Church puts abuse survivors at heart of safeguarding as report discloses 10 years of data

The Tablet
July 24, 2014

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/994/0/church-builds-bridges-with-abuse-survivors

The Catholic Church is to attempt to rebuild relations with sex abuse survivors, who pulled out of talks with the Church when the Church contested an abuse case from the Portsmouth diocese as far as the Court of Appeal. In an attempt to heal divisions, the Church in England and Wales will next year launch a new national advisory board involving victims a well as psychologists and other professionals.

In 2011 survivors groups including the National Association for People Abused in Childhood and the Survivors Trust abandoned their dialogue with the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service (CSAS) and National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC). They acted in protest at Portsmouth Diocese’s decision to appeal a High Court judgment that made the diocese vicariously liable for abuse by its priests.

The case concerned alleged abuse by Fr Wilfred Baldwin in the 1970s at a care home then run by nuns of Our Lady of Charity. The diocese denied the abuse took place and took the case right up to the Court of Appeal, which ruled in 2012 that it was liable to pay compensation for both this case and alleged beatings inflicted by a nun.

The new advisory group, disclosed in CSAS’s annual report published last Thursday, represents its first significant attempt to make a fresh start. The report also reveals the administrative difficulties caused by the Coalition Government’s decision in 2012 to merge the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority to form the Disclosure and Barring Service. Because of the extra time it now takes to complete checks on parish safeguarding representatives, there has been a rise in the number of parishes without them: up from 88 in 2012 to 126 in 2013, an increase of 1 per cent in terms of all parishes.

The representatives are volunteers who train people in the parish on working with children, and who are also points of contact on allegations of abuse.

The report discloses details of a pilot project in the Diocese of Hallam on working with victims and survivors that may go national. There had been fears that encouraging people to speak out would result in overwhelming numbers of referrals and an overload of complaints about clergy or demands for compensation, but this did not happen, the report says.

Data collection methods are to be improved with a new national computerised system capable of recording statistics on details such as age and sex of victims and the age, sex and ordination year of alleged abusers. Increasing numbers of priests have been laicised, with numbers up to 51 since 2001, and while child abuse allegations increased from 59 in 2012 to 81 in 2013, they still fell short of the 92 allegations made in 2010. CSAS will next February move from Birmingham to the bishops’ conference headquarters in Eccleston Square in London. The report includes a review of 10 years of data collection from 22 dioceses and 188 religious congregations. From 2003 to 2012, 598 allegations of abuse were reported to the statutory authorities by dioceses and religious congregations and of these, 465, or 77 per cent were allegations of sexual abuse. Of the allegations, 487 arose from diocesan and 111 from religious contexts. By far the greatest number of historical allegations reported after 2003 referred to incidents dating from the 1970s. Danny Sullivan, chairman of the NCSC, writes in a blog for The Tablet online: “The risk of abuse is never going to go away. Paedophiles have at least four victims on average. The protection of children, young people and vulnerable adults must remain at the heart of our ministry in the family life of the Church.”