Victims of the Clergy Discipline Measure
- Roy Catchpole
- Jul 13, 2020
- 14 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2020
“Protecting All God’s Children”
But the Church is not a safe place for all.
The church has become a Hell-Trap for the falsely accused!
"Protecting all God's children".
The policy for safeguarding adults in the Church of England
"To address the whole culture of silence in the church is vital," writes the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in the Church of England Newspaper, “"It is a form of abuse." he adds.
Thus the Church of England's leader appears to show himself mindful of his organisation’s past reluctance to respond to allegations of child sexual abuse. Its failure to protect the vulnerable from predators. Those who abuse their sacred positions of authority. In order to ensure that it can never happen again, and by way of an attempt to right a few heinous wrongs, the church has put in place what it claims are stringent preventative measures.
The Archbishop writes.
“We are here to go back to first principles, which is to let Jesus be heard through us. That means being compassionate and attentive to those who have been abused and sinned against. It means being far more attentive to their pastoral care and the establishment of ways in which they can feel safe to tell their story and be listened to,”
Warming to the subject, he continues,
“We have to be responsible for ensuring the Church is a place safe for all.
We cannot go on keeping them from Jesus”
It has been said by many, many times before,
‘Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." (Luke 18:16).
Says Jesus of Nazareth in Luke's Gospel chapter 18 and verse 16.
But Jesus went on to warn them, saying to His disciples,
“It is inevitable that stumbling blocks will come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. [or to offend against one of these little ones]" (Luke 17:2)
All of which is of course noble, right, and just.
But what of those who are falsely accused of a sexual crime – the most detestable kind of crime on the books?
Should they be kept from Jesus? Should they be denied a thousand years of refined Christianised justice?
Contemporary changes in legislation combined with a certain media obsession have had a profound effect on prevailing practice in the courts and in institutional attitudes across the board.
Since no corroborative evidence is needed now for prosecution of historical sexual abuse, - yes, you read that right – no corroborative evidence, lust the word of one person against another - the verdict left to the jury is to take their best guess on the word of the accuser versus that of the accused alone.
This is incredibly dangerous behaviour. Especially in a legal and political context in which the mantra is 'always believe the accuser' (aka 'victim'). Likewise there is an ‘always believe the victim’ attitude also in the way the church proceeds, as we have already tragically seen in the case of the maligned and prejudged innocent Bishop George Bell.
A Worrying Ethos.
Nor is this trend to always believe the accuser operative only in cases of sexual abuse. In my experience, this whole ethos is affecting the way in which some of the ecclesiastical hierarchy appear to treat ALL accusers. They either unconditionally believe them, or, when their false allegations are shown to be what they are - outright lies - the accuser is gently spoken to, and the one who has been lied against - the REAL victim - is the one who is punished! Not only is the liar is not offered advice regarding truth-telling by his episcopal line manager, but is allowed to go on their way and continue in their allegedly 'holy' work. Meanwhile the victim is left to suffer the ongoing negative consequences of the operation of this cabal. No wonder the churches are haemorrhaging membership!
The Anonymous Whispering Grass.
directed the head of the National Crime Agency Lynn Owens.
At the same time the accuser is legally assured of anonymity for life, which is a convenient way of avoiding the consequences of your lies if you’ve made it all up.
Motivations.
The possibility - nay, likelihood of generous compensation is an undoubted incentive for false accusation. Other motives can be primordial revenge, or psychological causes such as false memory, attention-seeking or other mental illness, such as, in the case of my false accuser, serious confabulation involving periodic five-senses hallucinations! She was someone who sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches things that are not there, do not exist, and never happened. An unusual condition, and one extremely difficult to demonstrate in the non-academic nor expert setting of an everyday Crown court setting. In my case this was finally stated in open court, that my accuser had been confabulating, which led directly to all her charges against me being withdrawn by the prosecution. It was a moment of great joy for me and my family and an incredible achievement for my defence team. I had been looking down the barrel of up to 11 years imprisonment had I been found guilty.
But it was to be a joy that would soon dissipate in the harsh glare of the Church of England's national Safeguarding Policy.
Risk Assessment
The Church of England safeguarding authority requires a risk assessment to be carried out and a safety agreement to be implemented for all those accused (guilty, or not, completely exonerated and wrongly prosecuted or not) of sexual abuse. This ecclesiastical trial is required, not only for those found guilty of abuse, or those who got off on a technicality, or for whom No Further Action could be taken by the police because of insufficient evidence, but also for those against whom it has been proven and admitted by the Crown that they were wrongly charged and wrongly dragged through the courts, having had their reputations and mental and physical health destroyed in the process. No help for the innocent here, then. No return to the familial arms of the Church of England for these children to Jesus.
The only exception to this harsh and unjust procedure is, according to the safe-guarder's rules, "If the allegation is malicious or unfounded." Well yes, I know. What was the allegation against me if not 'unfounded'? According to the Crown, it was. I would not describe the allegation of sexual assault as intentionally 'malicious', [my accuser was seriously confabulating and therefore probably lacked malicious motive] but it was certainly unfounded, as Judge Thomas declared to the assembled court.
So is it unreasonable for me to ask, "Why should a risk assessment and safety agreement be required of me, an innocent man?" And why should I continue to be deprived of my life's work and achievements, powers and honour in the church and its Christian community?
I have a completely clean Enhanced DBS. I am completely free to work with children and vulnerable adults - as I had always been up until the false allegation was made against me. Since my exoneration by the court, my freedom to work with children and vulnerable adults has been restored to me...
About the DBS
The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) helps employers make safer recruitment decisions and prevent unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups, including children. It replaces the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). Documents are below. The official website is https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-barring-service
How to Check DBS Clearances on the Online Update Service [Jun 2015]
Online DBS Application Flowchart [Aug 2017] The process explained for users in getting their DBS completed
... and so, I have to ask that question, and it comes something like this...
"Why should I continue to be deprived of my life's work and achievements, powers and honour in the church and its Christian community/ Why am I being condemned to experience what amounts to violent domestic abuse [the church is my family] by the church's bishops, clergy and safeguarding people?"
Prejudice, Classism...
Usually, if the allegation has gone to the police in the absence of sufficient evidence to bring a charge, which it will often do, it can only be dropped if there is deemed to be ‘insufficient evidence’ after a thorough investigation by the police.
But as Sir Cliff Richard has discovered, ‘insufficient evidence’ is not a judgement of innocence. It is not like,
"We have wrongly prosecuted you."
Mud sticks - even on the entirely innocent against whom there has been NO evidence, not INSUFFICIENT evidence.
While the Crown Prosecution Service may determine there is no case to answer, (in my case an admission that there is NO EVIDENCE and an apology is offered to me by the prosecution in open court), the Church of England National Safeguarding Team's policy appears to work both on the assumption that not only ‘insufficient evidence’ is enough to require a risk assessment and safety agreement, but also in my case, where there is ‘no evidence whatsoever’. Am I wrong to describe this procedure as an inner group of power-holders choosing to wear a blindfold?
All I can guess it that in the absence of evidence, there must be the presence of something else.
I wonder what that might be.
God forbid! Might it be, perhaps, the presence of sufficient prejudice to force a process of both risk assessment and safety agreement against an innocent priest?
If there were a real interest in truth and justice - or even in good practice, further information about my wrongful charging could easily be obtained from the CPS or police or the Crown to help the church make an informed decision whether a risk assessment and safety agreement are necessary or appropriate. But this doesn’t appear to happen in practice. To force that process I would have to personally apply and pay for a transcript of the trials, and present it to my Ecclesiastical Inquisitors. But to what end, if there is, as I suspect a level of prejudice already at work against me? I would simply be paying my persecutors to continue wearing their blindfold in their major [and probably only] pursuit of protecting and safeguarding, not the sexually abused, but the reputation of the institution.
An allegation is rarely if ever investigated for malice. And very rarely is the false accuser prosecuted for malicious allegation. The liars Gemma Beale and Carl Beech are well-known and widely publicised exceptions but are they are the tip of an iceberg of false accusers who have profited from lies and fantasies.
But I strongly believe that my false accuser did not act entirely out of malice.
Since it is almost impossible to prove that an allegation of historical sexual abuse is unfounded, every accused person may therefore assume that they will have to have a safety agreement in place even if the CPS determined that no further action was necessary.
But this leaves an innocent victim of a false allegation having to suffer further trauma and humiliation by having to accept the quite unnecessary restrictions of a safety agreement within the church whose management and discipline system is acknowledged even by the hierarchy to be unfit for purpose. Under such a regime, no individual treated in this way can ever hope to escape a level of suspicion from some of those around him.
'Safety Agreements’:
The Retreat of the Institution.
What can this ‘Agreement’ include?
Well, for me it included,
a) An obligation to sit in a certain place in church.
b) Not being able to arrive more than 10 minutes before a service.
c) Not being able to stay in the building or on its premises longer than 10 minutes after the worship has concluded.
d) Not being allowed to speak to under the age of 16. (if this rule is broken, as with all of the others, I would be reported and investigated).
e) Not speaking to women on their own.
f) Not to approach any woman in church or on the premises.
g) Not to visit any member of the worshipping community.
h) Not to accompany any female member of the worshipping community to their home.
i) Being unable to hold any statutory or voluntary position of responsibility in the church.
Archbishop Justin Welby explains:
“We have to be responsible for ensuring the Church is a place safe for all.”
But the Church is not a safe place for all.
Witness the years of pain and lack of church action against the abuser Bishop Peter Ball...
The church has become The Mouth Of Hell for the innocent falsely accused!
For the innocent victims of false accusations, the only route back into their church is fraught with anxiety and shame. In reality, there is no way back from this. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08pldr0/i-am-not-a-rapist
For those already suffering the trauma of a false allegation, and possible arrest, the Church is neither welcoming nor safe. It is, in fact, rejecting and, interestingly, fearful...
The imposition of a safety agreement (or 'covenant') means that the clergy, churchwardens and safeguarding representative of the church attended by the accused are all informed. Physical force can be employed to eject an accused person from any church-related venue with the full approval, and at the instigation of the bishop. The innocent who are falsely or wrongly accused have good reason to fear that to sign a safety agreement may be wrongly interpreted as a confession to having committed the abuse, somewhat akin to accepting a police caution.
A police caution is notification that a criminal offence has been committed.
For many who suffer from being falsely accused, their situation may not yet have been made public. They are pre-charge and may never be charged by the police. As such, they need protecting from these kind of church 'trials'.
They do not want further shame and fear when in reality they are in need, and hoping for support, not stereotyping and pre-judgement from their church. There is plenty of evidence that their lives might even be in danger from others or from themselves if such information about them is made public.
The current climate is not sympathetic towards those accused of such crimes, and some innocent people have suffered appalling acts of violence. I am familiar with these tragic cases from first-hand in a number of closed internet groups to which I belong and in which I offer what help I can to those falsely accused of sexual crime.
In the apparent zealous public forging of a safe space for ‘all God’s children’, the Church is ceasing to be any kind of space at all for the innocent victims of such false accusations, who are, by the way, also God’s children!
There is no place for them to tell their story, and no-one that I know about in the hierarchy with any influence or power particularly cares to listen to it. Thus far, none of them have listened to me, except to be threatening or rejecting when I inadvertently come to close to their own truths.
If the innocent accused attends a church in the diocese without a safety agreement in place, the Guidelines (5:19) state that “a wider circle” of people must be informed. The exact people and numbers are not always stipulated. This constitutes a manifest threat to those wrongly accused and adds further to the sense of fear associated with church. Many respond by losing their faith or simply abandoning church attendance entirely, living lives of broken isolation from their loving faith communities.
This is far from being “compassionate and attentive” to the innocent victims of false accusations who have themselves been “abused and sinned against” twice – once by the false accuser, and now by the church. Hence, my TEE SHIRT “I am an INNOCENT VICTIM of a False Accuser and the Church.”
In some cases the innocent victim of false accusation is provided with no pastoral support. For these people the church is not “attentive to their pastoral care” and appears cruel beyond belief. They are now the members of the Church family “not listened to”.
In the six-plus years since my false accuser caused me to be arrested, not one single official from the Church of England or the Methodist churches have been to visit me and my wife to ask how we are coping. Pastoral Care? You tell us. We hang on to existence by a thread.
If you have had an allegation of sexual abuse made against you, the church informs you that you are unable to worship anywhere in your diocese without a separate safety agreement in place for any church attended.
If you cannot accept the imposition of a safety agreement, you are effectively excommunicated. There is no alternative. Is the Church of England not thereby responsible for “keeping them from Jesus”? My contemporaneous journal recorded, 'Even to this very day I wander around in my car without clear direction throughout each Sunday morning, looking for a place of worship in my church when I want to be with the People of God. But I am unable for this and many associated reasons.'
Ironic that now in the days of Social Isolation this is a fate for all Christians in every country in the whole world! I wonder how those who have been complicit in 'keeping me from Jesus' feel about it now? Perhaps they are discovering how painful it is; how gut-wrenching it can be; What mental, spiritual and physical pain it can cause; how mournful and depriving for them - innocent Christian members of the faith community.
The church's Guidelines (2:8) state that the risk assessment should be evidence-based, compiled by those with no bias or connections, and should always collect and take into account relevant information from all statutory agencies involved (5:4). However, at least one diocese takes the view that “the risk assessment is not a process to determine guilt or innocence. It is not our remit.” No information was sought from a professional body involved nor the reasons given by the CPS for dismissing my case. Section 5:12 of the Guidelines stipulate that the individual’s relevant background history should be taken into account. This is not always done. The result is that innocent people of upright character are perceived and treated as though they are guilty.
Astonishingly, there is no right of appeal, since “ appeals cannot be made against the assessment conclusions and recommendations, which stand as the assessor’s opinion and cannot be challenged as such” (5.35).
That is a fundamental denial of natural justice.
Damned to Hell by an “assessor’s opinion”.
This means there is no hope of redemption. This is not a 'channel for fellowship' or communion. It is a Christianity without the Christ. How can it be a channel for communion when a safety agreement must effectively be in situ for life, and carried out again and again if the accused seeks out an alternative church - and what innocent Christian soul wouldn’t?
As each “wider circle” of people is informed of the accused’s presence among them, the church taints their names and destroys their reputations in perpetuity.
The “assessor’s opinion” - and remember, this is not the sentence of a properly constituted court of the land - is untouchable, immutable, infallible. As such it takes on the nature of a juridical determination despite what the church may believe or say. Nor is it a time-limited sentence such as the judge in crown court would administer, but it is in effect a lifelong sentence. But, you say, "It is [only] an assessor's opinion."
Indeed.
This isn’t merely a hypothetical injustice. It is a Kafkaesque corruption of divine justice, and it is happening now.
The Joyful Sister Frances Dominica
One only has to consider the appalling case of the lovely, gentle Sister Frances Dominica to realise that a false allegation of child abuse can have devastating effects on the accused.
Sister Frances would have preferred her case to have gone to court in order that her guilt or innocence might have been established beyond doubt.
Yet here she is, trapped in cyclical years of depression, shunned by her peers, unable to fathom why the Common Law and Human Rights Act both assert the presumption of innocence but it does not seem to apply to her.
Sister Frances is by no means alone: consider the Oxford University report ‘The Impact of Being Wrongly Accused of Abuse in Occupations of Trust: Victims’ Voices‘. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/impact-being-wrongly-accused-abuse-occupations-trust-victims-voice
This unfortunately expensive tome (still, bishops and their diocesan servants can afford it on their book grants) ought to be compulsory reading for all bishops and safeguarding teams and other assessors, religious or otherwise, of risk and safety in the realm of allegations of sexual abuse.
In their reluctance to accept in its practice that some accused people are actually innocent,
the Church of England is creating a new class of abused people - an 'underclass' - abused first by individuals, but subsequently by the institution of the Church itself, alienating and expelling them from the family of God, and denying them the natural interchange of fellowship and spiritual life.
Yes, it is a heinous wickedness to turn a blind eye to sexual abuse. We all, surely, agree with that. But shamefully it is something the church has been guilty of in the past. Its expressed intention is not to allow this to happen in the future. The archbishop has said so, and that intention, if serious, is probably praiseworthy.
It is also, by the same token, a grievous infraction to deny justice, pastoral care and comfort to those proven innocents who find themselves caught-up in the cat’s cradle of ecclesiastical policies in reputational limbo, depriving them of their religious rights and casting them in the mould of potential sexual risk.
Unfortunately, I see no balancing statement from the archbishop or any recognition of the desperate plight of the wrongly prosecuted innocents. Quite the opposite. If belonging to the Church of England constitutes being "present with Jesus" (!), then I am one of those little children of God who are being "kept from Jesus".
Not that I accept the archbishop’s exclusive premise implying ‘outside of Jesus’ equals ‘outside of the established church.’
For further observations regarding clerical sexual abuse and the Church of England's [lack of] response to it, see p.41 of 11th-24th September 2020 brief Private Eye article 'Hear No Evil' and many previous articles in those hallowed pages.
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