Faith, Faultlines & Safeguarding

This blog reflects on themes raised in Martin Sewell’s recent commentary, published on Surviving Church, about the experience of victim-survivors and the institutional response to persistent or ongoing safeguarding concerns within the Church of England. His reflections raise difficult and necessary questions about accountability, whistleblowing, and safeguarding culture. The reflections that follow draw on my own experience and build on earlier posts on Guarding the Flock.

Institutions don’t reveal themselves in their policies. They reveal themselves in rooms where they think nobody is watching...

Safeguarding competence is not a matter of sex or gender. Sex or gender does not make someone a safe pair of hands. Safeguarding is about judgement, accountability, humility, and moral courage. It is about how power is exercised, constrained, and scrutinised. It is about what happens when harm is disclosed, when difficult questions are asked, and when institutional reputation is at stake.

Victim-survivors don’t experience safeguarding as a policy. They experience it as a decision: will you protect me, or will you protect yourselves?

Many bishops now carry moral residue: the enduring weight of having chosen what was least disruptive rather than what was right.

Justice does not simply need to be done; it needs to be seen to be done. Yet the Church of England repeatedly behaves as though how things look to survivors is an inconvenience rather than a safeguarding imperative. Survivors are told to “trust the process” while watching the same group of senior leaders rotate roles; gatekeeper today, colleague tomorrow, and respondent the next.

The Church does not need a nurse to hold its hand. It needs a surgeon to cut out the cancer.

If Christmas—the feast of truth entering the world—is not the moment to tell the truth, then the silence is not pastoral. It is deliberate. It is public amnesia dressed in liturgy.

When I found myself in a management meeting as the newly arrived safeguarding adviser — a lay observer in a collar-heavy room — I was utterly fascinated. The dynamics. The factions. And what appeared to me to be an almost obsessive preoccupation with sex. Then someone said it: “Shall we talk about LLF?”

In such environments, safeguarding ceases to be pastoral and becomes political. It shifts from preventing abuse to preserving power.

Speaking truth into an institution skilled in narrative preservation feels like dropping a stone into deep water. The splash disappears instantly, and the silence that follows is suffocating.

Money has been the golden thread running through the Church’s history — shaping ministry, mission, and survival alike. Yet in desperate times, the temptation to lean on emotional or spiritual pressure to keep the books balanced becomes all too real. Where there is trust, vulnerability, and unequal power, there is the potential for harm. That includes financial harm. This isn’t just a conversation for finance committees. It’s a safeguarding conversation.

Policies and safeguarding frameworks may look great on paper, but behind the scenes, the machinery of reputation management is working overtime.

Safeguarding is not simply about stopping harm. It is about bearing witness. It is about making sure that what was once silenced is not ignored again. It is about ensuring that every voice is honoured, even when broken, trembling or unsure.

Clergy under investigation often feel — and, in my experience of diocesan safeguarding, too often are — presumed guilty. Cut off from support, they can be left in limbo for months. Even when cleared, the stigma lingers. Whispers persist, careers stall, reputations are bruised. The wounds seep on, staining trust and sapping the confidence of both clergy and their communities.

“Lessons learnt”  is an instituional shield. Harm gets reduced to an abstract idea. No names. No ownership. No human accountability.

Credibility is the currency of safeguarding. Survivors who come forward with regional or working-class accents may face disbelief, quiet dismissal, or subtle mockery because of how they sound. How are they supposed to speak up if their voices are judged before their words are heard?

“We don’t want to take a clergy person’s agency away.” That was the repeated justification given by safeguarding leadership when asked why clergy members facing stalking and harassment weren’t being safeguarded.