LONDON (ENGLAND)
Church Times
July 3, 2019
By Hattie Williams
A CLERIC who was convicted of possessing 8000 indecent images of children should be able to minister again because he was “penitent” at the time of his arrest, was probably “lured” into downloading the images, and would not have carried out the abuse itself, the Bishop of Chester, Dr Peter Forster, has maintained.
The cleric, Ian Hughes, was found guilty in 2014 of possessing 8200 indecent images of children — 800 of the “worst kind” — and sentenced to a 12-month custodial sentence (News, 31 January 2014).
In oral evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), on Wednesday, Dr Forster confirmed that he had written to the tribunal judge of the case, Sir Andrew McFarlane, to persuade him to go against guidelines of the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM), which stated that a lifelong ban be automatically imposed after a conviction of child abuse.
“They are guidelines, they have to be interpreted,” Dr Forster said. “I felt that in [Mr Hughes’s] case — given his relative youth, the fact that he was entirely penitent from the outset as to what had happened, and [that] his previous record of ministry was excellent — it was worth raising the possibility of a 20-year ban.
“The problem is that once you impose a lifetime ban there is no way to reverse it. . . if for 20 years he had lived out the penitence.”
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