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Is church safer for young people now? We don’t think so

by
28 October 2022

As IICSA ends, Julie Macfarlane and Alesha Racine consider abuse in the light of their experience

istock

WE WERE young teenagers living next door to one another in a West Sussex town in the early 1970s. We each attended different local Anglican churches. One of us sang in the choir, and the other attended the youth group. Our parents were friends.

What neither of us knew then was that each of us was living the same nightmare. We were each being sexually abused by trusted authority figures in our churches — one of us by a choirmaster, Dr Michael Walsh (News, 9 September), the other by a cleric, Meirion Griffiths (News, 31 July).

Many, many years later, each of these was convicted and served time for sexual assault. We testified at their criminal trials, brought civil actions against the Church, and eventually received compensation.

As young girls with no sexual knowledge or experience, we told no one that these authority figures, whom our parents taught us to respect, forced themselves on us sexually for years. The abuse was a lengthy, terrifying, isolating descent into the abyss. The fact that we never knew about the other’s ordeal until we reconnected this year says much about taboo, and the hidden nature of abuse.

 

WE WOULD both love to believe that the shocking pervasiveness of abuse by trusted religious leaders in the 1970s is a thing of the past. We would both love to believe that our own children are safer today from sexual predators than we were at their age. After the publication of IICSA’s final report, at the end of seven years of enquiry and evidence-gathering, can we feel hopeful?

The IICSA recommendation for the mandatory reporting of abuse — with no exceptions for religious contexts, such as the confessional — is very welcome, although it is difficult to understand why it has taken so long for so basic a condition for safeguarding young people to be accepted. We welcome, too, the recommendation to remove limitation periods for historical claims.

But will IICSA be enough to end the culture of excuse-making and disbelieving victims so deeply embedded in the culture of the Church? We doubt it.

One reason for our doubt is the way the Church responded once they knew about the men who abused us. After his release, Michael Walsh is once again working with young people as a church organist, and held the position of general secretary of the Guild of Church Musicians, until Lambeth Palace joined the dots and asked him to step down in 2020. Meirion Griffiths, forced to step down from his ministry in the diocese of Perth in 1999, after an initial complaint, simply moved up the road to another church.

Of course we understand the importance of forgiveness, but would make two points. First, forgiveness should not be equated with forgetting, or the removal of limits and safeguards on known abusers. In both these cases, there is evidence that church leaders in the UK and in Australia were kept in the dark about their history.

Second, does anyone in the Church ever think about the impact on victims of seeing their abuser successfully march on with their life after what they did to theirs? Sometimes, we both wonder if the real underlying problem here is that others simply do not care enough about these victims. We appreciate the centrality that IICSA placed on survivors’ voices, but caring must amount to more than just reading our stories.

Without this basic recognition of the overriding importance of the safety and protection of young people — who in 2022 remain just as vulnerable to sexually abusive authoritative figures as they ever were — it is hard to be optimistic about the culture changing. Both of us have also experienced the excruciating push-back by the Church when challenged with legal action (Comment, 11 December 2015). We have both seen how the Church instructs its insurers, Ecclesiastical Insurance.

Many church survivors told IICSA about the aggressively adversarial strategies adopted: technical arguments about limitations, offensive references to victim “consent”, gag clauses, negotiation game-playing, and the use of a widely discredited and unqualified psychiatric “expert”.

In its report on the Anglican Church Report, IICSA recommended the end of consent arguments and NDAs; but we know that the Church has continued to use these. In its Final Report last week, IICSA recommends an end to limitation periods to defeat historical claims. They also make several recommendations about compensation and redress.

But, in order to change the culture, the Anglican Church needs to recognise its continuing complicity in the abuse of children and young people. Still, now, only the bravest and most determined will be able to persevere in their search for any kind of justice.

Our idea of justice was only marginally about compensation, and far more about responsibility-taking and real change. For that, we are still waiting.

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