I still think I am onto something when I say that the best response to safeguarding concerns arises at a communal level. I don't mean that individual responsibility and awareness are not vital; they are. But what is it about the way the lives of congregations work that make churches such frequent contexts for abuse? And how can we look after each other better without denaturing congregational life?
That's actually a very deep question. The following is speculation only:
Firstly, we need to accept that abuse is common. Therefore abuse being common in churches does not necessarily signify anything at all. So that begs the question, is abuse more prevalent in the church than elsewhere? How one would measure that is very complex.
Thus, secondly we need to consider particular factors about churches. In general, churches are places where people go for solace. Churches are a place where emotional and spiritual power dynamics exist. There two things, especially in combination, make for exactly the kind of situation that manipulative abusers can exploit. Which brings me back to the point that having a philosophy of Best Practice for Safeguarding along with training for as many as possible is vital.
Don't misunderstand me, I work in a culture where so many aspects of training are at huge risk of descending into a tick-box exercise.* I understand the problem here but the paradox of abuse seeming to be rare when in fact it is very common means that there is a huge education gap. Even most victims of abuse may think it rare and often don't know about safeguarding.
Speculation only as I have not seen any direct research in this area. I am confident, however, that it is informed speculation.
I totally agree that we need a communal response. Of course we do. However, that is no way diminishes the need for a very directed program of education and training.
AFZ
*Off the top of my head, this is an (incomplete) list of the mandatory online training I have to do annually to do my job:
Conflict Resolution
Safe prescribing
Manual handling
Fire safety
Safeguarding (refresher)
Equality and Diversity
Bullying
Confidentiality
Online safety
You can see how it very quickly becomes a tick-box exercise for the hospital when they have literally thousands of staff who have to do this every year.
Thus, secondly we need to consider particular factors about churches. In general, churches are places where people go for solace. Churches are a place where emotional and spiritual power dynamics exist. There two things, especially in combination, make for exactly the kind of situation that manipulative abusers can exploit.
I agree with this, and would add a third factor. Because of its very nature, church is a place where we instinctively feel like we should be able to trust people, especially people in leadership positions, and where we feel like we should be trusted. It’s both an unrealistic and an understandable expectation.
Thus, secondly we need to consider particular factors about churches. In general, churches are places where people go for solace. Churches are a place where emotional and spiritual power dynamics exist. There two things, especially in combination, make for exactly the kind of situation that manipulative abusers can exploit.
I agree with this, and would add a third factor. Because of its very nature, church is a place where we instinctively feel like we should be able to trust people, especially people in leadership positions, and where we feel like we should be trusted. It’s both an unrealistic and an understandable expectation.
So do I, but such courses in no way prevent abuse occurring. Yes, they attempt to reduce the possibility and to increase awareness, but if a person is intent on abusing they will do so, no matter how many courses the church holds.
Right, but if you raise the likelihood (and, just as importantly, the perception) of detecting an offender this is likely to act as a deterrent. And increased vigilance and awareness reduces the opportunities for offending, because you plan to minimise scenarios where adults are in unobserved 1 on 1 situations with vulnerable people. Nobody claims that we can prevent or detect every instance of abuse. It's about harm reduction - like seatbelts and airbags or lane-keeping features in a car.
My emphasis. That and, having done the training, it may make you more aware of when something is "off" and feel more confident about raising it.
The elephant galloping around the room with the whole "We always managed without these things in the past" argument is that we can see how well that's worked out.
Until it doesn't ...
This is the problem with a lot of H&S rules. Workplace safety rules, as they say, are written in blood. They're all there in an attempt to prevent deaths and serious injuries that have actually happened by doing things "the old way". But most of the risks of death and injury that we're attempting to prevent are relatively low: they're high enough that on a national scale, you notice a problem, but low enough that individuals can do the "dangerous" activities every day of their lives and not have an accident.
So it's easy to understand how people think that there isn't a problem, and that H&S is overblown - it's because people suck at evaluating modest-scale risks.
I still think I am onto something when I say that the best response to safeguarding concerns arises at a communal level. I don't mean that individual responsibility and awareness are not vital; they are. But what is it about the way the lives of congregations work that make churches such frequent contexts for abuse? And how can we look after each other better without denaturing congregational life?
I totally agree that we need a communal response. Of course we do. However, that is no way diminishes the need for a very directed program of education and training.
Why wouldn't programs of education and training be an integral part of a communal response? It also seems unlikely to me that communal responses to safeguarding would develop or be encouraged in the absence of a sense of communal responsibility for safeguarding.
Thus, secondly we need to consider particular factors about churches. In general, churches are places where people go for solace. Churches are a place where emotional and spiritual power dynamics exist. There two things, especially in combination, make for exactly the kind of situation that manipulative abusers can exploit.
I agree with this, and would add a third factor. Because of its very nature, church is a place where we instinctively feel like we should be able to trust people, especially people in leadership positions, and where we feel like we should be trusted. It’s both an unrealistic and an understandable expectation.
My experience of church was that trusting one another is rather more than something that people feel - it's a quality that congregations are encouraged, or even instructed, to cultivate (along with forgiveness). It seems that, while keeping one another safe is a quality that we would naturally expect to find in church communities, keeping one another safe from each other is not.
Another factor that I would consider is accountability, particularly in relation to church leaders. As well as the importance of demonstrating and modelling accountability, this is in the rather more straightforward sense of being actually accountable to the people they lead.
You're still prescribing death by bureaucracy, if only as a side-effect. The operation was a total success - unfortunately, however, the patient died.
Church leaders will only be properly accountable following major cultural change. This will not be achieved by individual online training.
I'm sorry to labour the point, but I really do see many things dying of bureaucracy if this possibility isn't taken seriously. One way to stop abuse, I suppose, though it would lead to more people being neglected. The abuse probably happened, in a significant number of cases, when churches had more reach than they do now.
I am not minimising the pain and suffering caused by abuse. Or at least I hope I'm not. But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
You're still prescribing death by bureaucracy, if only as a side-effect. The operation was a total success - unfortunately, however, the patient died.
Church leaders will only be properly accountable following major cultural change. This will not be achieved by individual online training.
I'm sorry to labour the point, but I really do see many things dying of bureaucracy if this possibility isn't taken seriously. One way to stop abuse, I suppose, though it would lead to more people being neglected. The abuse probably happened, in a significant number of cases, when churches had more reach than they do now.
I am not minimising the pain and suffering caused by abuse. Or at least I hope I'm not. But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
Being rather cynical, I know, but (to mis-quote @ThunderBunk):
... I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving...
Safeguarding is not, of course, the only issue here.
You're absolutely right there. It's a model for which there is a need, but no practicable model for realisation. Making hypercorporate processes universal is not such a model, in any sphere.
Originally posted by Thunderbunk: But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, in 1989 my husband and I were members of a church whose minister was jailed.
Immediately prior to his arrest, our church was one of the most "successful" in the Church of Scotland. Congregations were large, giving was generous. In 1988, there was a newspaper article in which our church's "success" was lauded. Part of the "success" was based on the fact that the church was, by Scottish standards, huge. It had been built in the C19th as a combined church / soup kitchen and so had two halls, a large kitchen, a flat housing a live-in caretaker etc etc, and so, in addition to the core Sunday worship there was weekly Girl Guides / Boys Brigade / music groups / exercise classes; the place buzzed all week long, and hall hire provided a steady income.
This church was within walking distance of our home, but many people were travelling to attend it; generally people who had started attending when they lived in the city centre in their 20s, and kept attending after they had moved further out into the commuter belt.
Our minister was very popular. And then came the police raid, and his arrest. He was immediately suspended of course, but was adamant that he was innocent and would be back. A large section of the congregation were looking forward to his return. The day before his trial, he changed his plea from "not guilty" to "guilty."
Out church went into a slow death spiral. A few of the "travelling in" families left, whether to start attending their parish church, or no church, I don't know. And then more left, and more. Internal splits and recriminations started. More people left. Giving was falling away. Then we left, so we didn't experience the decline after that. Eventually the congregation had dwindled to a point whereby a neighbouring church was closed, the two congregations merged into "our" church building, and the "new" church was renamed and rebranded for a fresh start. But the decline continued, and ultimately the congregation folded and the church building was sold off.
My experience is that an abuser within the church destroyed a thriving congregation, and also cast a shadow over a much wider area. The case was reported in the press. The wider church was tainted by association. Many parents must have questioned their children's safety within their own churches.
I don't know what the figures were like for church attendance in the city "before" and "after" but I'm pretty sure that there was a drop at that point, a drop from which the city-wide Church of Scotland did not recover.
You're still prescribing death by bureaucracy, if only as a side-effect. The operation was a total success - unfortunately, however, the patient died.
Church leaders will only be properly accountable following major cultural change. This will not be achieved by individual online training.
The accountability of leaders has a lot more to do with mindset (as bishops, and archbishops, like Justin Welby demonstrate).
I'm sorry to labour the point, but I really do see many things dying of bureaucracy if this possibility isn't taken seriously. One way to stop abuse, I suppose, though it would lead to more people being neglected. The abuse probably happened, in a significant number of cases, when churches had more reach than they do now.
I am not minimising the pain and suffering caused by abuse. Or at least I hope I'm not. But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
Blaming bureaucracy looks to me like a straw man - the majority of churches, especially denominational churches, have always had bureaucracy. (In addition to its own, every parish in the CofE was tasked with keeping formal parish registers almost 500 years ago.)
As far as survival goes, why should church congregations that do not accept the need for safeguarding survive? Does the benefit of their survival outweigh the harm of avoidable abuse? I think these are unreasonable questions - but in the absence of an alternative model of safeguarding available for churches to adopt, they appear to be related to the question you are asking.
I still think I am onto something when I say that the best response to safeguarding concerns arises at a communal level. I don't mean that individual responsibility and awareness are not vital; they are. But what is it about the way the lives of congregations work that make churches such frequent contexts for abuse? And how can we look after each other better without denaturing congregational life?
The answer to that question starts with church congregations asking themselves difficult, painful, questions about their beliefs and attitudes. My experience is that the majority of congregants are not prepared to ask themselves these questions, let alone answer them.
Yes I agree with what people are saying. Maybe this is another case where death is needed before resurrection to new life can happen. In a different form, potentially - almost necessarily,.it seems to me. It just sucks being required to oversee the death throes.
This thread is all somewhat baffling to me because I had a background check and have to understand the general safety rules to be a Sunday School helper. I found it all very reasonable, mostly painless, and not even very hard. I would even say it was mildly helpful in that it was a reminder that if I'm a few minutes late P may be left alone with children (if J isn't here) and even though I would trust P with my life (and my child) I wouldn't want P to have that risk to herself. So I'm probably a little more timely because of that training.
I think part of the issue in Scotland (and I assume England is the same) is that background checks and training can mount up. E.g. if someone is a schoolteacher and fully checked and trained in that context, they still have to be separately background checked and trained to help with the Sunday School.
I had my first background check to help with my kid's toddler group back in the mid 1990s; I don't know how many background checks I have had over the intervening thirty years - maybe about twenty?
If they're really requiring the altar guild to be background checked and take online safeguarding courses, yeah, I get the complaint -- that isn't required in any of the churches I'm familiar with.
I think part of the issue in Scotland (and I assume England is the same) is that background checks and training can mount up. E.g. if someone is a schoolteacher and fully checked and trained in that context, they still have to be separately background checked and trained to help with the Sunday School.
And I can understand someone complaining about this. The church I worked for accepts the checking and training that people get in appropriate professions. I think they figure the school district has already done the work, so no need to duplicate it.
In Britain it's not a question of "the church ... accepts", we are legally required to be rechecked for each organisation we work or volunteer for, if relevant.
If they're really requiring the altar guild to be background checked and take online safeguarding courses, yeah, I get the complaint -- that isn't required in any of the churches I'm familiar with.
I think part of the issue in Scotland (and I assume England is the same) is that background checks and training can mount up. E.g. if someone is a schoolteacher and fully checked and trained in that context, they still have to be separately background checked and trained to help with the Sunday School.
And I can understand someone complaining about this. The church I worked for accepts the checking and training that people get in appropriate professions. I think they figure the school district has already done the work, so no need to duplicate it.
IIRC, they changed the rules in the UK (?) so if you had been checked in one local authority, that check was valid in the area it covered to solve that problem. Before that it meant you had be checked by each organisation even if they were in same area.
This thread is all somewhat baffling to me because I had a background check and have to understand the general safety rules to be a Sunday School helper. I found it all very reasonable, mostly painless, and not even very hard. I would even say it was mildly helpful in that it was a reminder that if I'm a few minutes late P may be left alone with children (if J isn't here) and even though I would trust P with my life (and my child) I wouldn't want P to have that risk to herself. So I'm probably a little more timely because of that training.
We're not allowed to do Sunday School or the equivalent - on our own. If I'm leading and there's no helper, then we're not going out. (There is an area at the back of the church where we'd go instead).
@Tubbs We aren't either. But the training reminded me that the Sunday School room would count as alone. (I had not thought of it that way previously because it's open to a public hallway etcetera.) I wanted to express that the trainings can be helpful to remind one to apply common sense.
That said I do see that if one had to get rechecked by every organization it would be truly exasperating. I know that my check was faster because I have had the trainings and checks previously.
@Tubbs We aren't either. But the training reminded me that the Sunday School room would count as alone. (I had not thought of it that way previously because it's open to a public hallway etcetera.) I wanted to express that the trainings can be helpful to remind one to apply common sense.
That said I do see that if one had to get rechecked by every organization it would be truly exasperating. I know that my check was faster because I have had the trainings and checks previously.
Rechecked and retrained by every organisation.
(Again, I jump through all the hoops and am in-date), but my church involvement is the only one I do. I’m aware of one person who keeps six of these plates spinning, and others who are definitely exasperated at 3 or 4.
Like I said upthread, if you’re active in your community across multiple organisations safeguarding training could take over your life.
And I can understand someone complaining about this. The church I worked for accepts the checking and training that people get in appropriate professions. I think they figure the school district has already done the work, so no need to duplicate it.
Scouting America has a background check and a set of trainings for youth protection. Church has a background check and an overlapping-but-slightly-different set of trainings for youth protection. Girl Scouts has a third set.
It's not really the background checks that take the time - they add a delay between someone saying they want to volunteer and that person being able to volunteer, but they don't really take time and effort from the volunteer. Having to take 3 or 4 different sets of almost-but-not-quite identical training on an annual basis can certainly feel like an unnecessary burden. I don't know that there's a good solution to that, though: each organization wants to tailor the application of what are the same fundamental principles to its own particular detailed cases.
It would be lovely (but impossible) if we had a central training authority, with basic modules for standard training, and organizations that wanted to add to it could do so without completely reinventing the whole wheel, if you see what I mean. It will never happen, of course.
If they're really requiring the altar guild to be background checked and take online safeguarding courses, yeah, I get the complaint -- that isn't required in any of the churches I'm familiar with.
I think part of the issue in Scotland (and I assume England is the same) is that background checks and training can mount up. E.g. if someone is a schoolteacher and fully checked and trained in that context, they still have to be separately background checked and trained to help with the Sunday School.
And I can understand someone complaining about this. The church I worked for accepts the checking and training that people get in appropriate professions. I think they figure the school district has already done the work, so no need to duplicate it.
IIRC, they changed the rules in the UK (?) so if you had been checked in one local authority, that check was valid in the area it covered to solve that problem. Before that it meant you had be checked by each organisation even if they were in same area.
The logic is/was is that when you get a crb check - if the police are actively investigating you, they may ask the employing agency to stall you but not include that information on the bit of paper they issue to you (which is all you’d be able to show to another agency) in order to avoid prejudicing an ongoing enquiry,
The key part is therefore who holds the info given by the police - at one point I think the Methodists acted as the organisation holding the information for a number of churches.
Comments
That's actually a very deep question. The following is speculation only:
Firstly, we need to accept that abuse is common. Therefore abuse being common in churches does not necessarily signify anything at all. So that begs the question, is abuse more prevalent in the church than elsewhere? How one would measure that is very complex.
Thus, secondly we need to consider particular factors about churches. In general, churches are places where people go for solace. Churches are a place where emotional and spiritual power dynamics exist. There two things, especially in combination, make for exactly the kind of situation that manipulative abusers can exploit. Which brings me back to the point that having a philosophy of Best Practice for Safeguarding along with training for as many as possible is vital.
Don't misunderstand me, I work in a culture where so many aspects of training are at huge risk of descending into a tick-box exercise.* I understand the problem here but the paradox of abuse seeming to be rare when in fact it is very common means that there is a huge education gap. Even most victims of abuse may think it rare and often don't know about safeguarding.
Speculation only as I have not seen any direct research in this area. I am confident, however, that it is informed speculation.
I totally agree that we need a communal response. Of course we do. However, that is no way diminishes the need for a very directed program of education and training.
AFZ
*Off the top of my head, this is an (incomplete) list of the mandatory online training I have to do annually to do my job:
- Conflict Resolution
- Safe prescribing
- Manual handling
- Fire safety
- Safeguarding (refresher)
- Equality and Diversity
- Bullying
- Confidentiality
- Online safety
You can see how it very quickly becomes a tick-box exercise for the hospital when they have literally thousands of staff who have to do this every year.Yep. 100% agree.
My emphasis. That and, having done the training, it may make you more aware of when something is "off" and feel more confident about raising it.
This is the problem with a lot of H&S rules. Workplace safety rules, as they say, are written in blood. They're all there in an attempt to prevent deaths and serious injuries that have actually happened by doing things "the old way". But most of the risks of death and injury that we're attempting to prevent are relatively low: they're high enough that on a national scale, you notice a problem, but low enough that individuals can do the "dangerous" activities every day of their lives and not have an accident.
So it's easy to understand how people think that there isn't a problem, and that H&S is overblown - it's because people suck at evaluating modest-scale risks.
My experience of church was that trusting one another is rather more than something that people feel - it's a quality that congregations are encouraged, or even instructed, to cultivate (along with forgiveness). It seems that, while keeping one another safe is a quality that we would naturally expect to find in church communities, keeping one another safe from each other is not.
Another factor that I would consider is accountability, particularly in relation to church leaders. As well as the importance of demonstrating and modelling accountability, this is in the rather more straightforward sense of being actually accountable to the people they lead.
Church leaders will only be properly accountable following major cultural change. This will not be achieved by individual online training.
I'm sorry to labour the point, but I really do see many things dying of bureaucracy if this possibility isn't taken seriously. One way to stop abuse, I suppose, though it would lead to more people being neglected. The abuse probably happened, in a significant number of cases, when churches had more reach than they do now.
I am not minimising the pain and suffering caused by abuse. Or at least I hope I'm not. But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
Being rather cynical, I know, but (to mis-quote @ThunderBunk):
... I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving...
Safeguarding is not, of course, the only issue here.
But I don't like the odds of churches, on a local, congregational level, surviving the current model of safeguarding.
As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, in 1989 my husband and I were members of a church whose minister was jailed.
Immediately prior to his arrest, our church was one of the most "successful" in the Church of Scotland. Congregations were large, giving was generous. In 1988, there was a newspaper article in which our church's "success" was lauded. Part of the "success" was based on the fact that the church was, by Scottish standards, huge. It had been built in the C19th as a combined church / soup kitchen and so had two halls, a large kitchen, a flat housing a live-in caretaker etc etc, and so, in addition to the core Sunday worship there was weekly Girl Guides / Boys Brigade / music groups / exercise classes; the place buzzed all week long, and hall hire provided a steady income.
This church was within walking distance of our home, but many people were travelling to attend it; generally people who had started attending when they lived in the city centre in their 20s, and kept attending after they had moved further out into the commuter belt.
Our minister was very popular. And then came the police raid, and his arrest. He was immediately suspended of course, but was adamant that he was innocent and would be back. A large section of the congregation were looking forward to his return. The day before his trial, he changed his plea from "not guilty" to "guilty."
Out church went into a slow death spiral. A few of the "travelling in" families left, whether to start attending their parish church, or no church, I don't know. And then more left, and more. Internal splits and recriminations started. More people left. Giving was falling away. Then we left, so we didn't experience the decline after that. Eventually the congregation had dwindled to a point whereby a neighbouring church was closed, the two congregations merged into "our" church building, and the "new" church was renamed and rebranded for a fresh start. But the decline continued, and ultimately the congregation folded and the church building was sold off.
My experience is that an abuser within the church destroyed a thriving congregation, and also cast a shadow over a much wider area. The case was reported in the press. The wider church was tainted by association. Many parents must have questioned their children's safety within their own churches.
I don't know what the figures were like for church attendance in the city "before" and "after" but I'm pretty sure that there was a drop at that point, a drop from which the city-wide Church of Scotland did not recover.
We need safeguarding.
Blaming bureaucracy looks to me like a straw man - the majority of churches, especially denominational churches, have always had bureaucracy. (In addition to its own, every parish in the CofE was tasked with keeping formal parish registers almost 500 years ago.)
As far as survival goes, why should church congregations that do not accept the need for safeguarding survive? Does the benefit of their survival outweigh the harm of avoidable abuse? I think these are unreasonable questions - but in the absence of an alternative model of safeguarding available for churches to adopt, they appear to be related to the question you are asking.
The answer to that question starts with church congregations asking themselves difficult, painful, questions about their beliefs and attitudes. My experience is that the majority of congregants are not prepared to ask themselves these questions, let alone answer them.
I know. An entire church community brought down by the actions of one person in authority.
I had my first background check to help with my kid's toddler group back in the mid 1990s; I don't know how many background checks I have had over the intervening thirty years - maybe about twenty?
And I can understand someone complaining about this. The church I worked for accepts the checking and training that people get in appropriate professions. I think they figure the school district has already done the work, so no need to duplicate it.
IIRC, they changed the rules in the UK (?) so if you had been checked in one local authority, that check was valid in the area it covered to solve that problem. Before that it meant you had be checked by each organisation even if they were in same area.
We're not allowed to do Sunday School or the equivalent - on our own. If I'm leading and there's no helper, then we're not going out. (There is an area at the back of the church where we'd go instead).
That said I do see that if one had to get rechecked by every organization it would be truly exasperating. I know that my check was faster because I have had the trainings and checks previously.
Rechecked and retrained by every organisation.
(Again, I jump through all the hoops and am in-date), but my church involvement is the only one I do. I’m aware of one person who keeps six of these plates spinning, and others who are definitely exasperated at 3 or 4.
Like I said upthread, if you’re active in your community across multiple organisations safeguarding training could take over your life.
Scouting America has a background check and a set of trainings for youth protection. Church has a background check and an overlapping-but-slightly-different set of trainings for youth protection. Girl Scouts has a third set.
It's not really the background checks that take the time - they add a delay between someone saying they want to volunteer and that person being able to volunteer, but they don't really take time and effort from the volunteer. Having to take 3 or 4 different sets of almost-but-not-quite identical training on an annual basis can certainly feel like an unnecessary burden. I don't know that there's a good solution to that, though: each organization wants to tailor the application of what are the same fundamental principles to its own particular detailed cases.
The logic is/was is that when you get a crb check - if the police are actively investigating you, they may ask the employing agency to stall you but not include that information on the bit of paper they issue to you (which is all you’d be able to show to another agency) in order to avoid prejudicing an ongoing enquiry,
The key part is therefore who holds the info given by the police - at one point I think the Methodists acted as the organisation holding the information for a number of churches.
I am not sure this is still the case.