NEWS

By: Jonathan West 

Ampleforth and Downside Abbeys are Benedictine monasteries, each with a boarding school attached. Last November and December the IICSA heard harrowing testimony from former pupils of both schools, describing both physical and sexual abuse that they suffered. The dates ranged from the 1950s to the 2000s.

But more sickening even than the accounts of the abuse was the way in which we learned that it was covered up. When one monk, Richard White, was found to have abused, rather than report it, the Abbot of Downside checked with the school solicitor to see if he had to report it. The reply (legally quite correct) was no. White’s crimes weren’t discovered for another 20 years, when the police stumbled across details in school records while conducting an unrelated investigation into abuse by another monk. White was sentenced to five years.

Successive abbots, former abbots and monk-headmasters were required to give evidence to the inquiry, and to a man they struggled to justify what was clearly a well-established and settled policy to keep such matters out of the hands of the police. It is also quite clear that they were intelligent men who knew precisely what they were doing and who knew how to remain just inside the law while conducting the cover-up.
Various lay Catholics also gave evidence, people wo had been employed by the Catholic church to reform its safeguarding and ensure the safety of children in the care of the church. These professionals all in effect said the same thing, that safeguarding in the Roman Catholic Church was essentially unreformable, that it was not reasonable to expect significant improvements to come from voluntary efforts by the church to improve its handling of safeguarding and that any improvements would therefore have to be the result of legal pressure from outside.

Eileen Shearer spoke of the barriers to effective working, which clearly remained by the time she resigned as Director of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA).

“Priority seemed to be given, often, too often, to protecting the institution from open scandal and to dealing with things in-house, a mistrust of the statutory authorities, and there seemed to be a lack of awareness of their own lack of knowledge in a way, so that they were not open to accepting advice or receiving training and development.

There is often reference in the evidence that I have read about the fact that the child protection policies nationally were not mandatory, which was not the intention, I believe, of Lord Nolan, and also that they might draft their own local policies.”

Adrian Child, Eileen Shearer’s successor as head of COPCA and its successor the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service (CSAS) was even stronger.

“If I could just, I suppose, add to that that I think the Catholic Church has had two excellent opportunities, through Nolan and Cumberlege, to get safeguarding right on a kind of, as I said, goodwill, internal basis, and whilst I think there’s been a huge amount of effort by a lot of people, a lot of very good people, within the church, and I include some bishops and religious leaders in that, they haven’t got it right, and that’s in a 15-year period. So I don’t see any value in tinkering around the edges and saying, “Here you are. Here is a third opportunity. Go away and sort this out yourself”, […] I think there needs to be accountability and some kind of mandatory enforcement.”

Dr James Whitehead, the outgoing headmaster of Downside School made a similar point

“Accountability is the fundamental problem. The members of the monastic community are not accountable unless they commit a criminal offence, obviously. But they are not accountable to anybody. They can go back and retreat to the abbey and, you know, after this, they will go back and enjoy their Christmas celebrations and not worry, fundamentally, about the impact, necessarily. There will be some bad PR for a while, potentially, but their livelihoods are never going to be at stake. They are going to go back and live in their grade I or grade II listed building and enjoy that for the future. So the issue of accountability is a real one.
I think the points that have been made in terms of the mandatory reporting I think are good ones, and I think the testimony that was given yesterday, arguing perhaps for a body which oversees more accountability within this area, I think I would fully support.”

Jane Dziadulewicz, former safeguarding co-ordinator for the diocese of Clifton raised the same point and made the same recommendation.

“I think there is a huge problem around accountability, and this problem — the problem within the Catholic Church has been going on for years. I think, unless a way can be found to ensure that bishops and religious leaders have no choice but to apply policies and procedures, we will continue to have problems in managing individuals accused of abuse and in keeping children safe within the Catholic Church.

“I think perhaps there needs to be some kind of body that holds the church accountable, which could result in financial fines or criminal sanctions if these policies and procedures aren’t applied, in the similar way by — across other agencies. There is just nothing. The church ultimately doesn’t have to do these things if it doesn’t want to.
“Once this inquiry is over, if nothing happens as a result of this inquiry, the church can continue in the way it’s continued for years, and so people can — will be able to access the services that the church has offered to children and families for years and the same problems will arise where offenders will be able to target children and abuse again.”

These opinions are not coming from enemies of the church. They are from people who have genuinely tried to reform the church’s safeguarding policies and culture, and who have concluded that reform from within is impossible. They were there, they have seen the task, and have done their best but have failed.

The inquiry has therefore heard overwhelming evidence that we have an institution here where those in charge knew perfectly well how to report abuse to the police, but made a deliberate decision not to, instead choosing over a period of decades to harbour known criminals in their midst.
The legal representatives of the abuser survivors were unanimous in calling for the inquiry to recognise the need for “mandatory reporting”, a legal duty on staff in institutions caring for children to report reasonable suspicions of abuse.

It is hard to imagine any measure short of legal compulsion under threat of substantial criminal penalties that will change the behaviour of those who know how to report abuse but who instead carefully skirt just inside the law to keep the abuse covered up. The monks giving evidence were quite clear that had a mandatory reporting law existed they would have obeyed it and reported the abuse.

But the amazing thing is that none of these quotes have made it into the inquiry report. The past misdeeds of the monks of Ampleforth and Downside are rehearsed in great detail, and the fact that significant problems remain at both schools is mentioned. But the report doesn’t mention anywhere that backsliding is possible and has been specifically warned against by expert witnesses who have tried to get safeguarding to work within the church. Instead the inquiry was full of praise for individuals such that the outgoing and next headmasters of Downside who appear determined to improve things.

The inquiry report says that it is holding off making recommendations until it has completed the Roman Catholic investigation. On the surface that is fair enough, but the lack of any mention of the risk of backsliding combined with the praise for individuals working to improve things makes me wonder whether the inquiry is going to argue against the need for mandatory reporting.

Such a course of action would be disastrous. Reliance on the presence of good people doing the right thing fails as soon as those good people (when all the publicity has died down) are blocked from getting on with the job and resign in frustration. Not having mandatory reporting essentially tells places like Ampleforth and Downside that what they did was OK legally and in due course they can go back to covering up abuse in time-honoured fashion. Do we really want that?

Jonathan West is a core participant in the IICSA investigation into the Roman Catholic Church.

In an Update Statement published on 27  November 2015, the chair of the Inquiry made the following statement.

Alongside these twelve investigations that form the first phase of the Public Hearings Project, we plan to hold a series of expert hearings into questions of public policy which will feed into the recommendations we make. We propose to start, in the first half of 2016, with an expert hearing into the risks and benefits of mandatory reporting. We will also hold a hearing to explore the balance which must be struck between encouraging the reporting of child sexual abuse and protecting the rights of the accused.

Today a letter has been sent by five lawyers acting for Core Participant abusees, to Professor Jay Chair setting out why this vitally important ‘seminar’ is needed at the earliest opportunity:

The letter is here in full 

That about sums it up, its excellent.

The Lawyers :  Richard Scorer (Slater Gordon); Kim Harrison (Slater Gordon), David Greenwood (Switalskis) David Enright (Howe & Co), Alan Collins (Hugh James)

Mandate Now response to Government Mandatory Reporting consultation outcome:

‘Reporting and Acting on Child Abuse and Neglect: ’

The Government’s decision to reject mandatory reporting in institutional settings in favour of the current discretionary reporting system has little to do with transforming the culture of child protection in Regulated Activities and everything to do Government thinking it is minimising cost.  Government’s key objective is to deliver the smallest possible increase in child protection referrals from professionals in schools, healthcare, sports, scouts, faith groups and similar, to the Local Authority for independent triage assessment.

Empirical research reveals that mandatory reporting by Regulated Activities more than doubles referrals from these settings to the Local Authority. In turn this more than doubles the number of children placed into safety who might otherwise remain at risk of harm. The government has chosen to ignore research and continue the status quo with minor changes to inter-agency working downstream of referrals. The consultation’s proposal for “duty to act” (also rejected in the consultation report) was a duty to take some unspecified “appropriate action” in response to a child concern, enforceable through criminal sanction should it be later decided that whatever action taken was not “appropriate.” The only surprise about government’s rejection of its own proposal is that as many as a quarter of respondents favoured it, including the NSPCC.

The consultation bore little or no resemblance to the design of Amendment 43 tabled by Baroness Walmsley in the Serious Crimes Bill in 2014 which prompted government to consult. The consultation was poorly assembled, omitted key research and was launched on the last day of parliament 21/7/16 having been signed off by Karen Bradey MP (Junior Minister Home Office) on 12/10/15. Government resistance to effective child protection in Regulated Activities is significant.

The main concerns intended to be addressed by well designed mandatory reporting legislation are twofold.

• To increase the number of children placed into safety. In 2015 the Children’s Commissioner reported the child abuse discovery rate in England was just 1 in 8 cases (12.5%).
• Under reporting of child abuse by organisations is significant as data has revealed. These include churches, schools, sports clubs and others.  This failure contributed to the launch of IICSA.

Improvements in training as proposed by government will not affect those who know how to report abuse but choose not to, and improvements in inter-agency working will not help the many children who have not come to the attention of any of the agencies.

The consultation report has not listed the evidence for or against mandatory reporting, it has merely stated the proportion respondents supporting or opposing the government’s poorly assembled proposals.

The government’s claim that mandatory reporting would discourage children from disclosing abuse “if they know that it will result in a record of their contact being made” is unfounded and no supporting evidence has been offered for this contention. Children disclose abuse because they want action to be taken.

With the continuation of the existing system, staff who report suspected abuse will remain whistleblowers without legal immunity.  Key Australian research, which was inexplicably omitted from the consultation documents published by the Home Office on 21st July 2016, shows the absence of mandatory reporting with legal immunity for staff contributes to suspected abuse being under-reported by more than 50%.

Tom Perry, the founder of Mandate Now says:  “This proposal does nothing to change the culture of child protection in these critically important settings. It’s the continuation of a failing system. We challenge the Department of Education and the Home Office to name a single jurisdiction where this model functions effectively and to provide the empirical evidence that demonstrates its evidence. By contrast some form of mandatory reporting in institutional settings operates in the majority of countries on all four continents, and research supports it.”

“The children attending cadets, football, faith settings, and schools such as Stony Dean School Amersham (2003), Headlands School Bridlington (2009), Gate House School Milton Keynes (2009), Hillside First School in Weston Super Mare (2011), Southbank International School (2015) would have been far safer had mandatory reporting existed because it delivers responsibility and accountability and provides legal immunity for reporters.”

“It’s time Government put children first and accepted that mandatory reporting is a vital component of a functioning child protection system.“

In a Post Script  – Mandate Now was interviewed on BBC3CR about the outcome. Robert Perrone had been mistakenly briefed about our MR objectives but it became clearer very quickly. The Government announcement chimes with this posting from 8/1/15 – Successive Governments flee Mandatory Reporting on the mistaken grounds of cost.

Mandate Now has reviewed the Church of England’s safeguarding policy document ‘Protecting All God’s Children’ 4^th Edition (2010) and its recently replaced Chapter 7 under the new heading – ‘Responding to, assessing and managing safeguarding concerns or allegations against church officers’. The content is a thicket of inconsistent discretionary ‘guidance’ which carries with it the risk of confusion, mistake and non-compliance.

Our review is available here.

Mandate Now is a pressure group that leads the agenda for the introduction of law that requires staff who have responsibility for children, and vulnerable adults, in Regulated Activities[1] to report known and suspected abuse to the Local Authority. We have reviewed policies for other Regulated Activities and organisations including The Football Association,  Stoke Mandeville (Lampard Review), and the BBC (Dame Janet Smith Review).

The challenge presented to anyone tasked with delivering safeguarding in the Church of England is the sheer volume of its ‘guidance’, and that clear and readily comprehensible procedures (insofar as they exist at all) are hidden like needles in a haystack. It does little to establish who is responsible for doing what and when.

The General Synod was told in February that it has two difficult years of reckoning as it faces close scrutiny of its record of handling child abuse, with 3,300 reports of alleged sexual abuse in 2016 alone. The current child protection policy does not give much cause for hope that children are safe in the Church or that where incidents occur they will correctly and safely be dealt with by the responsible persons both within and outside of the Church.

The few clear policies and commitments that exist are scattered piecemeal throughout the document, and there are statements in different places on the same subject that contradict each other. Some of the ‘statutory guidance’ documents that the policy relies upon are out of date, hyperlinks are broken; the names of bodies such as Independent Safeguarding Authority are out of date. There is no clear overarching commitment to refer any child protection issues that may arise to a completely independent body outside of the Church. At various places it appears that the Church’s Insurers, Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, may have had some involvement in formulating policy – which for obvious reasons of conflict of interest ought not to be allowed. It takes hours of reading to discern the flaws and yet the National Safeguarding Team promises yet more guidance is on the way.

If the document were rewritten deleting everything except for specific procedures to be followed by defined

persons within the Church (including the necessary definitions to support those procedures, and all gathered into one place) it is likely the page count could be reduced by more than 80%,  and thus produce an infinitely more workable and thus safer, policy document. Any retained weaknesses would then become far more easily identifiable.

Below are some of the shortcomings we found when reviewing the policy that the Church of England has produced principally for dioceses and Diocesan Safeguarding Officers (DSO’s):

Chapter 7 of ‘All God’s Children’ titled ‘managing allegations against church officers’ has been replaced by ‘responding to, assessing and managing concerns or allegations against church officers practice guidance (2017)’. Confusingly, both are available on the CofE website.

1. The document consists of unenforceable ‘guidance’ that dioceses ‘must have regard to.’ Having had regard to it, dioceses can use it in whole, in part, or not at all. It’s nothing more than discretionary.
2. Clear procedures, insofar as they exist, are also discretionary. Little reliance can be placed on any part of the policy.
3. CofE suggests a child protection referral ‘should’ be made to the Local Authority Designated Officer (“LADO”)/statutory authorities (“SA”) ‘if’ the threshold of ‘harm or significant harm’ is met. To establish this threshold some form of investigation is required. But investigation is the function of the statutory agencies not the Church. Coincidentally the ‘harm test’ is used by Local Authorities and courts to establish compulsory intervention. Of necessity the threshold for referral used by CofE needs to be lower than that of the statutory agencies which have the investigatory powers to establish ‘harm.’ If suspicions on reasonable grounds are not referred, many cases, which if investigated might meet the harm test threshold, will never be reported.
4. ‘Statutory guidance’ that underpins safeguarding in Regulated Activities is weak. The act of making a referral to the LADO / SA is entirely discretionary for those working in Regulated Activities. Under-reporting of concerns is a well researched occurrence and has contributed to the establishment of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse to which the church is giving evidence w/c 5/3/18.
5. The combination of the CofE using ‘harm or significant harm’ test and the home nations (excluding Northern Ireland) not being mandatory reporting jurisdictions, unlike 86% of Europe, means the Church operates ‘conditional discretionary reporting of known or suspected abuse.’ The Church has a long history of failing to report such concerns, with dire consequences for children involved.
6. The role of ‘Core Groups’ appears to be an exercise in ‘mission creep’. Their interference in an incident is a real possibility for the reasons we state in our review. There is an absence of expertise and independence in the establishment of these ‘scratch teams’.
7. The influence of the frequently mentioned, but technically independent Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, in Church child protection must be questioned. Paragraph 4.1(2) p.146 gives rise to cause for concern.
8. Some of the ‘statutory guidance’ referenced in the policy is out of date, superseded or defunct in a safety critical document that is meant to protect children in the Church.
9. The Independent Safeguarding Authority became the Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) in 2012 when the modus operandi of DBS changed as a result of legislation. There is no sign in this document that these changes have been accounted for.
10. Insofar as clear procedures exist, this document succeeds in concealing them.
11. There are multiple broken hyperlinks which reveal a lack of attention to detail.
12. Above all, there is no clear overarching commitment to refer any child protection issues that may arise to a completely independent body outside of the Church. This is the most important entitlement that a child can have.

Users of the policies have to negotiate a blizzard of CofE ‘guidance’ documentation.  Its slipshod assembly is incompatible with a safety critical culture the church claims exists in the Regulated Activity. The church is gripped by the undemanding requirements of ‘statutory guidance’ which cannot and does not provide a credible foundation for functioning child protection in Regulated Activities. ‘Statutory guidance’ is just that, ‘guidance’ and it’s discretionary. The church could deliver far more effective child protection if it was minded to, but there is no visible attempt to do so. The policy uses  great many words to deliver very little.

We have said in the review that we would like to see the church undertake to mandate staff to report known and suspected abuse on reasonable grounds, to the DSO and thereafter the LADO / children’s services for independent assessment. However there is no reason to expect the C of E will be any more capable of reforming itself to achieve this than the Roman Catholic Church, whose complete inability to implement and enforce measures was clearly shown during the November/December hearings into abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. We have every reason to expect the failure of Regulated Activities to refer concerns to the Local Authority / statutory authorities will become a recurring theme in the public hearings across several strands of the Inquiry’s investigations.

The remedy in each case is the same. If an institution is unwilling or unable to organise itself from within to implement effective safeguarding measures, then compulsion will have to be applied from without to achieve it via the introduction of well-designed Mandatory Reporting for Regulated Activities. Mandatory Reporting supports staff who have a concern. It also provides them with legal immunity, while failure to report carries criminal sanction. Such arrangements operate in the majority of countries on all four continents including 86% of European jurisdictions. We proposed draft MR legislation in our submission to the Government consultation announced on 28/10/14 but more than three years later, government has yet to provide the outcome.

It has taken the church years to reach this disordered safeguarding state. The National Safeguarding Team includes :

CofE safeguarding is under the stewardship of the Bishop of Bath and Wells Peter Hancock who has been in post since 26/1/16 but who has achieved little to effect any improvement. We wrote about an unfortunate development he feels unable to address in public :

Bishop of Bath + Wells Faces a Morton’s Fork over MR. CofE Imagineers Attempt to Conceal ‘U’ Turn

Why is this concerning? Recently Mandate Now had a twitter exchange with the Rev Tiffer Robinson, a member of synod. He is under a mistaken belief that mandated reporting of known and suspected abuse now exists in the church. You can read the exchanges here: ‘CofE Beyond Confused with Safeguarding. Welby Allegedly Claimed #MR exists in the Church. Had the Rev Robinson understood the safeguarding arrangements for his Regulated instead of just believing, he’s Rector in four Suffolk parishes, he would never have made the claim. How many members of the clergy are operating under this falsity?

It begs the following questions :

• From where did Archbishop Welby get this mistaken information?
• On what occasion/s has he misinformed the clergy that CofE has mandated reporting?
• Why has neither the National Safeguarding Team nor  safeguarding training corrected this misunderstanding?

No law exists that requires staff working in Regulated Activities to report known or suspected abuse. This was finally admitted by Government on 21/7/16 (last day of Parliament) when it published the consultation ‘Reporting and Acting on Child Abuse and Neglect‘ :

Click to expand

 [1] Regulated Activities are defined in the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 SCHEDULE 4  Part 1.  These include employment such as healthcare, sport, education, scouts, and faith groups.

Data is critically important for assessing a project’s direction of travel, effectiveness, achievements, scope for improvement and much else besides.

Mandate Now decided to look at the work of the The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia and compare data from it to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales.

Mandate Now provides no commentary to accompany the data.

The .pdf can be downloaded here

We hope you find this useful.

The consultation clock finally stopped when Government foot draggers released the pre-designed outcome to the consultation on 5/3/18.

Government retains a white knuckle grip on the failing status quo.

The Government acceded to a public consultation on Mandatory Reporting on 28.10.14. 

Children are being avoidably left in abusive settings as empirical research clearly reveals, because Government is out of step with the majority of countries on all four continents.