IICSA Anglican report 6th October 2020 – a fool’s errand?

By David Greenwood

Published October 21, 2020In: Child Abuse

In July 2019 after 7 weeks of hearings, countless witnesses and tens of thousands of pages of evidence the IICSA Anglican hearings came to an end. At that point all those following closely knew what had gone wrong and why.

I set out below the closing comments I made to the Inquiry. When you get the time please read through them. I asked the Inquiry to make recommendations to implement mandatory reporting and an independent body to oversee the church response to safeguarding reports.

The IICSA report published today (6th October 2020) does neither. Instead it has made entirely inadequate recommendations. The IICSA has failed to appreciate how determined church officials are to maintain reputations.

The headline recommendations are :-

To give Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers more power to implement national policy and to be allowed to take executive decisions without approval of the Diocesan Bishop.
To make minor adjustments to the CDM process.

The Inquiry has set out in some detail how it expects this organisation to re-arrange its internal structures, not only ignoring the repeated examples of how it is incapable of doing the right thing but allowing it significant leeway on how the suggested changes should be implemented.

I am significantly disappointed. This was an opportunity to do a good job of improving safeguarding responses and thus protecting children into the future. We are now faced with a position of the church having effectively been “let off the hook”.

The recommendations allow the church to retain control over the new “Diocesan Safeguarding Officers”. These will inevitably be church people. They will notionally have new executive power but are not independent. They will still avoid rocking the Diocesan boat when faced with tricky and important decisions. There is no guarantee they will be transparent or will set up independent investigations of safeguarding reports. They could easily degenerate into the self-protecting sham system of DSAs currently operated by the church.

I warned against the IICSA setting itself on a fool’s errand by getting into the detail of church internal rules and structures. It appears IICSA has ignored the evidence of the church’s repeated compulsion to do all it can by fair means or foul to protect reputations.

The adjustments to the Clergy Discipline Measure are likewise too little and allow the church to control how it deals with priests complained about. The IICSA seems completely blind to the tendency of church officials to use their systems to defend reputations. It is still happening in 2020. I see it in my own work for survivors.

There is no positive recommendation for a fully church funded independently-run redress scheme to avoid harmful litigation.

There is no recommendation for Mandatory Reporting despite almost overwhelming support for MR with a criminal sanction coming through the evidence loud and clear.

Too much credit has been given to the church for its written policies (albeit they are almost impenetrable according to the safeguarding expert, Edina Carmi). Credit given on this front ignores the fact that officials bent on protecting reputations can defeat complaints and erect barriers to the vulnerable by delay and by ostracising complainants from parish activities.

The phrase “tinkering around the edges” aptly describes these recommendations.

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IICSA Anglican Inquiry

Wider Church Investigation

Closing on behalf of MACSAS and AN-A1 to A6, Phil Johnson, Julie MacFarlane, Graham Sawyer and Rev Matthew Ineson

CLOSING ANGLICAN

Chair, panel: we act for ten victims of Anglican clerical sexual abuse and the survivors’ support group MACSAS.

Welby’s apology
May I deal with one matter immediately. Yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury flourished a letter he says he wrote to Mr Inneson in 2017. That letter was disclosed to the Inquiry yesterday and then, to us, shortly before you came in at 2 pm. Mr Inneson has not had a chance to respond to it. The Archbishop relied on the final paragraph of that letter to suggest he had given Mr Inneson an apology. Mr Inneson does not accept that. His objection is to the words ‘deeply sorry….from your description of how this has been dealt with by the Church’. I am not sure it is even grammatical. It is certainly mealy mouthed. It does not frankly accept the Church treated him badly.
Yesterday was an opportunity for the Archbishop to give a full apology – in public and in Mr Inneson’s presence – for what the Archbishop accepted was the ‘shabby and shambolic’ way Mr Inneson was treated by the Church. He sat there, the most powerful man in the Church, and Mr Inneson, sat behind, waited and waited and waited – as he has been for years. That was more than just a discourtesy to Mr Inneson. The Archbishop still ‘doesn’t get it’.

A national, independent regulator
I turn to the main body of my submissions.
The Anglican Church is the first of the major institutions to face a final reckoning in this Inquiry. The Anglican Investigation, with all its component parts, is a case study par excellence for why there must be:
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It is why I wish in this address to:
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This is not to replace the Church’s own steps to regulate itself. It is on top of that. Our essential point is: we do not care about the peculiarities of your byzantine institution comprised of 42 medieval fiefdoms, governed by centuries old Canon Law. You fix that if you can. It is your responsibility in every parish and every diocese. But you will comply with minimum standards set by a national regulator that apply to every registered institution that cares for children. No special pleading.
What must not happen – and what we say would be a fools’ errand for you – is to attempt to make specific recommendations for each of the immensely complicated organisations you have to consider. Extensive though this inquiry is, you are still only considering a few institutions. What about all those institutions you will not be able to scrutinize?
The regulator must be completely independent and, just as importantly, be seen to be independent.
We first suggested a national, independent, regulator of the child-care sector at the conclusion of the Downside/Ampleforth case study in December 2017. At the time, it seemed a bold submission. It no longer seems a recommendation of the best, but one of absolute necessity.
Others were content to limit their recommendation to mandatory reporting. The evidence has moved on. Even the Archbishops of Canterbury and York now accept mandatory reporting is a ‘no-brainer’.

No change
I will not, with great respect to the Survivors of clerical abuse – particularly those who have given evidence before you, some without anonymity – be dwelling on the litany of abuse, failed safeguarding and cover-up that you identified in your report into Chichester and Peter Ball and have heard yet more in this strand. All I will say, is that the evidence confirms that, despite the Church being anxious to be on best-behaviour in front of this Inquiry, the problems persist:
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They did know. They were told. They did believe it. They had training and policies galore. Child abuse is and always has been regarded as a grave crime. They have had so much time.
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The real risk is that once the heat of this Inquiry dies, the institution – whether it be the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church – revert to type or progress so slowly we have to wait a generation. It will not be sufficient to pass one or two laws that require mandatory reporting or extend position of trust offences. Laws ossify. Only look at Canon Law. You need a regulator that is continually applying the heat with guidance that changes dynamically as we better understand through experience what works and what doesn’t.

Which institutions pose the greatest risk to children?
I said I would to try to identify more general factors that identify high risk institutions.
These are:
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We suggest this analysis assists you in understanding why:
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You have published your report about Chichester and Peter Ball in May. You identified key features of the Anglican Church that led to those terrible cases:
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In the course of this hearing, you have looked in more detail at specific issues such as:
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We would add:
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All of those things have played their part and, so long as there is a Church of England, will always play their part. It is the nature of the beast: what makes it good in many ways, also creates the very high risk it poses to children.

Going beyond the reasons why
We need to go beyond the reasons why. No doubt, for devotees of the CofE and history buffs, the causes of this institutional sclerosis are fascinating.
For the victims of abuse, it is stomach churning.
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It is, I suggest, of limited relevance to you. The purpose of analysing why the Church failed is not for you to make recommendations about how it might improve matters by doing this, or that. It is to confirm in your own mind that the Church really has failed for reasons that are inherent to its very nature will not change without external, truly independent, state regulation.
Because all decent people – victims or not, Anglicans or not – simply want all reasonably practicable measures to be taken to make it stop. That is the acid-test we require in our Health & Safety legislation. It is the acid-test that only state-regulation can provide for child-protection. How the Church meets these minimum standards is up to them. Do not, we beg you, get sucked into making specific recommendations about how this byzantine institution goes about meeting those standards: it is up to them and whatever guidance the regulator gives. If they fail, they face the regulatory consequences, like everybody else.
There is nothing special about the CofE. It is no answer to a factory in breach of health & safety regulations that it is special because it a) makes specialist aircraft parts, b) believes this, that and the other, c) and arranges its management structure in a peculiar way. It is irrelevant.
So much of this is institutional special pleading. When the Archbishop of Canterbury objects to our proposal because it would mean radical change, the sub-text is this: We are special, We are too big too fail. The answer is: you are not special and you may be too big to succeed. But if you are saying, we may not be able to meet minimum standards, therefore they pose an existential threat: you are right and so it should be.
You must bend to the needs of the community like everyone else. The Seal of the Sacrament is a good example: we are not interested in a theological debate about the pros and cons of the Seal and its limited exception dating back to 1603. The rule is, you report abuse to the statutory authorities however you learn of it.

Mandatory Reporting

We are in favour of Mandatory Reporting in the form as advocated by the pressure group Mandate Now.

The Regulator
We have always said we envisaged a child-safety regulator as a statutory body akin to the the Health & Safety Executive (‘HSE’). The history of the HSE is a long one: the first of the so-called Factory Acts was in 1803. They were enacted to protect children from exploitation in the cotton mills. Having heard the evidence in this Inquiry we say it is remarkable that in 2019, no such similar body exists for the protection of children from sexual and physical abuse.
Features of this regulator are designed to catch all children looked after by organisations.
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