UNITED KINGDOM
Church Times
March 13, 2018
By Hattie Williams
A SURVIVOR of clerical abuse, Professor Julie Macfarlane, who brought a civil suit against the diocese in which she was abused, has said that an article she wrote in the Church Times “galvanised” the Ecclesiastical Insurance Group (EIG) into meeting to discuss settlement and change their civil-claims policy.
Professor Macfarlane of the University of Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, was giving evidence on Tuesday to the public hearing conducted by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA), in London, on the extent to which the Anglican Church has failed to protect children from sexual abuse.
In an article published in this paper in 2015, she spoke of how she had been abused for more than a year at the age of 16 by the rector of the church she attended at that time, and to whom she had gone for spiritual counselling after experiencing some doubts about her Christian faith (Comment, 11 December 2015).
She wrote: “He told me that God wanted me to kneel and perform oral sex on him. This was the start of more than 12 months of constant sexual abuse by the priest. He continued to make me perform fellatio on him, and masturbated on me, in multiple locations. He waited for me in dark alleyways as I walked home from the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher in the evenings.”
She told no one about the abuse until she was in her 20s, and did not bring her civil claim against the Church, and a subsequent complaint to Sussex Police, until 1999 and 2014 respectively. The rector was not identified in the article, and was referred to in the hearing only as “F12” due to the ongoing police complaint against him.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.