Safeguarding and Reputation

The Church of England - ignoring cult abuse of children

Today is Safeguarding Sunday, when ”churches from diverse backgrounds and traditions across the UK shout about safeguarding and help protect vulnerable people”. This year’s theme is a timely one - “let’s talk about it.” 

There will be a lot to talk about, in both the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion, as the Church is still reeling from last week’s publication of the 251-page Makin Review on serial abuser John Smyth , and the subsequent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Safeguarding Sunday falls in the middle of ‘Trans Awareness Week’, which raises its own safeguarding issues, not least for Church of England schools -  of which more later.

John Smyth QC

The Makin Review suggests that one man, John Smyth, abused 130 boys and young men (in England, Zimbabwe, and South Africa), over a period lasting more than four decades. Smyth was an eminent lawyer who famously  prosecuted Gay Times for Mary Whitehouse in 1977. Around this time, he was beating boys attending Evangelical summer camps at Iwerne Minster, in Dorset, and boys studying at Winchester College, an elite private boarding school in Hampshire. Both Smyth and his victims were semi-clothed or naked during the beatings, which were severe, and often continued long after they drew blood.

Journalist Andrew Graystone, in the introduction to his book about the cult of the Iwerne camps, noted the contradictions in Smyth’s character:

“In the 1970s, John Smyth was a prominent and dashing young QC, representing the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse in several high profile cases. At the height of the ‘permissive society’ Whitehouse and Smyth were facing down pornographers, theatre directors and publishers in the name of the Christian faith. Smyth’s most famous work for Whitehouse was the notorious trial of Gay News and its editor Denis Lemon for blasphemous libel. It takes a special legal mind to invoke a statute charged only once in a century. I realised that Smyth was commuting up to London every Monday and exercising his considerable legal powers to crush a typewritten free-sheet that was emboldening the newly emerging gay community. Then he was going home to Winchester, where he was beating young naked men until they bled. And he was doing both in the name of Jesus.”

(Andrew Graystone, Bleeding for Jesus, 2021)

Physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse

The Makin Review was published while I was writing my last two substack posts, on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. The differences between Smyth and the men in Rotherham’s trafficking gangs were obvious. The Rotherham traffickers were not particularly devout Muslims; Smyth was a fervently Evangelical Christian. The Rotherham traffickers were taxi drivers, drug dealers and small shopkeepers; Smyth was a top lawyer, a Queen’s Counsel. The Rotherham traffickers abused young girls, and lost interest in them when they reached their late teens; Smyth abused boys, and continued abusing them after they became adult men.

Underneath these differences are some not always obvious similarities. Smyth’s English victims were all from elite private boarding schools. But they were vulnerable, separated from their families, and Smyth presented himself not only as a father figure to them, but as a representative of God. The boys were keen, too, to demonstrate their commitment to the ‘Muscular Christianity’ that Smyth espoused. It’s a different form of vulnerability from that of the working class girls who were exploited in Rotherham, but it’s vulnerability nonetheless. 

Abusers seek out vulnerable people to exploit, and invariably use well-tried grooming techniques to win their compliance. They make their victims feel special, and give them gifts to reward complicity - alcohol and drugs in Rotherham, bibles at Iwerne and Winchester. One Iwerne victim told the Makin Review: “”the seductive bit was John seeing me as special … I wasn’t just anyone else at Iwerne. I was one of the elite of the elite. It was very powerful.” Another said: “there was an allure to the secrecy of the beatings. I thought: I’ve been on this, and it’s a means to spiritual empowerment.”

In Rotherham, male abusers often used adult women to facilitate their grooming of children. John Smyth’s wife Anne performed a similar role for him. Her presence in the family home persuaded Winchester College boys, and their tutors, that it was safe for them to visit him at weekends. And, when boys returned bloodied from beating sessions in the sound-proofed shed John Smyth had constructed in their garden, it was Anne who handed out the bandages and adult nappies to cover the wounds her husband had inflicted.

The sexual abuse of girls in Rotherham was enforced by physical coercion, and there was a distinctly sexual component to Smyth’s physical abuse of boys. What Smyth added to the mix was spiritual abuse. He interpreted passages from the Bible literally, to justify his abuse. Vicious beatings, he suggested, were validated by Hebrews ch i2 (“If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he who the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers , then are ye bastards, and not sons”) and Proverbs ch 13 (“He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”). The example of Jesus, as prophesied by Isiah ch53 (“with his stripes we are healed”), was presented as the ultimate selflessness, to be emulated by true believers.

Denial and cover-up

The Church of England authorities were even more negligent than Rotherham council in safeguarding the children they were supposed to protect, and far slower in taking any responsibility for their negligence.

It started with the Iwerne Trust, who, as early as 1982, commissioned Canon Mark Ruston to investigate Smyth’s behaviour at their summer camps. Ruston’s report revealed the serious physical, psychological and sexual abuse that many boys had experienced. Yet it downplayed the significance of the abuse, likening it to the corporal punishment that was then commonplace in the private schools from where the boys had been recruited. There was no comparison in reality - several victims interviewed later for the Makin review mentioned boys receiving all-day beatings of 800 strokes. Not even the harshest of disciplinary regimes in private schools at that time came close to that level of brutality.

What Ruston did chronicle was bad enough for the Iwerne Trust to worry about the damage to its reputation, and to Conservative Evangelism more generally, if word about his findings got out. The Trust decided to circulate the Ruston Report to only a tiny number of allies, and not to inform the police of the crimes that Smyth had committed. The Reverend David Fletcher, a leader of the Iwerne summer camps, told the Makin Review that he thought “it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.” Ruston himself was worried about “the effect on evangelism” (ie on a sect within the Church). Smyth was asked to sign an undertaking not to contact his victims, not to work with young men, and to seek psychiatric help. There was no monitoring of Smyth’s adherence to this undertaking, which he breached on countless occasions.

Despite the efforts of the Iwerne Trust to keep Smyth’s abusive behaviour secret, many in the Church of England hierarchy, including three Bishops, knew something of it in the period leading up to 2012. None of them saw fit to inform the police of Smyth’s crimes, and some of them encouraged Smyth to leave the country and set up Iwerne-style summer camps in Zimbabwe. Here Smyth continued to physically abuse boys. He took naked photos of them, and insisted on sleeping in dormitories with them.  

The fate of one boy that Smyth had abused in Zimbabwe could not be hidden. Guide Nyachuru, who was 16, was found dead in the camp swimming pool in 1992. Smyth was charged with culpable murder, and for five additional counts of criminal injury. He  led his own defence, and the case was dropped after he successfully argued that the prosecutor had a conflict of interest.

Things started to change in 2012, the year when Jimmy Saville’s multiple sexual abuses became public knowledge.  Anne Atkins, who had met John Smythe as a child, wrote an article for the Mail on Sunday about the serious abuse committed by “an eminent lawyer”, which many church officials assumed was Smyth. The church hierarchy started to take notice of complaints by victims, though they downplayed the severity of the abuse they had suffered. It was widely assumed, for example, that Smyth’s victims were all consenting adults, which was totally untrue.  Jo Bailey Wells, the personal chaplain to Justin Welby (the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury) thought that Smyth’s record of abuse was “not particularly remarkable”. She did think, though, that Welby should be told of it, given his previous involvement with Smyth (Welby had been a ‘dormitory official’ at Iwerne camps that Smyth had led, and he had contributed financially to Smyth’s summer camps in Zimbabwe).

A powerful exposé on Channel 4 News in 2017 (the second of the videos embedded here) brought knowledge of Smyth’s abuse to a wider audience. Only around this time did the police in England became seriously involved, As for the Church of England, the Makin Review notes that its response to the Channel 4 programme ”was poor in terms of speed, professionalism, intensity, and curiosity. The response was not trauma informed and the needs of the victims were not at the forefront of the thinking and planning.”

Much of the media reaction this month, once the Makin Review was published, focussed on whether or not Justin Welby would resign as Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion (he did). Important though this was, it diverted attention away from an institutional culture that, over several decades, had put protecting the reputation of the church over protecting children from abuse. This ensured that a serial abuser was able to continue abusing children for decades, up until his death in 2018. Above all, the focus on whether or not Welby would resign avoided any questioning of the beliefs that Smyth had drawn on to justify his abuse of children  - a religious fundamentalism based on selective and literal interpretation (many would say misinterpretation or mistranslation) of millennia-old scripture, rather than on any consideration of morality or justice.

It’s a cult

“The CofE does pretty well in terms of safeguarding training. But it’s a complete disaster when it comes to dealing with safeguarding failures of which they are many. Think of it like a health service that focusses entirely on prevention, but completely fails anyone who is sick”

(Andrew Graystone, X, 9 Nov 2024).

Andrew Graystone’s suggestion that safeguarding failures in the Church of England relate solely to  historic abuse, and that its training prevents a new generation of abusers from accessing children, is unduly complacent. Much of the abuse that John Smyth  meted out was part of what Graystone himself recognised as a cult:

“I believe that the Iwerne movement has all the marks of a cult.  If we are to prevent abuse from happening it is important to understand the context that enables it to happen, and to be passed off as an acceptable part of whatever culture facilitates it. In this case the context was the toxic culture created by the Iwerne network and its founder, and the warped ideology that gave it its false sense of legitimacy.”

(Andrew Graystone, Bleeding for Jesus, 2021)

Smyth and the summer camps he led are, thankfully, no more. But the Church England is resisting the independent oversight of safeguarding that was recommended in a report that it had commissioned from Alexis Jay. Above all, it refuses to address the cult background to Smyth’s abusive behaviour,  and to acknowledge its attendant safeguarding risks. 

The Church’s  failure to recognise the dangers posed by cults lives on with its response to ‘transgenderism’ -  an ideology whose malign influence extends far beyond that of the Iwerne camps, and whose cult nature is dissected in Skirt Go Spinny’s documentary, Wrong Bodies, particularly in this extract.

The ‘transgender‘ cult is not only tolerated by the Church of England. The Church actively encourages it in its schools, which are attended by around a million children. Its promotion of ‘transgenderism’ is particularly apparent in its anti-bullying guidance, ’Flourishing for All’ (Sep 2024). 

This guidance acknowledges that although Church of England schools have a Christian foundation, their pupils include those of “all faiths and none.” Because of this, “a school will need to teach pupils how to respect different viewpoints.” This respect does not apply to different viewpoints about ‘gender’ though. ‘Gender questioning children’ (its preferred term for children who believe they have a so-called ‘gender identity’ separate from their sex) are to be “kept safe from polarised debates” as “this is absolutely essential in order to uphold and preserve (their) psychological safety.” So if a child has been persuaded online that they were born in the wrong body, the guidance is that this cannot be challenged by the school asserting the reality of sex (so a church school has not only to deny human biology, but also to imply that God got it wrong). 

Flourishing for All discourages church schools from being open to the possibility that a ‘gender questioning’ pupil may be same-sex attracted, or from pointing out that rejecting sex-role stereotypes is not changing sex. Allowing gender ideology to flourish unchallenged encourages children to dissociate from their bodies, and often to go on and seek unnecessary and damaging medical ‘treatment’. Schools following the guidance are unable to mention those risks, let alone advise against taking them.

The guidance insists that church schools must challenge “repeated mis-naming”. This affects all pupils, who will be required to use a pupil’s (or a teacher’s) preferred pronouns.  The way this damages a child’s perception, and how this threatens their safety, is explained by Barra Kerr here. The damage is particularly acute for girl pupils who are required to call their male teacher ‘Miss’.

Church schools are warned that if they make alternative arrangements for ‘gender questioning’ pupils, “such as individual changing rooms, toilets and showers in school or sleeping arrangements on residential trips”, then this must not be done “in a way that reinforces any sense of exclusion pupil may feel”.  In other words, if a boy says he will feel excluded if he cannot shower with the girls, then the girls must accept their boundaries being violated by him. In a sentence that echoes John Smyth’s appeal to scripture to justify abuse, the guidance adds that “we are to follow the example of Jesus who paid special attention to the excluded.”

The guidance insists that church schools must be “places of constant nurture and compassion”. This is to be nurture and compassion for “gender questioning children and transgender adults”, not for pupils whose boundaries are violated by policies dictated by the ‘gender’ cult. The reason for this discrimination, endlessly repeated, is that ‘gender questioning children and transgender adults’ are supposed to be a “highly at-risk group” whose “psychological safety” is under constant threat. 

Children who have been persuaded that their bodies are ‘wrong’ are certainly at risk. The risk is of being sucked into a cult that messes with their minds and is financed by an industry that profits from destroying their bodies. Yet this is not the risk that the Church of England’s guidance recognises, or protects children from. The guidance draws attention instead to a dubious statistic - “in 2022-23, transgender hate crime had increased by 11% compared to the previous year.” A ‘hate crime’ is anything which is perceived as hateful, and motivated by hostility. Calling a man who says he identifies as a woman ‘he’ can be recorded as a hate crime if he perceives this as hateful and motivated by hostility. As a measure of risk, the hate crime statistic quoted in Flourishing for All  is meaningless, and a diversion from the real risk.

‘Flourishing for All’ gives every indication that its authors have been captured by a cult which, by normalising the deconstruction of biological reality, seeks new recruits from children who are taught in Church of England schools.

It took the Church centuries before it recognised that supporting abuses like slavery and rape in marriage was wrong. It took decades to acknowledge the abuses perpetrated by John Smyth, and it has yet to address the cult doctrines that enabled them. How long will it take before it stops supporting the ‘gender’ cult’s promotion of body dissociation and boundary violation?

No child is born in the wrong body. This shouldn’t need to be said. Will the Church of England ever take a stand, for children and for reality, and openly acknowledge it? That would be something worth shouting about on Safeguarding Sunday.