C of E bishops should lose responsibility for safeguarding children, says inquiry

Damning report says church protected its reputation above its ‘explicit moral purpose’

Harriet Sherwood
@harrietsherwood
Tue 6 Oct 2020 12.00 BST

Church of England bishops should be stripped of responsibility to keep children safe from sexual abuse, according to an independent inquiry that said the church had protected its own reputation above its “explicit moral purpose”.

A damning report from the independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published on Tuesday, said the C of E’s culture of deference and “clericalism” meant it was a place where abusers could hide.

But it stopped short of backing two key demands of survivors: mandatory reporting of abuse disclosures to statutory authorities and independent oversight of the C of E’s safeguarding policies and actions. It will consider these issues further in a future report.

According to Tuesday’s 154-page report, which followed an investigation by IICSA into how the the Anglican church in England and Wales handled disclosure of sexual abuse, 390 clergy and people in positions of trust in the church had been convicted for abuse dating back to the 1940s until 2018.

More than 2,500 “safeguarding concerns” about children and vulnerable adults were reported to dioceses in 2018 alone, including 449 claims of recent child sexual abuse. A quarter of the total were reported to statutory authorities.

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