Shame is the overriding emotion I feel reading that nearly 400 figures within the church establishment have been convicted of abusing children over the last 70 years. Shame, anger, but not all that much surprise.
“Many of these cases demonstrate the Church of England’s failure to take abuse seriously, creating a culture where abusers were able to hide,” the independent inquiry concludes. Too many bishops were more concerned with supporting those who had been accused of abuse than looking after the victims. Abuser priests were quietly moved on to a new parish when news of their activity reached the attention of their bishops. The language of a “fresh start” and “forgiveness” became a kind of cover for deeper concern for reputational management. Those who had been abused were treated like a problem that needed to be hushed up, made to go away quietly.
It was at St Paul’s that I first heard the weasel phrase “reputational risk”. It wasn’t used with respect to child abuse, but was a catch-all warning for anything that might potentially tarnish the good name of the church. The irony, of course, is that the fear of reputational risk may have been the very thing that led the church to cover up many of its dirty little secrets.
Of course, over the last 70 years the Church of England has changed beyond all recognition. The “long withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith, has removed the old deference towards the clergy which meant abuser priests were believed over their victims. The last time I wore a clerical collar in the street, a passing motorist wound down his window to shout “paedophile” at me. Even so, the line that it is all very different now is still unconvincing. In 2018, over 2,500 “safeguarding concerns” about children and vulnerable adults were reported to dioceses. Some of these may well have been as unfair as the malicious shout from the window of a passing car. But some of them won’t have been. There are still abusers in the church. And the collapse of deference has not deterred them.
The church, when I joined, used to have a very clubby feel and there was a sort of vestry chat that would look upon and describe lay people as “Muggles”. Now frowned upon in all but the most defiantly Anglo-Catholic of circles, it was an expression of clerical solidarity. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. But it engendered a kind of closed ranks mentality when ‘one of our own’ was accused of something. And there was often a kind of gloomy Gothic creepiness about clergy bonding that bracing sunshine of secularisation has done much to dispel. Not that child abuse in the church is a peculiarly Anglo-Catholic thing. But with evangelicals it generally seems to have a more sado-masochistic expression, as with the punishment beatings handed out by the abuser John Smythe on the Iwerne Trust Christian camps, or the naked ice-baths and beatings delivered by Rev Jonathan Fletcher. I experienced something of this kind of abuse myself and the emotional scars will always be with me.
So although much has indeed changed, I still don’t really trust the whole “much-has-changed” line. It is true that what is now called Safeguarding has become an over-riding obsession within the church’s hierarchy. And at times it seems that the whole apparatus of church administration is bearing down upon this issue, with continual directives seeking paper exercises to monitor the situation. I suspect that part of the church’s highly defensive reaction to Covid has been driven by this concern. And the worry about Safeguarding will, I fear, be used as a reason to introduce even greater centralisation into church structures. This, in turn, will alienate further many clergy already alienated by the way the central church is busy accruing to itself the sort of authority that has traditionally been located on the ground, in parishes.
But the evil of abuse is highly adaptive and can inveigle itself within even the most administratively focused of approaches. For despite the voluminous interventions of the central church, there remains the problem that church people are largely too biddable, too conflict-averse when it comes to this enemy within. Wickedness often places itself adjacent to virtue as a mechanism of disguise. And those of us who feel it our calling to recognise the good in other people can be poor judges of the dark side that can sit closely alongside it.
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SubscribeDear Giles
Thank f&& someone understands the nature it and apathy.
The problem though is this…in the UK in 2017, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London launched a unit to tackle online “hate crime and improve support for victims across the capital, as part of his manifesto commitment to ensure a zero-tolerance approach to hate crime of all forms.”
When it comes to internet and children being groomed online for abuse, the Met and other police forces complain they have no resources to pose as a child in order to prevent a peadophile offending BEFORE any child is harmed. So the police are impotent and adult victims have set up their own stings, they are not vigilantes, but follow certain processes for successful prosecutions. I understand if to be in the 100s of successful convictions.
I cannot tell you how utterly despairing and despondent, you feel when you think that in the twitter community, you can get police to investigate a hate crime, but stop a child being harmed from a sexual predator? No one is interested as if you’re a past victim and people think compassion and understanding is Automatic it isn’t, it’s the complete opposite.
We live in a society including church that is full oc people committed to not seeing child abuse. Was it Rochdale where children in care were opposite council buildings forces into underage prostitution right before the council’s eyes. Yet they did nothing.
It’s too difficult to deal with, you’re just jumping on #metoo #hetoo bandwagon, it’s too long ago… there’s excuse after excuse. And once you’ve spoken, any network you had connected to the church, school and the like, you lose that and essentially faith goes out the window.
I wish I’d kept my mouth shut because I lost virtually everything and the second breach of my trust, I cannot come back from. It’s a world I struggle to make any sense of anymore, so like many I withdraw.
Sincerely
J