UNITED KINGDOM
Church of England
Speech to General Synod July 2013 from the Rt Revd Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Notts, Chair of the Churches National Safeguarding Committee.
“The Commissaries Reports will I suggest be seen as landmarks in the Church of England’s responding to abuse committed by its clergy and other leaders. This can be the pivotal point when we turn from having a default position that is to defend the institution, even at the cost of failing to respond appropriately to those who have been abused, to one where we will listen to the survivor and begin from there.
“The Commissaries exposed serious failures in the Diocese of Chichester but in doing so exposed much wider institutional failings which affect every Diocese. For far too long the institution, and notably those in most senior positions, either disbelieved the stories that survivors told us or believed them but tried to hide the truth away or remove the offender elsewhere vaguely hoping that ‘the problem’ would go away. We can make all the excuses that we like about society being different in previous decades; or our understanding of abuse being so much better. We can note that our policies were different then and we followed those policies. But these take nothing away from the fact that we failed to listen properly; we did not acknowledge the wrong done; and we protected the institution at the expense of the person abused. We cannot do anything other than own up to our failures. We were wrong. Our failures were sin just as much as the perpetrators sinned. By failing to listen or act appropriately we condemned survivors to live with the harm when we should have been assisting them into whatever measure of healing might be possible.
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