A letter to the General Synod 04/2021

 Open and Important Synod Safeguarding Letter 21/04/2021

Dear Synod members and other recipients,

This is important to all of you as it relates to safeguarding, the upcoming Synod and the Church of England. Those who write, who speak up, tend to be ignored or dismissed even made out to be mad in the tradition C of E unchristianity, but remember, we are ‘The Nation’ who Justin Welby and Steve Cotterell have taken to trying to address; they need to let us respond and they need to listen or they need to stop addressing us. The church barely acknowledges responses and feedback, they even played the victim and wailed about ‘Malicious Voices’ the oldest gaslighting trick in the book, when challenged by one of those odd little papers recently. Quite a desperate response.

Each Synod, we see the self-important little files marked ‘safeguarding’, ‘clergy discipline measure’ and among the garbled lines and bullet points, there seems to be an implication that things may change for the better one day - one day when those accountable can no longer be held to account, presumably, as is the Church of England way. The reality is, even proposals for ‘independent oversight’ are not all that they seem. The C of E have historically not understood the word ‘independent’ and the small print says nothing will change. Independent has a different meaning to the C of E.

Those endless reams of paperwork and Sir Humphrey Appleby strategies aren’t making any difference and haven’t made any difference. There is a major safeguarding crisis that is not addressed by including safeguarding as a synod topic for the sake of the media.

Jayne Ozanne and various others who are on the synod to try to change the church for the better, have embarrassed the church, quite rightly too, with articles discussing whether it is viable to remain in the Church of England and Synod and continue to try to change things or if the harm to them is too great, and this past weekend, Sam Margrave has embarrassed the church by getting an article in the Church of England’s own newspaper, the Guardian, speaking up about the situation that the C of E faces, and funnily enough, after weeks of the Archbishop of Canterbury abusing the media for his routine self-advertising, which often occurs after revelations such as the cover-up of the Fletcher and Smyth cases - which he has links to, the C of E have no response to Mr Margrave’s article. And this is the image of the C of E, communication from the C of E is all a one-way street and very poorly managed.

The C of E represent a tiny percentage of the nation and yet routinely inflict C of E publicity on the nation, including the recent strategy by the Archbishops to ‘order, advise, beg or warn’ the nation through ‘joint letters’ in the press. Putting two really bad Archbishops in a position where they think that together their autocratic power has more influence over the nation was a bad strategy, it reflects poorly on the C of E and doesn’t improve on one really bad Archbishop re-abusing victims who have been denied justice by the C of E by advertising that he only cares about getting limelight and acting as a pseudo-politician.

Nothing that Mr Welby says puts the C of E in a good light, even his scripted praise of the Duke of Edinburgh could have been trotted out by any politician and occurred just after a comment by Mr Welby that being part of the Royal Family was like a life sentence without parole, obviously a jeer while some people await Prince Andrew’s questioning by the FBI, and inappropriate. Mr Welby is basically telling the world that some people, himself included, are above the law.

Think about this. The other Christian denominations in the UK collectively outweigh the C of E; the C of E are driving their own congregations away, and if you think about the 2% or so of the population who actually worship in the C of E, a percentage of those are clergy and employees of the C of E, and then there are schools, where worship and evangelism is being forced on children and families, according to reports. The other denominations are not being a burden to the general public with delusions of controlling them through letters or upsetting them though silly publicity stunts. However, this is a safeguarding letter. Quite apart from fearing for Sam Margrave’s safety because I know what the Church of England can do to people who challenge them on such serious matters, all those Sir Humphrey safeguarding and CDM papers produced at each synod are making no difference while senior clergy actively involved in safeguarding failures and deliberate harm remain in their positions.

This synod must not be used as further public harm to abuse victims. One victim in particular whose case caused the channel islands to be moved to a diocese they preferred, is already being harmed again and further harm is a safeguarding failure. The use of the press and media by the church is a safeguarding issue while there is no justice to victims of the church. The use of the media and press for false safeguarding compliance, for example pretences about the IICSA’s recommendations, is harmful to victims. The constant falsehoods about safeguarding by the C of E in the media have been very harmful to victims of the church over the past 8 years, it is a fresh abuse to hear the senior clergy who have harmed victims lying about their commitment to safeguarding but that barely touches on the safeguarding issue that I need to raise. Justin Welby’s fake passion about safeguarding is an indication of something very flawed after his own serious misconduct.

This week, Justin Welby has continued his PR run, presumably because he’s not looking forward to being without limelight while he goes away on Sabbatical, that paid-for holiday while British people have been denied holidays. Because Mr Welby has unresolved safeguarding complaints against him, including serious harm, the Church of England are liable for ensuring that Mr Welby’s hosts for his sabbatical are aware that he is considered to be a safeguarding risk. ‘Sabbatical’ is sometimes a code name for ‘suspension’ in high profile cases, and in Mr Welby’s case, ‘Suspension’ wouldn’t be adequate, only dismissal or resignation would be acceptable, and arrest would be ideal.

The response to Panorama’s ‘Is the Church Racist’ investigation was Mr Welby stating that he didn’t know about NDA’s being used. Two years ago an abuse case in Birmingham made headlines, a C of E abuse victim was made to sign an NDA, it was headline news but Mr Welby apparently missed it. NDAs are used routinely in Dioceses to silence clergy, according to a church leader. Does Justin Welby not know his own church? Despite his constant vanity headlines being unconnected to the church, this is unlikely, as, some five years ago, the case I have mentioned which Mr Welby was closely involved in, involved the National Safeguarding Team trying to get the victim silenced through an NDA, immediately after failing to prevent catastrophic harm to the victim, and while simultaneously prioritizing illegally paying a forensic psychologist to order that ‘The victim was ignored’ purely to protect the church against the consequences of manifold crimes against the victim, making any kind of safeguarding utterances by the church in the press into a mockery.

Justin Welby doesn’t seem to have learned that professing sorrow for every wrong he is part of and responsible for, purely for press acclaim, is not making any difference to the situation. His accusations that the congregation en masse are racist, when the racism stems from the senior leadership are deeply unjust. Mr Welby’s interference in Covid 19 purely for his own acclaim is sickening after his failure to the church and the nation, he really needs to stop making headlines and give the church’s victims and the nation a break. BBC 4 churn out church propaganda to ensure that the elderly audience continue to bequeath to the C of E, but Mr Welby shouldn’t be using BBC 4 or his position for more 99p store books floated on his position and vanity and otherwise not worth publishing, while he’s refusing responsibility for himself and his actions and harming many people and destroying the church of England with his dishonesty and plain unsuitability for his position.

I’ve been listening to victims of the Fletcher case talking about Bishop Rod Thomas’s statement. The C of E have a way of playing with words to cover themselves and gaslight victims, and Bishop Rod Thomas did just that in the ugly aftermath of the recent Fletcher publicity. He said he had referred himself to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would decide on whether he merited action. The Archbishop himself and his senior clergy have done horrendously wrong and no one has been suspended, removed or resigned even though those wrongs are open to see, and Rod Thomas knows that. There have been two PR scapegoating suspensions of Bishops for the fake safeguarding campaign of the past 8 years, no one Mr Welby favours or protects will be suspended. These two-edged gaslighting/publicity stunts harm victims but are the way the church has behaved during the past 8 years, and before, but it has become increasingly noticeable.

In 2013 Justin Welby and the Bishops of Winchester and Dover and safeguarding Bishop of the time committed a very serious safeguarding failure, a case with many NDAs that Mr Welby is well aware of, but none signed by the victim unless it was faked, which wouldn’t be surprising. A vulnerable adult with the most horrendous past of abuse and neglect was groomed and abused by two serial abusers in responsible positions protected by the church. The Diocese of Winchester and safeguarding refused to help the victim and prioritized silencing her and humiliating her, blaming her, making her out to be mad. Suffering severe trauma from being regressed to childhood by one abuser so that he could groom and abuse her, and efforts by the church to forcibly silence her by their influence over the police and other authorities, the victim’s trauma became uncontrollable. The church subjected her to arrest, police violence, efforts to deem her mad, and imprisonment. Many many laws were broken by the church and police throughout.

As a result, she was left on the streets, of her home town, Winchester, much to the embarrassment of the Bishop at the time, Michael Scott-Joynt, who was patron of the homeless services there, and had her slandered out of the homeless services there despite her specific request for protection from him and his house, and he and his safeguarding officer attempted again to silence her through police violence and efforts to have her deemed as mad. But she wouldn’t be silent, even though she was left on the streets as a rough sleeper for years.

In 2013, a conflicted church counsellor was used to produce an unqualified statutory mandatory report on the case, breaching the ethics of her BACP accreditation by using her qualification as a counsellor to ‘validate’ the report and not declaring her interest as a member of the C of E. What she produced wasn’t a report, it was a regurgitation of carefully selected correspondences about the case that she was given and a number of illegal attempts by her and the Diocese to change the victim’s legal diagnosis of autism to insanity and efforts to undermine the victim, for example trying to label the victim ‘unforgiving’ over a totally unrelated case in the Diocese of Winchester where a special needs teacher, part of the victim’s church and one of her youth leaders, abused multiple children in his special school and in Romania.

The victim’s horror that her youth leader did this, and her need to speak up about the way the church tried to silence it, led to the vicar who was abusing her telling her that ‘She would be judged the same as the paedophile because she had Asperger Syndrome’ and the report in 2013 labelled the victim as ‘unforgiving’ for her deep shock over this but failed to explain what had happened or why it was relevant to the victim being abused and denied justice. The victim wasn’t included in the report, and when she took the Bishop of Winchester to court in 2013, it was lied that there were attempts to contact her and include her in the report, easily refuted by correspondence after the report was released.

Justin Welby used the report as an international vanity publicity stunt, one of his first, and despite being an Archbishop, apparently failed to realize how dangerous this was for the victim, he failed to fact check the report and ensure it was a complete account and failed to ensure the victim was included. He allowed the victim to be attacked constantly by strangers from the day the report was released to this very day. 8 years of horrific damage by press, media and strangers, while some celebrities and stars who have support and legal teams and much better foundation are killed by much lesser smear campaigns and the victim has been without support of any kind throughout, and was still a homeless rough sleeper when the matter was vomited all over the press and media without any thought for her safety.

Paul Butler showed an equally limited understanding of safeguarding to Justin Welby’s and stated that he was ‘praying for everyone involved’ which apparently he thought sufficed as safeguarding cover, he refused to communicate with the victim, he failed to declare his conflict of interests, both Paul Butler and Peter Hancock were former Bishops in the Diocese of Winchester and knew the perpetrators in the case. Currently the Bishop of Southampton has taken that gatekeeper role as it appears the Diocese of Winchester need to be safeguarded against the consequences of their wrongs. Paul Butler didn’t just fail to restore safeguarding to the situation, he actively enabled harm to the victim and didn’t protect her as the powerful men in Jersey took over and ran a hate campaign against the victim, including a conflicted report by ‘Jersey Safeguarding Partnership’ which they subjected the victim to violence to try to force her agreement of its publication, and a report by their own in-house conflicted judge, which the victim took the Bishop of Winchester to court over in 2014 and brought an injunction against him, not a gagging order as the police who the Bishop used to try to violently silence her were wrongly told in 2018, an injunction, by a destroyed vulnerable adult with no money or representation, and the Bishop of Winchester still hasn’t been suspended, because Justin Welby was deeply and openly involved in this matter and committed grave and criminal misconduct.

During the three years from 2013 to 2016 the victim was attacked constantly by strangers and the press and media and left devastated and suicidal, she had been rebuilding her life, and she lost lodgings, she lost work, she lost friends, she lost everything she tried to build up, repeatedly, and yet Paul Butler and Justin Welby thought this was a safeguarding kick, nearly killing this woman constantly for years on end, essentially what they did was attempted murder, no one in their right mind would facilitate such severe harm for so long and not imagine the outcome being death. These are educated men, ignorance cannot be pleaded.

The nastiest and most persistent media was the Jersey media, overseen by the brother of one of the serial abusers and influenced by the powerful men who held positions in the Jersey church as well as the government, judiciary, police and other bodies. Openly a church reader who was also Jersey Home Affairs Minister read out lies extracted from records he could access to use against the victim. Openly the External Affairs Minister broke the law in a similar way. Nothing has been done. These men weren’t brutalized and imprisoned, the victim was.

Of course a vulnerable adult stating this alone when asking for help would be made out to be mad, and with the church pushing this view forward with their power and ability to conflict any authority, the victim was left voiceless. Not a single report in this farce contained the victim’s story, and so she wrote what she could on a blog, powerless and too traumatized to write, she tried. The media attacking her, especially the Church Times, whose behaviour was despicable, attacked her blog as ‘hate and rage’ which it wasn’t and didn’t offer a link so that others could judge for themselves, but simply worked hard to uphold the farce and the lies published and destroyed the victim.

Out of the media, the Church Times publication of hatred and undermining of the victim was horrific with the Huffington Post, ‘Thinking Anglicans’ who need to drop the ‘Thinking’ because their pseudo-intelligent babble about the C of E tends to uphold Justin Welby’s PR pretences, close runners-up, and the Jersey Media were the worst. The church were stumped when former police officer Bob Hill whose Jersey blogspot still tells some of the story, stepped in and tried to defend the entirely defenceless victim. Mr Hill, although very misguided by the false reports, tried to highlight the severe corruption in the case and as a result, the church used another vulnerable adult to try to drive a wedge between Mr Hill and the victim, causing severe trauma all round and further removing support from the victim. This was when Winchester became embarrassed and had to fake ‘supporting the victim’ and the disgraced safeguarding officer who had had the victim arrested multiple times illegally liaised with the NSPCC, totally inappropriately, and the NSPCC contacted the victim unsolicited, adding to her distress, she was neither a child nor a parent but this highlights the huge abuse of power that the church of England commits unquestioned as well as unresolved serious misconduct relating to the NSPCC, who have failed to process the complaint.

The victim took the Bishop of Winchester to court but was prevented from attending and the Bishop’s solicitors lied but the Bishop was put under an injunction which he has breached. Nothing Justin Welby says has any credibility while this remains the case.

Justin Welby publicly upheld the wrongdoers after arranging so with the powerful politicians, Lords, judiciary and others conflicting the case, he did this publicly as a synod/PR stunt exactly five years ago, with no warning to the victim. He did this a little while after hijacking a clergy discipline complaint against the Bishop of Winchester shortly after making a mockery of the whole investigation by upholding the wrongdoers in the case live on BBC during the course of the investigation. Making it clear the investigations were pure PR and box-ticking and the outcome was decided.

The victim refused to be silent and the National Safeguarding Team manipulated and insulted and enraged her, they told her they had the report that was bound by an injunction, so obviously the injunction was breached. The Bishop lied to the press and media and claimed he had withheld the injunction-bound report ‘for the victim’s sake’ thus feeding the press-led smear campaign by the people in power in the church, the House of Lords, Politicians, conflicted police and others, that the victim was in the wrong and imposing this on the general public. The Bishop claimed the report would be ‘fed into’ another report, thus breaching the injunction multiple times and framing another Bishop, Bishop John Gladwin for breaching the injunction. This too remains unresolved.

The National Safeguarding Team tried to entrap the victim while unable to explain to her why they had allowed her to forced to suicide by the matter, she would have committed suicide if someone hadn’t phoned her and told her they saw through every scrap of the church and Jersey dignitaries actions. Unable to explain themselves to the victim who continued to demand answers, the national safeguarding team hid behind their use of a ‘forensic psychologist’ paid to protect the church without the victim’s side of things being heard. The victim didn’t cease to ask for justice just because of the widespread slander of her by Graham Tilby, Moira Murray, Jane Dodds (yes, liberal democrat MP, former safeguarding worker) and others with the help of their illegal validation by a ‘forensic psychologist’. So the Bishop of Winchester, who lied to the police in order to do so, had the victim violently brutalized and imprisoned again in 2018 after the C of E had set other victims on the victim like a pack of dogs at a controversial protest at Canterbury. The attempt to force a distressed person to be insane and into psychiatric care or prison to make the church’s wrongs go away speaks more for the archaic church than any of the C of E vanity PR that causes nuisance and distress to so many.

The matter remains unresolved, with the Bishop of Salisbury preferring to retire rather than face it as it would now be his duty. The National Safeguarding Team keeping up the same barrage, Meg Munn ignoring the case, Justin Welby and the Bishops of Winchester and Durham refusing to step down, the Safeguarding Bishops studiously ignoring the case and all correspondence surrounding it, and all considering the matter firmly under lock and NDA, especially under the orders of Lord Faulkner and Baroness Butler-Sloss and their colleagues who abused their extensive and inordinate power to traduce the victim and uphold the senior clergy responsible for destroying her.

The final question before Mr Welby swans off to focus on ‘reconciliation’ after his horrendous onslaught of vanity PR is, Mr Welby, where is the victim who you and the Bishop of Winchester publicly apologized to in 2013 as PR game before horrifically destroying her? Is she still homeless as a result of the 2018 destruction of her whole life when the police violently brutalized and seriously injured her and dragged her from her home in front of the whole community who they then lied to? Or is she dead from a police beating or suicide or locked up and deemed insane thanks to your corruption despite many reports upholding her mental health and severe distress, just to silence her and protect the senior clergy from consequences? Stop using victims as PR, stop initiating and circulating false reports and answer for this. Then Mr Welby, no more holidays at taxpayers’ expense unless in HMP, step down and take those involved with you. Your all PR persona and no human status is a bit too transparent, (except to ‘Thinking’ Anglicans’, who are a grand paradox).

This safeguarding failure/murder, is a matter which shows the futility and failure of all authorities and systems in the UK, which shows that the C of E is dangerous to all vulnerable groups and which speaks of the suffering of not one but many victims who have faced this. This matter has been raised as high as the speaker in the House of Lords and yet Mr Welby has just spent a month on public vanity shows. The Church of England isn’t safe and can’t be deemed to be safe until all the Sir Humphrey paperwork and the vanity shows stop and matters like this are addressed.

John Carter, on behalf of the silenced.