UNITED KINGDOM
The Tablet
24 July 2014 by Ruth Gledhill
The Catholic Church is to attempt to rebuild relations with sex abuse survivors, who pulled out of talks with the Church when the Church contested an abuse case from the Portsmouth diocese as far as the Court of Appeal. In an attempt to heal divisions, the Church in England and Wales will next year launch a new national advisory board involving victims a well as psychologists and other professionals.
In 2011 survivors groups including the National Association for People Abused in Childhood and the Survivors Trust abandoned their dialogue with the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service (CSAS) and National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC). They acted in protest at Portsmouth Diocese’s decision to appeal a High Court judgment that made the diocese vicariously liable for abuse by its priests.
The case concerned alleged abuse by Fr Wilfred Baldwin in the 1970s at a care home then run by nuns of Our Lady of Charity. The diocese denied the abuse took place and took the case right up to the Court of Appeal, which ruled in 2012 that it was liable to pay compensation for both this case and alleged beatings inflicted by a nun.
The new advisory group, disclosed in CSAS’s annual report published last Thursday, represents its first significant attempt to make a fresh start. The report also reveals the administrative difficulties caused by the Coalition Government’s decision in 2012 to merge the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority to form the Disclosure and Barring Service. Because of the extra time it now takes to complete checks on parish safeguarding representatives, there has been a rise in the number of parishes without them: up from 88 in 2012 to 126 in 2013, an increase of 1 per cent in terms of all parishes.
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