UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society
Posted: Wed, 16 Mar 2016
A report by Ian Elliott, an expert in child safeguarding, has found “repeated failures” by clergy and bishops in the Church of England to deal with reports by survivors of child abuse.
A single survivor of child sex abuse told “over 40 members of the clergy during the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s” of sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of a senior member of the Church of England, but failed to receive an adequate response – including from people in “very senior positions within the Church” and the office of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
As late as 2014 the survivor made another report of the historic sex abuse and found “the response less than adequate.” The Church offered no “real investigation into his disclosures” and “every question arising from the issue of senior disclosures was entirely ignored from the outset by the bishop he reported to, the Head of Safeguarding.”
The report has been made public after the Church initially released its conclusions alone. David Greenwood, a lawyer specialising in helping child abuse victims claim compensation, said in a press release that the church had “indicated that it does not wish to publish the whole report so the survivor is taking the step of providing the report to the press.”
The report offers a damning verdict on the Church’s response to allegations by the survivor, referred to as “B”.
According to the report, it was “deeply disturbing” that despite B reporting the case to a “large number of people”, some of them claim to have “no memory of the conversations.”
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