THE “atmosphere of blame and guilt” that has followed publication of the Makin Review is creating a culture of fear that encourages cover-up, the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, warned this week.
He spoke of “real fear in the local church” among clergy and parish safeguarding officers (PSOs), who needed reassurance about their practice, and of the importance of creating a “no-blame atmosphere, where we are asking not who but why, where we are all looking to improve in an atmosphere where we won’t be hung out to dry.
“I regret this atmosphere of blame and guilt that has followed Makin and is being stirred up by all sorts of people including some of my colleagues, because it creates a culture of fear, and and a culture of fear encourages cover-up,” he said on Tuesday. “Whereas, for good safeguarding, you need a no-blame culture.
“There is no doubt at all that clergy are really feeling under pressure, and many of them are in touch with our safeguarding team wanting to ensure they follow due process, wanting reassurance, just now very frightened in this area — and PSOs also.”
He spoke of meeting with a priest who had recently begun ministry in a parish that was “in a mess safeguarding-wise,” and was doing a “fantastic job of turning it around”, but was struggling to find a PSO. “He is feeling personally extremely vulnerable, and a great deal of what I had to say to him was about trying to reassure him, but he really is feeling that he will be in trouble, and be disciplined, because he can’t find a PSO, because it is taking time to get up to speed with dashboards and hubs. There is a real fear in the local church.”
The diocese of Blackburn held three listening sessions for clergy last week, in the light of the Makin review. “I was really taken aback by the strength of emotion,” Bishop North said. “A lot of sadness at letting down survivors, a lot of disappointment at ‘Here we are again’, a lot of anger at the Church nationally, but then a great deal of fear about their own practice. I just don’t think fear and guilt and blame fosters the right atmosphere for safeguarding; I think it makes us a less safe Church.”
Actively covering up abuse must be a disciplinary matter, he said. But a distinction should be drawn between those who “refuse to change or have actively covered up or have abused”, and those who had made a mistake.
“Where there are people who either make mistakes in process, or who don’t follow up properly, that’s educational, and if they are living in fear of heavy disciplinary action, they won’t admit to their problems,” he said. “We need an atmosphere in which people are willing to come forward and ring the DSA [diocesan safeguarding adviser] and say ‘I think I have mucked this up’ and the DSA can do some education work.”
Speaking on Sunday on Radio 4 this week, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, said that “brilliant work” was being done on safeguarding at parish level. “It distresses me that parish safeguarding teams’ morale is completely shot to pieces by this.”
On the recommendation, set out in the Jay review, for safeguarding to be transferred to independent bodies (News, 23 February), Bishop North said that, having once argued for “complete independence”, he remained convinced of the need for “independence of scrutiny”. One of the things he heard regularly from survivors was that it was “a nightmare trying to make a complaint to a body that has abused you”. But, drawing on conversations with DSAs, he had reservations about independence of operation: “I think the risk is that we see ourselves as outsourcing our own safeguarding responsibility.”
The Jay review, published in February, reported hearing from many PSOs that “their role felt onerous and that they were ill-equipped to manage the role”. One cause was “the wide range of duties they were expected to carry out”.
On Tuesday, Bishop North said that he had seen in the past ten years “enormous changes around the culture that people are trying to set and their understanding of safeguarding culture as opposed to process”, which he attributed to a new generation of clergy. “They are bringing positive attitudes towards safeguarding.” The feedback he had heard from clergy was that dashboards and hubs were “difficult to set up”, but, “once you are up and running, they make things much easier and much more reassuring”.
He recognised, however, the challenge of recruiting PSOs in some areas, and said that dioceses needed to be part of the solution. It might be necessary to pay people to act as PSOs for a range of urban parishes, he said.
On Tuesday, it was announced that the Survivors Voices group was launching an independent publishing arm, Survivors Voices Press, to “amplify the voice of survivors, promote understanding of trauma, and encourage ally-ship with abuse survivors”.
The group’s co-founder, Jane Chevous, said: “There’s a lot of concern about legal issues if you name your abuser, and there’s a certain niche version of survivor stories that is acceptable, the ‘shock horror’ or ‘tragic but brave’ stories. But anything else, that perhaps tries to be more holistic, is not responded to favourably, and certainly people have had their publications refused because it’s about abuse.”
The first in a series of publications by survivor authors will be launched tomorrow. They are: The Reality of Rape by Jenny Cooke and Poppy in Pieces by Sue Atkinson.
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