IICSA must demand a Mandatory Reporting law for child sex abuse, and find a way for victims of clerical abuse to be fairly compensated
The Independent Commission on Child Sexual Abuse’s (IICSA) October 2020 report on the Church of England prompted predictable headlines such as “A hiding place for abusers” and “alleged perpetrators were treated more supportively than victims”.
Despite being entirely deserved, the report was light on the extent of archiepiscopal irresponsibility.
To its credit, the Church Times drew attention to how the Church treated Julie Macfarlane, a teenager who was sexually assaulted, harassed and stalked for a year by a C of E minister.
She describes “the scale of both the abuse and the long-term cover-up by the Church” as “mind-boggling” and the “systemic nature of the child sex abuse” in the Church. She initiated a law suit which was handled by the Church’s insurers, Ecclesiastical Insurance Group. They attempted to reject her claim on the grounds that it was out of time, and that she had consented to the assaults carried out by a minister who was much older. She said: “I was a 16-year-old girl coming to my minister for spiritual counselling and he dropped his pants. I asked the lawyers to explain to me what a consent conversation would look like in this context?”
Julie tackled the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, about the insurer’s “adversarial” approach through her lawyer. The Archbishop replied to the lawyer that he would “be very aware of the constraints under which we in the profession have to work in dealing with these miserable matters. The scope for personal and sensitive engagement is very limited.” Julie described this as “intrusive, dishonest, and hurtful … [and] crystallis[ing] … the Church’s wilful hypocrisy and the insincerity of their so-called apology… claiming to be powerless … [was] no more than crocodile tears.”
Anyone minded to dismiss the above as exaggerated or a one off may wish to consider a 2016 Telegraph report, which said the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office had been criticised for “ignoring” a rape victim’s 18 complaints. The Australian gave this the stark headline “Victim snubbed to save cash”. A 2018 Sunday Times report concerning a different victim/survivor (Justin Welby ‘blocked’ payouts to abused pupils) is also relevant. The victim told Justin Welby: “The idea that the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the worldwide Anglican communion and Church in England… which even Bishop Tim [Thornton, Bishop at Lambeth] agreed had £8bn in funds, is pleading poverty… is beyond contempt and… does you no credit.”
Justin Welby even told a victim in 2018 and others that consideration of further financial redress would have to wait until after IICSA reported and [however long it takes] the Church had deliberated on what it said. Could IICSA ever have imagined that it would be used as a pretext to delay — or possibly even deny — the fair recompense of victims?
Yet, despite — or even perhaps because of — all the foregoing, the Church’s national safeguarding team was keen to assure everyone in response to the “blocked payouts” article that: “The archbishop takes all safeguarding issues very seriously and this has been one of the highest priorities of his ministry since he took office.”
These insultingly meagre pay-outs from the Church’s insurers result from the massive power imbalance of the settlement between the insurers and the victims. As a well-informed victims’ representative has just written to me: “Many C of E victims would prefer compensation to be determined by the courts, but in 15 years this has happened only once. This is because settlements are forced upon the, generally impecunious and psychologically vulnerable, claimants under threat of becoming liable for the church’s legal costs. Settlements are effectively deals struck between two insurance companies with the lawyers taking an ever increasing cut.” Admittedly, other abuse survivors may be similarly persecuted, but not by those claiming pastoral care.
Julie couldn’t believe the Church wouldn’t offer a settlement to avoid defending the case in court, particularly given the accused minister had resigned following an inquiry. It is a measure of the Church’s clericalism, much criticised by IICSA and the archbishop himself (“the insanity of clericalism”) that it acted as it did with her. And especially given she is now a Distinguished University Professor (of law) who wrote a well-known book about lawyer/client relationships in 2008.
As Julie notes: “The Anglican Church owns a majority share in [insurance company] EIG, its representatives sit on the EIG board making policy, and the church directly benefits from EIG’s profits.”, so the church could “command” whether its insurers were “highly adversarial and aggressive” or (as its public statements would have us believe) “avoid offensive and spurious defences, and respond to a lawsuit with empathy and a desire to see justice”. She could also have mentioned that, given the Church’s huge wealth, it has no need of an insurance company, but then there would be no one else to hide behind.
Could the Church yet again be playing for time, confident that it can ride out the latest storm by doing the bare minimum? I hope not, but it would not be a difficult case to make. For example, the hierarchy reportedly announced a help line, rushed out after seven years on the drawing board, to deflect the barrage of bad publicity following the first IICSA report. As a victims/survivors’ spokesperson described it, “sleight of hand, designed to deflect the terrible shame of the Church”.
We can only shudder to imagine how victims must have felt, having plucked up the courage to disclose their abuse, perhaps for the first time, only to find it would be over a week before anyone could assist them.
Similarly, the Archbishops’ Council has just approved an interim pilot scheme for survivors of abuse in the C of E. They were quick to call it a “turning point”. Yet it is geared only to those survivors’ cases which are already known to the Church, “where the survivor is known to be in seriously distressed circumstances, and the Church has a heightened responsibility because of the way the survivor was responded to following disclosure”. I know several people who come into this category but none have been advised to expect anything.
Victims’/survivors’ spokesperson Andrew Graystone dismissed this scheme as doing “nothing more than rescue a few survivors from the cliff edge. It’s not a repair fund, but a suicide-prevention budget”. He told the BBC’s Sunday Programme of the “millions of pounds spent on reputational management”, while “there is no budget line” for “redress or reparations … or care for survivors of abuse”.
For some reason, the church remained tight-lipped on how much had been set aside for the above, or any other, abuse survivors’ scheme. The Mail believes the Church considers at least £200m is needed, but even this is less than two per cent of its disposable assets above parish level. Is it not time for the great and the good on the Church’s synod to demand that at least this be made a formal budget and that they be informed every quarter how much of it has reached victims?
Leading abuse lawyer Richard Scorer told the Sunday Programme, “this scandal has been unfolding over 30 years in the C of E and in that whole time not a single senior cleric has accepted personal responsibility and personal accountability for these failings”. “If he doesn’t resign, Welby needs to be giving a very, very strong lead personally on this and needs to be personally committed to delivering measurable outcomes [within a specified time frame] and agree to resign if they are not delivered”.
IICSA must be firm in the face of such severe failings. It needs to make a clear recommendation for criminal legislation to introduce Mandatory Reporting of reasonable suspicions of Child Sexual Abuse in institutions, and find a less adversarial way for far fairer compensation to be awarded independently.
