LONDON (ENGLAND)
Church Times
February 9, 2018
By Andrew Graystone
Andrew Graystone asked abuse victims how the Church could better help them
OVER the past two years, I have come to know a great many abuse victims as friends. Some remain faithful members of their Church. Others, understandably, never want to enter a church or meet a priest again. Some do not wish to revisit their abusive experiences. Others cannot get through an hour of the day or night without reliving their personal horror.
I have wanted the leaders of the Church to take on board some of the insights I have been given into the experience of victims. So I asked a number of people who have been abused within a church context to answer my questions about the ways in which the Church had responded to them. Their verbatim replies are contained in a booklet, Stones Not Bread, which will be presented to all members of the General Synod as they meet this week. Below is an extract from the booklet.
They come from nine different individuals who were abused. Most of them do not know each other, and they answered individually. All of them have been physically or sexually abused in situations where the Church has accepted some responsibility. They represent at least eight otherwise unrelated instances of church abuse. All of them are “recent”, in that they have been dealing with the Church’s safeguarding procedures in the past few months and years, even if in some cases the abuse is non-recent.
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