Bishop Greg Thompson on Being a Sexual Abuse Survivor and the Threats That Made Him Resign
By Melissa Davey
In February 2014, Greg Thompson returned to Newcastle in New South Wales to serve as bishop of the Anglican diocese, the same place he was abused almost four decades earlier as a teenager. He had spent the previous seven years serving as bishop in the Northern Territory but thought it would be somewhat fitting to finish his working life in Newcastle, near where he grew up in the Upper Hunter and where he first became interested in the ministry. He believed his experiences working with Indigenous people in Arnhem Land and victims of family violence and drug abuse would be useful to the Newcastle diocese, which he wanted to direct towards a stronger focus on social justice and community engagement. That this was the place that he was sexually abused by friends of his family as a child, and by senior figures of the Newcastle Anglican church as a young adult, was something Thompson had disassociated himself from, as many abuse survivors do. He had never spoken of it except to his wife and children. But, in May 2014, shortly into his tenure as bishop, Thompson received a summons to appear before the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. On the list of persons of interest was the name Ian Shevill. When Shevill was the bishop of Newcastle in 1975, he and another senior church figure sexually abused Thompson, who was then just 19. “The royal commission didn’t know that, they didn’t know my background,” Thompson, now 60, told Guardian Australia. “They were simply seeking all materials from the 1950s. But on reading that summons I realised that my personal story was going to be captured in the royal commission’s request for information. “Soon after that a police task force was announced to focus on the diocese of Newcastle. I realised then that my life was not going to be a typical one for a new bishop.” From that point on, Thompson said he faced an unrelenting journey with the royal commission, including helping the commission gather information, telling his own story and dealing with the subsequent harassment from members of his own church. Screws were found in his staff members’ tyres and Thompson was warned by parishioners that he was not safe. His own experience of having being abused was forced to the surface and he refused to shy away from the task of asking tough questions of his church. It resulted in hundreds of abusive messages, including threats, directed towards him. Last week, Thompson announced that it had become too much to bear. He will stand down as bishop in May. “I feel physically and emotionally unwell,” Thompson said. “I think that time and space will be a big factor in feeling stronger and better and more able to manage multiple stressors. I’m not down a cliff. But I’ve certainly realised I can’t keep pushing myself at the edge of it.” The royal commission asked independent data analysts to design and analyse a survey of the 23 Anglican church dioceses in Australia and gather information about complaints of child sexual abuse received between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 2015. They found 1,082 alleged incidents of child sexual abuse among the 1,115 recorded complaints made to 22 Anglican church dioceses. The results underestimate the extent of the abuse, with many victims now dead or facing barriers to coming forward. The results also don’t include complaints of child sexual abuse in all the institutions associated with the church. Though the statistics show the abuse was shocking and endemic, Thompson didn’t realise until he began assisting the commission in its work that he was not the only victim abused within Anglicanism. He believes he was the first within the church to speak publicly without anonymity about it, sharing his story with the royal commission in a public hearing in November. Thompson has paid dearly for it. Despite the royal commission substantiating that Shevill was an abuser and, despite the galling statistics, Thompson has been publicly and personally attacked by members of the church throughout the country. Thompson must have consented to what happened to him, some said. Some of the most difficult attacks came from those who knew him. The same people who have received bread and holy communion from him publicly tried to discredit or question his story privately, writing letters to the royal commission and suggesting that the past should be left alone. “And I thought, ‘What an extraordinary betrayal’,” Thompson said. “They’re not simply trying to undermine me but they are undermining the very things they are supposed to believe in. The church is supposed to be a place of healing and compassion and community. They were betraying that.” Meanwhile, police were made aware of the threats and personal attacks but, as far as Thompson is aware, no action was taken. What the experience has made clear to Thompson is that changing legislation to prevent abuse and to compensate victims is not enough. Education about how abuse occurs and why victims can take decades to come forward is also not enough, he believes. For change to occur and victim-blaming to end, hearts and minds must be changed, he said. It was too confronting for some people to grasp that the same senior church figures who might have offered them comfort and communion may have also been sexually abusing children, he said. So they refused to entertain the thought at all, blaming the victims instead. “Information is only one part of the change process,” he said. “But transformation, the changing of peoples mindsets and attitudes, is a much longer journey. I know I grew up with the idea that you didn’t talk about sexual offending, it wasn’t talked about as sexual abuse. “In our families these things went on and are still going on, and there was never talk about it. So the taboo of that has also been a part of church life. I think one of those attitudes and mindsets at the time was that children would get over this, and that these things belong in the past and should stay in the past. “It is the old taboos which prevented and limited people coming forward.”
Thompson has had to grapple with the thought that his own parents were likely affected by this cover-up and stay-quiet mentality. They died before Thompson could tell them about what he had suffered. “I try not to think about it too hard,” he said. “It does upset you, because the whole abuse experience is also about who was looking after you. It raises lots of questions.” When Thompson was a child his parents were part of the working poor. He and his eight siblings lived in a modest, four-bedroom fibro home in the upper Hunter Valley, where his dad would fly into temper tantrums and his mother would take her problems out on the children. Money was tight. As a young teenager, he was sexually abused by family friends, boarders taken in by his family for extra money. “As a child I always remember climbing a hill near my home and looking out at the hills in my town and thinking, ‘There’s got to be something better’,” he said. “And that thought has propelled me to travel a lot. I’ve travelled much of Australia and been involved in different things. It’s got me into a different thinking space and a wider set of relationships. Hope and faith have been a part of my being driven not to be captive to the harm that had been done to me.” That harm came to Thompson again at the end of his career from both senior and lay members of the church, angered that Thompson dared to hold the Anglican church to account. Thompson says that speaks somewhat to the factions and allegiances that cut across the church. In his evidence to the commission, Thompson said that, within the diocese and across the country, these factions were preventing a common and cohesive response to child sexual abuse from being formed by the church. “Conflicts of interest arise around friendships, where alleged clergy who have offended have been afforded a lot of protection at various levels, either at a committee level or in the local parish,” he told the commission. “People refuse to accept that their loved priest has been an offender.” There are also conflicts around the inclusion of LGBTI people in the church and allowing women to become bishops. As well as being criticised for questioning the church about its response to abuse, Thompson has openly called for a more inclusive church model that respects LGBTI people and that allows women to become bishops. His socially progressive values have seen him draw the ire of more conservative arms of the church, including the Anglican diocese in Sydney, over the past three years. Accumulated, the stressors of uncovering abuse within Anglicanism, facing his own abuse, giving lengthy testimony to the commission, supporting and standing up for victims and survivors, being slandered by his peers and in blog posts, and pushing social reform in the face of conservatism all took its toll. His faith in God has not been shaken. But Thompson says he remains unsure if he believes in the institution of the Anglican church and the ability of some of its most senior leaders to change. While Thompson is not sure what to do next, he says that once his health has recovered and he has spent some time with his wife and newborn grandson, he will find a way to serve the community. “I have a lot to still give,” he said. “I’ll get over this period of stress and strain to feel able to work again in a whatever challenging work comes my way. I’m not ready to put my feet up.” Whatever he does, it is unlikely to be in Newcastle. “Family is elsewhere,” he said. “And it’s not best for me to be around. There’s going to be a new bishop. They need to find their own way of doing things. I think me being around may be difficult for anyone coming into the role. “I’m quite happy to support that person at a distance but I’m certainly not going to get in the way of their leadership, be it a woman or man who replaces me.” Asked if sharing his story with the commission and the public had proven more harmful than healing, Thompson pauses. “Not quite healing. But there’s some validation in it. I think the commission has validated my personal abuses and the commission regards my story as important because it explains how abuse has been a part of the history of the diocese. “I realise that personal experience of abuse has helped me to become highly sympathetic to survivors and their story but also to understand the culture of protection and power.”
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