Unedifying Accounts

The latest Anglican safeguarding scandal to come to public attention depresses in the same way any other has, though it carries its own special quality with it, apparently coming close to closing an entire cathedral in an attempt to get rid of one residentiary canon. The current Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North – as redoubtably Anglo-Catholic as his predecessor Julian Henderson was a conservative Evangelical – blames it all on the outmoded structures of the Church, though there do seem to be other factors at play. I raise an eyebrow when anonymous sources complain of the ‘absolute power’ Canon Hindley exercised at the Cathedral – I’ve never met a member of any cathedral staff who felt they had the slightest influence over their colleagues at all – but when you hear that a judge concluded he had assaulted a man, but nothing was done because nobody could be sure the victim was underage, you do gape a bit.

It takes me back a few weeks when my Antipodean regular reader and correspondent Dr Wellington asked me whether I’d come across the older scandal in the Diocese of London, where the one-time diocesan ‘fixer’ and Head of Operations Martin Sargeant had been convicted of fraud. Yes I had, I replied, and my interest was more than it might usually have been because when the miscreant’s name was first reported I’d realised I’d been to school with him. Within the outline of the middle-aged bloke in the pictures I could just about glimpse the teenage boy I remembered from Bournemouth: you didn't believe much of what he told you even then.

Part of Mr Sargeant’s story involved a now-infamous debrief with the Archdeacon of London when the former left his diocesan post in which he delivered what was described as a ‘brain-dump’ of what he claimed to know about London’s clergy. We now know that this was a compendium of gossip and personal bile with very little truth to it, but the Diocese treated it as positive allegations of abusive behaviour that had to be followed up. The typical Church of England habits of secrecy and inefficiency kicked into motion and one result was the suicide of Fr Alan Griffin who spent a year being investigated for crimes that were never made known to him, and which, the coroner who examined his death decided, ‘were supported by no complainant, no witness, and no accuser’.

It struck me that given our current, and completely understandable, safeguarding culture, it’s hard to stop this happening. We are all taught that any allegation must be reported and followed up: it rests with others to decide what is to be done next. What if, as seems to have happened in London, everyone in the chain feels they dare not be the one who says, ‘this is just poisonous gossip and we will take it no further’?

The integrity of the local safeguarding team is presumably crucial. I have had a case which ours regarded as less serious than I did, and it turned out they were right. On the other hand, I know someone against whom an allegation was made many years ago, then withdrawn (in neither case by the supposed victim, who maintained nothing had happened) and, when the priest demanded in a meeting with the bishop and the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser the right to begin the long, difficult process of having the matter expunged from his record, was told by the DSA that as far as she was concerned he was guilty no matter what anyone said, and implied that him being ‘obviously a homosexual’ was proof of paedophilia. The bishop, my informant said, ‘went white’ and insisted on dissociating himself from the remark (I can mention this as all concerned are long gone).

At theological college I once found myself marvelling at the ability of the kitchen to both overcook and undercook rice at the same time, and the CofE’s safeguarding practice seems caught in the same place, at once hopelessly lax and unacceptably hypervigilant. The answer, as so many voices say, is simply to bring the police in whenever any allegation is made, like every other organisation. Why, yet again, should we imagine we’re so special?