerns were about, but somehow mentioning them may have been thought to be another way of silencing me by making veiled accusations.   The way these allegations were brought up, seemed to have no connection with proper procedure.  I am confident that I have never contravened any safeguarding protocols. I told them I would meet any allegation head on because I had served the parish for 27 years with integrity. The bishop then told me that I should stop going to my parish church. I replied this was not going to happen, God wanted me there and I wanted to serve God there. The DSA then suggested they would pursue some kind of restraining order. I felt very threatened by this suggestion even though it did not seem to be a threat they were entitled to make. At this point I was feeling very distressed and told them that I was going to leave. I stood up, but was derided by DSA who said, “Is this how a Churchwarden behaves?” I said “I am not a CW.” The bishop then brought up the matter of my placing a portable image of the Virgin Mary on the altar of the lady chapel at the request of the Non Stipendiary Minister.  I wondered whether mentioning this episode was suggesting undertones of sectarianism. The bishop then said that I was responsible for the last three members of the clergy leaving, as though I was some kind of 5th columnist. She said she had reservations about licensing a new priest for the parish because of me. I said that if she believed all she said was true, she should hold an independent inquiry. I would welcome that. I had by now deduced that this meeting was a set up and not, what I was led to believe, a way forward. I told them it was an ambush. I did not feel comfortable and left the meeting and her house. The DSA ran out and caught me entering my car shouting ‘Stephen’ twice. I told him I would not be driven out of my parish church, and I drove off in a confused and distressed state.

When I had first contacted my diocese in April 2021 about the bullying I was subjected to, including nasty WhatsApp messages, they had no policy on bullying and harassment. On the 29^th July this year the diocese published its first policy on Bullying and Harassment.  There was also a procedure for making a complaint about safeguarding among several policies which had been absent. What I had been subjected to was behaviour which contravened both policies. I believe it is my persistence which has woken the diocese up to missing policies especially that complaints against clergy can be made through a process other than CDM route.  I had never been advised about it. It states on it that method of complaint will always be presented as a first option by the diocese, but it never was with me and it was not visible on their website.

So, after all this time I am still subject to bullying and spiritual abuse.

    Ed’s comment Today (Wednesday) we have received the vast report of PCR2 which contains up to date information about bullying and abuse in Church of England going back 70 years. No doubt the material provided by the Report will feed into my comments on the issue over the coming months. Meanwhile, I include here a first-hand account of the experience of one individual of church power abuse. I am aware that hearing only one side of a story about abuse raises potential problems of partiality. While obviously we do not have all the details of the background to this narrative, there is a part of the story which gives us reason to believe that the whole of Stephen H’s account is plausible and credible.  A bishop in the CofE might well suggest a mediation between the two parties following an unsuccessful CDM and use his/her authority to bring this about.  The fact that the expected mediation process was suddenly, apparently, abandoned by the bishop is an unexpected twist to the story.  The bullied one became further bullied by a double attack from the Safeguarding Adviser and the bishop herself.   Whatever animosity the bishop may have felt towards Stephen H, this intimidating behaviour, as reported by Stephen, is unbecoming of any church leader.

I recently had cause to read through the summary of the Clergy Discipline Measure (2003) as set out on the official CofE website.  Although the Measure is now due to be replaced with a new revised version, this original attempt to put something in place to check malfeasance among the clergy, seemed eminently sensible and measured.  As I read it, I tried to shut out the reports of CDM disasters that I have heard about that have taken place since it came into effect in 2006.  Some have reached the public domain while others have been privately shared with me as a concerned blogger.  Surely the combination of a qualified legal adviser and a diocesan bishop, which the Measure sets up as a quasi-legal determining body to deal with clergy disciplinary cases, would have the wisdom to administer truth and justice in every case that comes before it?  Bishops, we would hope, possess the status of trusted leaders and will only be appointed to their position because they have gained the respect and confidence of those who have worked alongside them over their years of ministry. Are not such figures all able to demonstrate the qualities of pastoral wisdom and goodness?  With these qualities, surely it is impossible for them, with the help of legal guidance, to allow any injustice to occur when dealing with clergy accused of malfeasance?  Sadly, this hope sometimes turns out to be misplaced.

My reader will not be surprised to discover that the CDM process has, in many instances, failed to live up to its aim to be a simpler, more straightforward method than the old consistory courts for dealing with problems of discipline among the clergy.  When I review some problem areas in its implementation, there is one thing that inevitably creates problems in providing justice.  This can be summed up in the single word – malice.  In using this word, I am far from suggesting that every disciplinary case in the Church involves the presence of any malice.  No doubt there are dozens of cases which are dealt with equitably and justly.   I would hope that most of the cases that come to the attention of the Diocesan bishop and his legal adviser are responded to expeditiously and well.  These are never heard of again.  It is only when malice comes to be a factor within the process that real problems can occur. 

Malice can come into CDM processes from at least two directions.  The first direction is from anyone, lay or clerical, who dislikes a particular clergyperson and decides that complaining about them will somehow make them disappear from the post they currently occupy.  Most of these malicious complaints are picked up at an early stage and are quickly dismissed.  But the very fact of facing a CDM may be extremely demoralising to the respondent.  They will live with uncertainty and stress for some time and, even if they are eventually found innocent, their self-confidence as a pastor to their flock may have been irrevocably undermined.  

The second potential scope for malice in the CDM process is more serious.  This is when a member of the clergy finds themselves the object of dislike or even enmity by other senior clergy who then use the CDM processes to harass them. A failure to be neutral on the part of a diocesan bishop is not unheard of, and this hostility is extremely difficult to counteract by the affected clergy.  The Christ Church drama demonstrated the way that the CDM process became used at one stage to further the deliberate malice against the Dean from other clergy as well as members of the College.   Few of us would have the necessary stamina to withstand constant attacks of this kind.  One of the most depressing things about the saga is the way that official church structures, in the form of the NST and the diocese of Oxford, had allowed an evidently spurious CDM claim to be pursued for months against the Dean between March and September 2020.  Seven allegations against the Dean were eventually dismissed.  It was especially striking in this case that no vulnerable person existed on whose behalf a safeguarding inquiry could properly have been instigated.  There was actually no complainant individual at all: the issue had been entirely fabricated by the Dean’s enemies. Eventually it dawned on the church authorities that their processes had been highjacked by the Dean’s enemies and the complaint was thrown out.  In the meantime it had taken several months of deliberation to arrive at this conclusion.  It was quite clear to those of us on the outside, that malevolence was at work and the whole CDM process was being undermined and manipulated by what appears to be a very public manifestation of spite.   Even a single example of church processes being manipulated by the malice of identifiable individuals helps to destroys our ability to have confidence in such processes.  If a bishop, and here I have examples in my mind, ever uses the church disciplinary processes to undermine a member of his/her clergy for reasons that have to do with dislike, then the integrity of that bishop as well as the whole CDM process itself is bound to be seen as flawed and without credibility.

Another serious problem with the CDM process has been the inordinate time for some investigations to take place.  The ones we hear about are those that seem to drag on interminably, putting a clergyperson and his/her family under appalling stress.  I am not sure that I would be able ever to recover from six months enforced ‘gardening leave’.  This talk of suspension brings one on to another issue which is the fact that it is very unclear why some, but not all, clergy are forced to ‘stand back’ while their case is considered.  This inconsistency can give rise to massive injustices.  George Carey was forced, in a fanfare of publicity, to surrender his permission to officiate for a time because it was discovered that the known abuser, John Smyth, had attended the college, Trinity College Bristol, while Carey was principal.  Smyth’s attendance was part-time, and he probably only rarely visited the college.  Why the NST made such issue of this detail, when a rapid examination of facts clearly exonerated Carey from any culpable behaviour, is a mystery.  The Smyth allegation clearly upset Carey quite badly. Those looking on must have wondered if this was an example of a weaponised disciplinary action. Was it that Carey, now in his 80s and on the edges of the national Church, provided an opportunity for those who are senior in the safeguarding world to show that they can act tough to protect the vulnerable?  The same solicitude for protecting the vulnerable was not taken in a far more serious ongoing case where there is an unresolved CDM.  This particular individual, known to readers of Private Eye, has allegedly committed far more serious misdemeanours.  Not only is this clergyman allowed to continue in his current post, but he is also permitted to apply for a senior post elsewhere in the Anglican Communion.  Having an ongoing and unresolved CDM against you is, apparently, no impediment to promotion in the Anglican Church.  A bishop issuing a ‘safe to receive’ letter for a clergyman with an unresolved CDM may be committing a falsehood, but he also may be wanting to remove a suppurating sore out of his jurisdiction.  In popular terms, the bishop is flinging a dead cat over the wall for someone else to deal with!

If we were able to claim that the CDM process is conducted everywhere with perfect justice and impartiality, we would still be left with fact that the whole system is often shrouded in secrecy. Sometimes we are told a lot about the individuals caught up in the process; on other occasions we are left in the dark.  I probably hear more about individual cases as people write to me.  I am quietly appalled at the level of malice that is found in some of these cases where things have gone badly wrong.  Speaking very generally, the complaint I hear again and again is that those at the highest levels of authority in the church are far more interested in shutting down inquiries into bad behaviour than in finding justice and reconciliation.   Meetings with bishops are sometimes described as experiences of being bullied so that the victim will not seek to reveal their story.  The focus is on the reputation of the institution and its officers rather than on putting right a past wrong.

A hierarchical episcopal church like the Anglican Communion has the chance to be an excellent model for Christian bodies everywhere.  For this model to work well, however, there has to be complete integrity within the structure and among the leaders, so that every member of the body has confidence and trust in them.  If any of these episcopal leaders engages in malice or dishonesty, it does not take long for a cancer of suspicion to spread across the whole body.  It is also not easy to be a bishop when previous holders of this office have spent time in prison or others are found to have involved themselves in lies and dishonesty in order to defend the institution.   The statistics that were revealed recently about public attitudes towards public institutions, show a significant decline of trust toward the Church and the clergy who lead it.  The bishops of the Church of England should perhaps be spending far more time in discussing how to communicate their absolute integrity to the ordinary people of Britain.  Churchgoing Christians also need to show themselves as decent wholesome people before anyone will want to hear what they wish to communicate about God.  At present we have been witness to too much outright seediness in our Church for the outsider to feel attracted to what we may have to offer.

I doubt very much if anyone has ever thought to write a book with the title: A Theology of Bullying. One reason for its non-existence may be that the word bullying is still associated in many people’s minds only with the abusive activities in a school playground.  A lot of cruelty and abuse would take place there but, because it was often out of the sound and sight of supervising adults, it was deemed not to exist.  Teachers and other adults are today, hopefully, far more attuned to the signs of child-on-child abuse in schools and better trained to deal with it. 

The word bullying, as we are all aware, can be applied to the abuse of power in any context and may occur in any human relationship.  Theology does have a great deal to say about power and its use/abuse so, by extension, theological reflection may be relevant in a discussion over bullying whenever it occurs. Relationships which involve power abuse are everywhere, whether in a workplace context or in a church. It is always important to understand why they happen, and we have the resources of a number of disciplines to help us do this. Attitudes in society mean that now we are far less tolerant of bullying behaviour.  For example, in the past it was expected that the novices in many work situations would have to endure power abuse as a kind of initiation into the adult world of work.  Even in the Church it seems to have been a common experience for training incumbents to have bullied their curates.  Whether Vicars were jealous of their younger colleagues, or for some other reason, the typical curate experience may well have included this experience of being bullied.   Power misuse in a church context was not only found in the experience of curates trying to find their feet as pastors and teachers.  We are now of course aware of the extensive catalogue of sexual abuse cases that continue to haunt the churches so grievously over recent years.  The authorities in the Church have made enormous efforts to protect the vulnerable from this particular manifestation of power abuse by the setting up of an extensive variety of safeguarding structures.  Unfortunately, these structures are so complex and convoluted that it takes a determined effort to find one’s way around them.  Even when we have negotiated our way round to understand all the Church’s structures to deal with power abuse and bullying, we find that there is one enormous failing in the whole enterprise.  To put the problem into one sentence, the Church does not really understand the nature and prevalence of power inside its structures and culture.  Without such an understanding the Church cannot root out the evil in the abuses that exist, whether in sexual exploitation or in the other forms of bullying that occur.  Without a detailed and intelligent understanding of power and the way it works in institutions and relationships, there can never be any end to this evil found in bullying and other forms of power abuse.

A good place to start our understanding of power and its abuse, are the writings of Albert Maslow.   He proposed that all human beings have a series or ‘hierarchy of needs’.  At the base of this hierarchy, we find the existence of fundamental survival needs.  These include the need for finding food, shelter and safety from predators.  When we have established our ability to survive and reproduce our species, our needs become more sophisticated.  We have social and esteem needs, and these can be attended to once the survival needs have been met.  At the top of the needs table is a state of existence which Maslow calls self-actualisation.   This is the peak of human striving, and it might embrace such things as spirituality and fulfilling one’s deepest strivings and vocation.  For many people the idea of self-actualisation remains an aspiration rather than a reality and they are content with the fulfilment of their survival and psychological needs.  My introducing of Maslow’s ideas is not the prelude to a full exposition of what he has to say about human striving.  Rather I want to suggest that there is a way of understanding bullying and human evil generally by presenting them as the shadows of the various stages of Maslow’s hierarchy.  To put in another way, each legitimate attempt to provide for one’s human needs can be easily corrupted to become an act of pure evil.

To return to the theme of bullying.  At one level we can see that bullying is a corruption of our natural and healthy need to preserve our life from threats to its existence.  The need to protect oneself and one’s family might begin as a legitimate desire for survival, but it can slide into acts of gratuitous unpleasantness towards another.  These acts may or may not involve physical violence, but the techniques practised by bullies are similar to the legitimate acts of self-preservation against threats of various kinds.  The thing that makes one violent act legitimate and another evil is found in what motivates them.  Bullies inflict evil and pain, not for survival purposes, but because it provides them with some gratification.  There is the pleasure of being in control, having power over another.  To summarise, power abuse/bullying finds its roots in actions that are connected with the instinctive behaviour around our self-preservation.  We know that if we are threatened, primitive instinct comes into operation, activating the fight/flight response.  Any use of this fight response, an expression of our raw power, will not be used very often we hope.  It is unsettling ever to be faced with our capacity for violent behaviour towards another.  Perhaps bullying is an addiction to this primitive capacity for violence.  Most of us avoid being attracted in any way to this form of gratification even though we recognise that we may have it deep down within the psyche.

Beyond mere survival for the individual and his/her progeny, other needs in Maslow’s construct come to the fore.  As we go up Maslow’s ladder of needs, we find legitimate needs existing alongside their negative/shadow counterparts. For example, love and belonging have positive manifestations but there are those who can only experience such things in a corrupted version such as dominance and control.  A higher level that Maslow calls self-esteem also may be honourable, but we also find a parasitical version which we describe as malignant narcissism.  The narcissist is the one who has learned through life how to feed off other people to meet his esteem needs.  Even the highest level of need, self-actualisation, may be at someone else’s expense by manipulating them in some way.

Maslow and his hierarchy of needs gives us, I believe, a different way of understanding evil and abuse.  To put it at the simplest, evil can be found whenever fundamental legitimate human needs are short-circuited and thus corrupted.  A human being has the right to expect to find at some point in his/her life a fulfilling partnership with another which may involve sexual expression.  This ‘need’ is not a justification for an act of violence or abuse to extract a fleeting moment of physical gratification.  In the same way it is reasonable to look for some form of human community.  This does not mean that we have to find a group of people to control and terrorise to fulfil our fantasies of importance.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is extremely helpful for pointing us to legitimate fulfilment and forms of gratification.  At the same time it shows us how easy it is for these to become corrupted and sources of active evil, both for ourselves and those whom we infect with that evil. 

What is evil?  The answer from our brief consideration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that evil appears when human legitimate needs and desires are corrupted by their shadow side.  Two factors in the corrupting of Maslow’s legitimate needs are laziness or impatience.  When the child, Violet Beauregarde, in Charlie and the Chocolate factory shouted, ‘I want it and I want it now’, she was thinking and acting out the way that many behave today.  The ‘right’ to have our heart’s desire instantly, whether it is food, sex, power or wealth is a powerful motivation for becoming enmeshed in evil.  Because the legitimate need to flourish as a human being is quite close what is thought of by many to be a right to be gratified in whatever way we desire, there is a tendency to get the two muddled up.  When a parent gives way to a demanding child who, because of their immaturity, thinks only in terms of a instant gratification, he/she does that child an extreme disservice.  Long-term harm may be stored up for the young person who does not understand the difference between these two concepts of need and want.  In the same way there is much evil caused by the individual who can only see and treat all others as objects, i.e. as a means for personal gratification.

Human needs and human gratifications have the habit of getting confused in our minds.  Many find it difficult to disentangle them.  The problem for many is that some forms of gratification have become made respectable because they are practised by people we look up to.  We may perhaps see nothing wrong when a bully is in full flow because we have been conditioned to think of hierarchical authority as being always legitimate.  The use of the cane in schools of yesteryear seemed normal at the time because those of us who were witnesses of it could not contemplate the dimension of base gratification being felt by those wielding the stick.  In the same way we still find it hard to challenge the motivation of those who act unjustly in disciplinary matters, even within our churches.  Are they meeting their own psychological needs by administering such power/punishment or is there some other process going on? Disentangling motives for action is quite a hard thing to do, but perhaps what is more serious is the refusal ever to scrutinise these motives for doing the things we do, whether or not from a position of responsibility.  We all need to be able to recognise that the person who is put in a position of authority and power, may be simultaneously abusing that authority for reasons of satisfying a base need for gratification, and this has nothing to do with goodness and justice.

by Anonymous

A further instalment from Anonymous who wrote the last critique of CofE Safeguarding practice.

So the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.  Except that if you follow the British Religion in Numbers postings [LINK], you’ll notice how parlous the state of the Church of England is, and why numbers might matter.  For example, 70% of the population never go to church, and never pray. This will not be news to clergy, but it does explain the difficulties they have believing the latest missional growth targets set for their them by their bishops.

A recent survey into the trustworthiness of clergy and priests found that public perceptions in Britain Doctors (66%), scientists (62%), and teachers (59%) are considered the most trustworthy professions in Britain, according to the IPSOS Global Trustworthiness Index.  The global survey (an online sample of the adult populations drawn from 28 countries between May and June) found that clergy and priests were ranked ninth of eighteen professions in Britain. One third (33%) of the British population deemed them trustworthy, with almost the same again (29% )untrustworthy, with 38% neutral or undecided. The net positive score of 4% saw clergy and priests in Britain drop to eleventh in this presentation of the rankings. Globally, the average trustworthiness rating for clergy and priests was only 26% (40% saying untrustworthy).

We are not surprised at these numbers. Not because clergy are like the proverbial curate’s egg (i.e., good in parts), but because the church they represent is, frankly, not trusted.  Nor should it be. It will consistently put PR ‘optics’ above truth and justice. It will consistently bury bad news, the most egregious example of this being the report on the suicide of Fr. Alan Griffin’s tragic suicide being released the same afternoon that the last Prime Minister resigned. The Diocese and Bishop of London had been sitting on the report for weeks.  How extraordinary that the church should pick that afternoon to release a report on its culpability and incompetence.  But fear not, all of those who are implicated in this tragedy have either resigned, been suspended, or disciplined.  (That previous sentence is a made up one, and belongs to a parallel universe to which the Church of England will not “boldly go”).

Recently on another related website, a new Church Warden wrote in to ask if anyone could explain what NSP, NSSG, ISB, NST or the ISS meant, and why were there so many acronyms in Church of England safeguarding, yet nobody actually in charge or responsible for anything?  It is baffling.  If you write to Meg Munn – Chair of the NSG – about policy and practice on risk assessments, she claims that fraudulent risk assessments intended to harm a person in the process of the “weaponization of safeguarding” is not her brief. She writes about risk assessments generally apparently, and cannot comment on individual cases. Is any reader aware of any risk assessment, ever, that was general in character, and not personal or specific to an individual? We are not, but Ms. Munn believes this to be normal.

Just imagine a “general report on torture victims” that doesn’t delve into individual cases. Or a report on victims of abuse that mentions no individual cases.  If you can imagine these publications, there is currently a vacancy on the NSP for you. Although we are bound to say, being vacant is a prerequisite for applicants.

Surely safeguarding is always granular, specific and personal, and absolutely cannot be general? But in the Church of England, we do not speak of such things, for fear of being weighed and found wanting. Could the Independent Safeguarding Board perhaps have looked at deliberately fraudulent risk assessments? It declined to do so. How about the NST, or a Dioceses, or  a DSA? No, not them either. And this assumes they were not party to the production of bogus documentation, cover-ups and the like.

Reform will take a long time to arrive.  It takes moral courage and compassion to do the right thing, and this seems to be absent among our church leaders. Victims of abuse will only secure justice when the Church of England accepts that it will always have an inherent conflict of interest in trying to self-correct its failings, corruptions and abuses whilst simultaneously preserving its reputation. It needs to hand over all responsibility for safeguarding cases to a proper professional regulator with the teeth, clout, resources and fearless courage to speak truth to power, and bring the Church of England to heel. There is no other way.

When transparency, honesty and integrity are absent, all that is left to victims is legal action.  Repentance and redress must precede any attempt at reconciliation. At present, we have victims of abuse waiting many, many years for investigations to start or conclude. These investigations are often half-baked, and lack the resources, expertise and regulatory framework to compel subjects to engage with them.

Where does this leave the Church of England today? On this first birthday of the ISB, we are also at the tenth anniversary of George Entwistle’s departure from the BBC as its new Director-General. He lasted 54 days in post – a record in short tenure. Within weeks of starting his tenure as Director-General, the BBC became embroiled in the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal. Entwistle faced questions from the government at the time over why the BBC had failed to broadcast a Newsnight investigation into sexual abuse allegations against Savile after the presenter’s death in 2011.

Entwistle was accused by Lisa O’Carroll of The Guardian of giving a “less than authoritative performance, showing a lack of curiosity about Newsnight’s investigation”. What had gone wrong?  With hindsight, the BBC had put reputational management above all else.  It had given Savile the run of prime-time for years, and also TV and radio studios for decades. During these times, he had reputedly and repeatedly abused minors. 

Yet when the Newsnight journalists were ready to go public with the broadcast, the BBC lost its nerve, and gave Savile more benefit of the doubt than might have been granted to Fred West or Myra Hindley. In the event, ITV took the story, and it was left to BBC Panorama to eventually upend its sibling-rival Newsnight, and expose the BBC’s complicity in the Savile abuses. 

But worse was to come.  Entwistle resigned as BBC Director-General only a matter of weeks later, following controversy over a Newsnight report indirectly and incorrectly implicated Lord McAlpine in the North Wales child abuse scandal. 

The parable hardly needs explaining.  The BBC covered for an abuser, and then falsely accused an innocent. It protected one abuser; yet abused an innocent person who needed protecting.  In the case of the BBC ten years ago, this led to the resignation of the Director-General, George Entwistle. We look forward to the day when Archbishops and Bishops, backed by the NST, ISB, NSP, NSSG, ISS or whatever the latest flavour-of-the-month safeguarding acronym is, will also have the basic decency to resign when they get things so badly wrong.  At present they don’t, because they have no accountability to anyone, and are unregulated.  Indeed, their incompetency’s often lead to higher preferment.

Until then, the Church of England of England won’t be trusted by the people. The clergy cannot trust the church or the bishops. And that will reap a bitter harvest of bitter decline. If only we had bishops with courage to put PR optics to one side, and act with integrity, and champion truth and justice. But we have none of such. We are no longer hoodwinked by episcopal spin with their motivational talks, hubris and defensiveness.  The Church of England is in decline because we can no longer believe or trust our own leaders.  For our sake, the people’s sake, and for God’s sake, please will they go?

I cannot be the only person who shudders when I hear the word deliverance or exorcism used in connection with the ‘pastoral care’ of LGBT folk.  Thankfully most Christians who belong to these communities and networks understand how to avoid such ‘ministries’.  Word spreads quickly that a particular church in an area is not a safe place for LGBT folk.  Some members of these networks may have discovered, to their cost, that any kind of involvement with these congregations is not just unpleasant, but it could even be described as dangerous.  It assaults both mental health and general well-being.  A recent book has been published on this theme by Matthew Drapper and he describes his experiences as a Christian gay man in Sheffield.  He was receiving an inhouse training at St Thomas’ Philadelphia so that he could exercise the ministry of a youth worker.  His attachment to the theology and style of an Anglican charismatic church was total but he found that his identity as a celibate gay man made his membership there increasingly problematic.  In the end, after nearly three years training at the Church, he was forced to leave the congregation.  He was thought to be some kind of threat to the well-being of the young people he was working with.

In Matt’s book, Bringing Me back to Me, he describes quite vividly the exorcism he was forced to endure as part of his earnest attempt to stay within the church community at St Thomas’.  Anyone interested in the unpleasant detail of the process conducted at a Prayer Team weekend in Feb 2014 can read it for themselves in Matt’s book.  I do not propose to dwell on the details of this event.  Matt clearly believed, at the time, that the deliverance process might help him overcome his attraction to men.  Clearly it did not, and Matt was left with serious trauma and an increase in his sense of shame and grief over not being straight.  He had failed to become what he felt he was required to be.  I tell the story in its bare outline because my concern is the fact that such processes are ever offered within an Anglican orbit.  As a former diocesan deliverance adviser, I am clear that the ceremony described in Matt’s book would be considered a breach of every CofE bishop’s regulations about deliverance as well as a gross violation of good pastoral norms.  Although the attempted exorcism took place some eight years ago, there is reason to believe that similar attitudes and practices still continue in parts of the Church of England.  Churches who conduct these irregular forms of ministry, designed to remove the demon of gay attraction, probably also sit lightly on all forms of episcopal authority.  When such ‘deliverance ministries’ take place, it is a serious matter and risks the infliction of significant pastoral and psychological harm.  The recent debate on the issue of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ has reached the level of Parliament and we may find that this practice is seen as harmful and may be outlawed by the law of the land.  The final decision on this matter has yet to be taken but there is clearly a large body of political as well as Christian opinion that feels that such legislation is necessary and urgent.

One of the difficulties that is encountered among Christians as they debate the issue of LGBT rights and morality is the background theology that conservative Christians use to make their arguments.  Those who are clear that gay sex is always wrong and evil will often bring a crude demonology into the discussion to buttress their point of view.  It is a difficult argument to contend with.  For the conservative side, any tolerance of LGTB rights may in itself be ‘proof’ that the more open group is caught up in the thrall of demonic forces.  You must be under the devil’s control if you fail to agree with ‘our’ conservative interpretation of Scripture.  The idea that there could be more than one way to read Scripture, which seems to be the dominant Anglican insight expounded by the Living in Love and Faith process, is not entertained.  The discussion also hinges on what we mean by demons.  I will happily explain what I understand to be the demonic in Christian experience, but my use of such language probably would not be sufficiently literal to satisfy the conservative wing of Christian opinion.  ‘The devil made me do it’ language does not cut it for me as a way to understand the issues of personal moral responsibility.  Ascribing the moral failings of others as an example of surrendering to demonic influence is also suggestive of a weaponised theology which is meant to undermine critics of the conservative worldview.  Debates about the nature of evil in the world are important but shorthand arguments about demons and Hell do not seem to explain anything at all.

It is extremely important to make sense of Scriptural accounts of Satan and the demonic.  However we come to understand this language, I find myself completely unable to accept the use of this discourse as a weapon to be used against other Christians.  In short, I deplore any attempt by Christians, whether in or out of the pulpit, to attempt to terrify or manipulate others by telling them that they are destined for Hell or under the control of the devil because they do not agree with the speaker.  I have noticed how devil language often seems to enter the discourse about equal marriage.  The implication is that if you do not agree that a condoning of gay marriage is the worst thing a Christian can do, then you are likely to end up in Hell.  Mention of the devil is or can be a serious form of hate speech.  How else should we describe language that tells another person that they are possessed?  It is abusive and certainly discriminatory,

Readers of Surviving Church will be familiar with the story of Lizzie Lowe who killed herself at the age of 14 believing herself to be wicked and beyond the God’s forgiveness because she had same sex attraction.  No one in her circle openly accused her of evil thoughts but she had internalised a thoroughly negative perspective from the few references to the topic that she had heard in sermons at church.  Given the fact there will always be a number of LGBT folk attending a congregation without necessarily making it public, a preacher must always be extremely sensitive to this likelihood before preaching on the topic using inflexible and condemnatory language.  We have already called anti LGBT rhetoric potentially hate speech.  We could also describe it as dangerous and inflammatory.  How far should our membership of the Anglican family suggest that such language is wrong and unacceptable?

In this blog post I am suggesting that if we overlook the danger, the cruelty and the trauma meted out to LGBT people in the name, we think, of an ‘orthodox’ reading of the Bible, we are doing real violence to the Christian faith. Arguing for a theological position is one thing, but to allow these same arguments to do harm to maybe vulnerable people – this becomes a safeguarding issue.  The LGBT community surely has right to practise its Christian faith in communities that do not question their right to exist and to claim salvation.  The Living in Love and Faith process continues its journey through the CofE and we are all aware of the probability that our Church will never agree on the topic.  The question that is still more urgent is not, who is right and who is wrong, but whether we are ever entitled to commit pastoral violence towards those we disagree with.  Should members of our Church ever be permitted to threaten the LGBT community with Hell and enslavement by the demonic realm?  These extremes of rhetoric and pastoral practice can do so much harm.

‘The devil walking about seeking whom he may devour’.  These words from the traditional version of compline remind us of the binary struggle between good and evil that exists within the imaginations of so many Christians.  Are we really going to suggest, as some Christians do, that the chief stumbling block to wholesome faith is the attitude we currently take on the gay marriage issue.  In 2022 you might think, to judge from the rhetoric in some places, that the only moral issue some Christians are concerned about is this topic.  For myself the primacy of the Gospel or good news is not defined by my attitudes over same-sex marriage, but my readiness to promote a world in which God’s shalom, as proclaimed by Jesus, is found.