13 June 2018 | by Richard Scorer

Wheels of change in tackling clerical sexual abuse still grind too slow 

The Tablet

Professor Alexis Jay, who chairs the IICSA, flanked by panel members Ivor Frank (left) and Drusilla Sharpling
Photo: PA

This year’s annual report from the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC) comes at a time when clerical sex abuse is back in the headlines. On Monday, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, Chile, who has been accused of covering up clerical sexual abuse. The previous week, the Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, was convicted of concealing abuse committed by a priest in the 1970s.
In England and Wales, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA) held a three-week hearing in December last year into abuse scandals at two Benedictine schools, Ampleforth and Downside. Following revelations about Ampleforth, the Charity Commission decided in April to strip the school of responsibility for safeguarding and to impose external oversight. For all the many reports, commissions and papal directives, the clerical sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church shows no sign of abating, nearly 40 years after it first surfaced.

The recent IICSA hearings – in which I represented many of the victims – provide an opportunity for a deeper examination of some of the issues, and a review of the progress the Church has made in its response to the abuse crisis, or the lack of it. Of course, as a monastic order associated with socially elite private schools, the English Benedictine Congregation is not perfectly representative of the Church in England and Wales. But the IICSA hearings nonetheless highlighted some stark realities.
One is that the abuse scandals and the clerical attitudes associated with them cannot simply be dismissed as “historic”. Progress has undoubtedly been made in improving safeguarding, but IICSA also heard of some recent cases, and, perhaps even more worryingly, the hearings revealed disturbing evidence that the attitudes and culture that allowed abuse to fester for so many years still persist in the Catholic Church.
This is significant. As the NCSC annual report confirms, sexual abuse of children, by its very nature, invariably takes a long time to surface: we cannot know exactly how many children and vulnerable adults are currently experiencing abuse in church settings, because many of the victims will not tell us for many years hence. Progress has to be measured not just by the numbers of allegations surfacing at any given moment and by the raw data of safeguarding infrastructure set out in the NCSC report – how many DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks have been processed, how many staff have undergone training and so on – but also has to be measured against the more intangible factor of how much attitudes and culture have changed.
By this yardstick the IICSA transcripts make unhappy reading. A social worker who investigated Downside school in 2010-2012 described the attitude of senior monks to safeguarding as “the worst I have encountered in 35 years”. Police complained of repeated obstruction, and significant records documenting safeguarding concerns about specific monks, previously undisclosed, were discovered in brown envelopes during the police investigation. Within the recent past, suspected sex offenders had been appointed as school governors and trustees, and (inevitably) had had input into safeguarding policies.
A psychologist who interviewed sex offenders among the monks at Ampleforth and who wanted to report her findings to the police was told by the then abbot that her “problem was that she did not believe in Divine Grace”. She recalls him telling her: “I am not having child protection policies in the monastery.” Although Ampleforth claimed to have effective safeguarding policies, a male teacher in his forties who was grooming and then seriously sexually assaulting a teenage girl had repeatedly behaved inappropriately to her in front of staff and students without any safeguarding concerns being raised (the teacher was convicted and imprisoned in March last year).
A former abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation who had sat on the Cumberlege Commission in 2007 had failed to ensure that a serious historic allegation was reported to the police until 2010. The former head of safeguarding for the Clifton Diocese said in her evidence to IICSA that “the Church’s PR machine likes to point out that it has these policies and procedures in place, but in some cases individual bishops and clergy then resist those policies”. A former head of COPCA (the Catholic Office for Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults) complained to IICSA that “there is nothing mandatory and nothing enforceable, there is no accountability with safeguarding in the Catholic Church, it is all on a goodwill basis”. Each of these examples might be explained away as just one person’s unrepresentative behaviour or gripe; taken together they reveal a systemic problem.
None of this is to decry the efforts made over the past decade and a half by many conscientious safeguarding professionals. DBS checking and staff training matter hugely, and have helped to make the Catholic Church a safer space. But without deeper cultural change, a proliferation of Quality Assurance Frameworks can only take the Church so far.
The bureaucracy and language of safeguarding can easily become a kind of managerial voodoo, remote from the realities it is trying to describe. Thickets of policies and procedures can make it difficult for clergy and lay people alike to understand in simple terms precisely what should be done and by whom. Worse still, as the case of the Ampleforth teacher exposed, a narrow focus on box ticking can allow abusers to hide in plain sight.
The lesson of IICSA can be expressed in that old business school adage: culture trumps strategy every time. It is not only structures and protocols that need to be reformed, but hearts and minds. The temptation to cover up abuse for reputational reasons can be particularly acute in religious settings. The Church seeks to be a moral beacon for the world around it, yet clerical sex abuse cases and the scandals surrounding them powerfully undermine this claim. All too often this leads to a cognitive dissonance – a belief that a priest is a good man and couldn’t possibly commit such crimes – or, if the evidence is irrefutable, the offence being put down to a momentary lapse on the part of the perpetrator. A culture of victim blaming is created.
Even where the reality of abuse is recognised, reputational pressures may still discourage external reporting: a problem seriously compounded by safeguarding policies that still sometimes say “should” rather than “must” report abuse to statutory authorities, and leave wriggle room for those who prefer to keep allegations in-house. As a former head of COPCA said to IICSA, the time has come to impose mandatory reporting requirements, backed up by legal sanctions.
If the temptation to cover up abuse can be particularly acute in the Church, so can the temptation to absolve it. The IICSA hearings were replete with instances of clerical abusers being protected from accountability by a distorted concept of forgiveness. Facile injunctions to forgive without action being taken to investigate criminal activity still infect far too much religious thinking about child abuse. It is not enough just to mark this down as muddled thinking.
But a serious reappraisal needs to probe deeper still. Looking at the Catholic Church from the outside, it seems to combine an unhealthy exaltation of the clergy with a serious neglect of their emotional well-being. Much ink has been spilt on the dangers of clericalism and in the hearings I talked about the clerical arrogance that equates the Church with God. Clearly, where priests are minded to abuse, that sense of superiority can shelter them from the reality of their behaviour and instil fear and submission in their victims.
But recognising this is only the start: the battle against clericalism in the Church has to be more than merely rhetorical. Abusive priests are often the product of a culture: it has been obvious for decades that the all-male institutional environment of the seminary can infantilise, and may be a poor preparation for life outside, particularly given the emotionally immature starting point of some seminarians. There have been new guidelines on priestly formation, reforms of the curricula, and an increased emphasis on psychological vetting of candidates for the priesthood. But little has really changed at the fundamental level, and, most problematically, many priests continue to face the terrible choice between the emotional loneliness of celibacy and the secrecy and guilt of illicit relationships.
An even more fundamental issue looms over all of this: the absence of women from the Catholic Church’s power structures. I have never believed in a simplistic or reductive relationship between gender and abuse. But there is now more than enough evidence that women are more likely to report concerns about abuse, and, in any case, greater diversity within clerical power structures would almost certainly counteract the group-think that so often underpins abuse scandals and their cover-up. The Church of England has started down this road. Women priests and bishops are most certainly not a conclusive panacea for abuse, but they will certainly help.
Facing up to all of these issues would entail a profound reappraisal. From the outside looking in, there seems little prospect of that happening. This is why the debate has travelled in the direction of the imposition of external oversight and mandatory reporting. The decision by the Charity Commission to intervene in Ampleforth may be a harbinger of things to come. The good work of safeguarding professionals in the Church should be commended, but in the absence of a more profound process of change I fear we will still be where we are now in a few years’ time.
Richard Scorer is Head of Abuse Law at Slater and Gordon UK and the author of Betrayed: The English Catholic Church and the Sex Abuse Crisis.