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Recent times have seen the Church of England, the church we love, the church we had thought of as home, become engulfed in a safeguarding crisis. So many people have been left damaged and hurt, exiled and disenfranchised and yet more and more of these safeguarding failures continue to emerge.Hardly a week goes by without a new story reaching the media. It is easy to feel helpless, even overwhelmed in such situations.
This initiative aims to bring together organisations and individuals affected by these safeguarding failures and the subsequent attempts to cover them up, totally deny them or to sweep them aside as something of no serious consequence and to keep on speaking out untill the survivors and their families feel justice has been seen to be done.
We seek to lobby the Church of Englamd more effectively and we believe this can be achieved more powerfully as one umbrella organisation, a group that will bring pressure to bear and force the Church of England to face up to and deal with the situation satisfactorily, to take responsibility, to bring justice, restore hope and to bring healing and peace to all those affected by this shameful crisis. To restore confidence and trust will be a far greater task, something that right now we can only dream of.
If you or your organisation would like to become allied with us in this campaign, we would love to hear from you.
We have recently created a series of factual videos - The Wilkinson Files - which have summarised the huge amount of detailed provided by Dr Sarah Wilkinson in her report on the cancellation of the Church of England's Independent Safeguarding Board (see menu link) .
Our next project will be The Jay Files (see trailer above) in which we will look at the recommendations by Professor Alexis Jay into the future of independent safeguarding in the Church of England.
Rev Andrew Dotchin
The Call to Safeguarding.
"In my teenage years the most powerful image of the Church was that of the mother pelican who pecks at her breast to feed her young.
When we refuse to be held accountable for the abuse that happens within our churches the pelican is transformed into a monster who devours her young.
A double tragedy, for when we do this we, though we may think we are protecting the church, are in fact destroying her".
Friday February 9th A note from David Lucas
As Synod approaches social media is becoming more and more alive with posts and comments about the safeguarding debacle, much of this material comes from sources we here cannot be sure of the veracity of and therefore are having to resist sharing with you here.
However I am receiving complaints that this should be happening at all on social media and that unreliable information is somehow the fault of groups such as ours. I simply want to point out that many people are deeply hurt, in pain and are suffering as a consequence of such unresolved pain such things will happen and the Church of England should have seen this coming, we did. This is the Law of Unintended Consequences, something we would have expected an institution as big as the Church of England to be aware of.
The fact that it is not cannot be laid at the door of groups such as ours. Hurt people lash out.
The best way to solve unreliable and even bitter things circulating on social media would be for the church to come up with a speedy, just and fair solution. It is no good complaining that hurt people are behaving badly, we must ask who caused the hurt and what are they doing to make amends?