ENGLAND
Anglican Communion News Service
March 5, 2018
The statutory inquiry investigating institutional responses to child abuse in England and Wales has begun a public hearing into the Church of England’s Diocese of Chichester. The Diocese is being investigated as a case-study in the “Anglican Church” strand of the inquiry’s investigation into the Church of England and the Church in Wales. Today, Senior Counsel for the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Fiona Scolding QC, began the hearing by setting out the structures of the Church of England and a history of cases involving the diocese, from the 1950s onwards.
“A series of allegations came to light from the late 1990s onwards, and then engulfed the diocese in the first decade of the 21st Century,” she told the inquiry. “The role of this hearing is to examine what happened and what it demonstrates about the response of the Church to child sexual abuse.
“It is also to ask about the Church’s ability to learn lessons and implement change from that which it has already largely acknowledged were mistakes. This hearing will also seek to examine how the Church dealt with those who, having been abused as children, came to speak to the Church as adults, to tell their stories, and of the inadequacy of the response by the Church to those disclosures.”
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