50 Years of Safeguarding – 950 Years of Clergy Discipline: Where do we go from here?

Abstract

This article is based on an Ecclesiastical Law Society London Lecture delivered on 17 November 2021. It builds on a previous lecture entitled ‘Safeguarding in church and state over the last 50 years: “from Ball and Banks to Beech via Bell”’, which also formed the basis of an article published in this Journal in 2020. That article, among other things, identified a number of significant cases of sexual abuse by clergy which were/are the subject of ‘lessons learned’ reviews and concluded by suggesting how investigation and fact-finding might take place in the future, independent of the bishops, but under the supervision of a ‘judge’, and argued that effective risk assessments could only be based on findings of fact. The author was subsequently asked to chair a working party for the Ecclesiastical Law Society aimed at addressing how the Clergy Disciplinary Measure 2003 (‘CDM’) should be reformed. This article now deals with events that have occurred since, from the publication of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA)'s investigative reports into the Anglican Church (inter alia), the Lambeth group's proposals for reform of the CDM, through to General Synod's responses to both sets of recommendations. It also surveys in some detail the approach the church has taken to the assessment of risk within its safeguarding policy in recent years, as well as its historical approach to clergy discipline. The article concludes by drawing some threads together as a result of the author's own work and research into these two subjects over the past two years, and finishes by suggesting some possible directions in which the church ought now to move.