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Documentary, Panorama Scandal In The Church Of England 2019
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00:00Tonight, the scandal of child abuse in the Church of England.
00:07I think it's been a very big problem, perhaps bigger than any of us would want to think.
00:12We investigate how senior clergy in one diocese failed to act.
00:17It should have been dealt with right away, and they didn't.
00:20They just turned a blind eye and moved on.
00:24Abusers in church diocese who were able to evade justice for decades.
00:29They're extremely serious. Some of the worst sexual offending that's imaginable.
00:34We ask, did the Church put its own interests before the needs of survivors?
00:39I think there was too much concern about the reputation of the Church,
00:42and there was not enough care for those who are themselves victims of abuse.
00:47And in the wake of past scandals, can we trust the Church to do the right thing today?
00:53The Church is not interested. The Church does not want to know.
00:57And that's today. Not years ago, that's today. It's happening now.
01:01The Blue Mountains in eastern Canada.
01:19A world away from Kevin Bennington's childhood in England.
01:25I've been here since 1976, 77.
01:30And so I'm longer here than I have been in England.
01:34So this is home.
01:36Kevin went to school 3,000 miles away in Lincoln,
01:40where he was a chorister in the Cathedral Choir.
01:43In this extraordinary landscape, do you ever think back to those days in Lincoln?
01:47No, not really. I've tried to forget about it.
01:49You think you've actively suppressed it all these years?
01:52I think I have, yeah. I've tried to anyway.
01:55Kevin was sexually abused until the age of 13 by this man, Roy Griffiths.
02:06He was deputy head teacher at Lincoln Cathedral School in the 1960s.
02:12Kevin was one of around 80 pupils.
02:16This is the first time Kevin's spoken publicly about his experience.
02:20He now knows he wasn't alone.
02:25He'd have one or two of us, or just me, in his apartment.
02:28The things that would happen, which I remember quite vividly,
02:32these things, he would bath us.
02:34And he'd have us naked, sitting watching the television,
02:37because we'd get to watch the TV.
02:39And then we'd have to be there, and he would touch us,
02:42and we'd have to touch him.
02:44When you say he was touching you, what was going on?
02:47Well, masturbating.
02:49Well, he'd try to.
02:51And the same thing, we'd have to do that to him as well.
02:55In return, I suppose we would get treats and candy and Chinese meals,
03:01vesta chow mein meals and stuff like that, which I used to love.
03:06Lincoln, with its huge cathedral,
03:08has been an important centre of the Church of England
03:11for hundreds of years.
03:14And Roy Griffiths held a position of trust
03:17right at the heart of it.
03:22Here he is during a service.
03:28And this footage shows him in charge on sports day.
03:33Over the years, that trust gave him access to other boys,
03:37like Mark Wheeler.
03:40That's Lincoln.
03:43That's in the... This one here?
03:45That's in the formal, kind of, chorister gear.
03:48Which is you?
03:49I'm the middle one.
03:51Mark has also never spoken publicly about his abuse before.
03:55Mr. Griffiths was cold and frightening.
03:59He was just all-powerful.
04:01Roy Griffiths was a live-in teacher at the school.
04:04When you got older, there were certain privileges.
04:08One of them was that you could go into his room at night
04:12and watch late-night TV.
04:14One evening, he invited me to come over to sit on his lap.
04:20And then I remember feeling his hand creeping down my groin
04:28towards my genitals and kind of stroking.
04:34And so I got off his lap.
04:37He didn't ever make me do that again.
04:39And that was that.
04:41But Kevin Bennington was repeatedly targeted by Roy Griffiths.
04:50In 1969, the abuse became more extreme on a school trip to Scotland.
04:57We stayed in the bed and breakfast.
04:59And he decided that he was going to try to have sex with me.
05:05At that point, I thought, this is not right.
05:09So I stopped it and I went out and spoke to this woman that was her house.
05:15And she, at that point, I told her what was happening.
05:18And she contacted my mother.
05:20Well, my mother's reaction was she was just flabbergasted and furious.
05:23She was ready to kill him.
05:24And that's when she went immediately down to Lincoln Cathedral
05:28to confront the bishop about what had happened.
05:31Kevin's mother complained to the then Bishop of Lincoln, Kenneth Riches.
05:37It was a clear opportunity decades ago for Roy Griffiths abuse to be stopped.
05:46The following year, another pupil made a complaint about Griffiths abusing boys at the school.
05:51There was a night when we heard that a boy had reported him for doing naughty stuff to kids.
06:00And had anybody else had this experience?
06:03And yes, I had.
06:04So I went forward and talked to the matron.
06:06And that's when I realised that what had happened wasn't quite right.
06:13Despite these reports, the school let Roy Griffiths continue teaching.
06:20for another two months.
06:22And they didn't tell the police.
06:24Instead, he was able to move to Papua New Guinea.
06:29We've discovered he went straight to this Anglican boys' school
06:33where he worked for at least ten years.
06:36It should have been dealt with right away.
06:39And the church should have instructed the police for being a pedophile.
06:45And they didn't.
06:47They just turned a blind eye and moved on.
06:54This failure to act in Lincoln was not a one-off.
06:59Child abuse was being buried in other dioceses too.
07:02But it would be another 40 years before the Church of England
07:06finally tried to put right the mistakes in its past.
07:10In 2007, the church ordered a national review of its staff and clergy files, going back decades.
07:22It wanted to find out how many cases had slipped through the net.
07:26It was called the Past Cases Review, and it should have been a chance for the church to discover, once and for all, the scale of its abuse problem in the past.
07:41Every one of the church's 42 dioceses, led by their all-powerful bishops, was supposed to take part.
07:53I think overall, the Past Cases Review was a good piece of work.
07:58It was to try and establish whether there were any other cases of potential child abuse sitting in a dusty file somewhere.
08:10We're talking thousands of files. I think I reviewed in excess of 3,000 files.
08:17Dioceses were told to employ independent child protection experts like Kate Wood.
08:23They scoured 40,000 staff records, looking for anything that could indicate child abuse and how it had been handled.
08:31You could come across a sentence, for instance, it could be something like,
08:38that unfortunate business in the 1960s, or that unfortunate business with the choir boys,
08:45that gave you no more information than that, but obviously raised concerns.
08:50The most important part came next.
08:54If a case hadn't been properly dealt with at the time, the diocese responsible was supposed to take action,
09:01which could include alerting the police.
09:08But right from the start, there was a serious flaw.
09:11The Church of England decided not to speak to survivors of abuse.
09:16This has completely dominated my life. The abuse took up ten years of my life.
09:21Phil Johnson leads a National Church Abuse Survivors Group.
09:26As a boy in Eastbourne, he was abused by more than one member of the clergy.
09:31At the time of the review, he offered to give his local diocese information about them.
09:38I thought I had hugely relevant information.
09:42And I was told that this review would not be interviewing anybody,
09:46that it was a paper review and would only be a review of records.
09:50So I thought it was just fundamentally flawed.
09:54So the review was not interested in talking to people who claimed to have experienced abuse,
10:00the people that were the victims of the survivors?
10:02Well, it certainly wasn't interested in talking to me.
10:05Here in Wells, the Bishop helps oversee how the Church of England now handles allegations of abuse.
10:12Why didn't the Church want to speak to survivors?
10:16I think there was a pastoral concern that we didn't want to re-traumatise folk,
10:21to disturb people or contact people who may no longer have any contact with the Church.
10:27I'm very clear that if we had spoken to survivors and victims of abuse,
10:32that we would have had a much better review taking place.
10:37The Church also told diocese they weren't typically expected to include dead clergy in their reviews.
10:45In a case where an abuser is dead, it doesn't mean the victims are.
10:49And the victims are the people who know what really happened.
10:52They're the people who knew if they colluded with other people,
10:55if they'd made complaints in the past that were covered up or not listened to.
10:59So unless you have a full picture of what's really happened,
11:04you're never going to know the full scale or scope of the abuse.
11:13Scores of serious abuse allegations were left out
11:16because the alleged perpetrators were dead.
11:23We've been given a confidential document from inside the Diocese of York.
11:27There are allegations here about 32 dead clergy from York Diocese
11:35that weren't considered during the past cases review.
11:39Some of the details make for disturbing reading.
11:42This entry says a vicar interfered with 10-year-old girls in the early 1980s.
11:48And this one talks about serious offences against boys.
11:52The investigation was announced by the Archbishop of York
11:55after the review had concluded.
11:58All dioceses were later asked to do the same.
12:04Dr. John Sentamu has never published the results,
12:07nor have other dioceses.
12:10The Archbishop said he wanted to consider the privacy of victims
12:13and families of alleged abusers.
12:16And lessons learned were shared within the Diocese of York.
12:22Why were some categories excluded?
12:24Was there a cover-up going on?
12:26No, I don't think there was a cover-up.
12:27We've learnt a huge amount in the last ten years.
12:30It should have been much better.
12:31So why were dead people excluded?
12:33I think that was an oversight.
12:35I think there was a concern to get on with the job,
12:38and therefore we started with the files that we had
12:41and didn't think about it in its breadth and its depth,
12:45which we're now seeking to do.
12:47In 2010, three years after the review had begun,
12:53the Church of England published its results.
12:56The number of cases that required further action,
12:59according to the Church, was surprisingly small.
13:02When the report was published,
13:05it was two sides of an A4 sheet of paper
13:08and had this ridiculous conclusion
13:12that there were only 13 cases in the Church of England
13:17in the last 50 years after reviewing 40,000 clergy files.
13:21And I just thought, this is not credible.
13:24Bishop Alan Wilson is one of the few senior clergy
13:28in the Church of England
13:30who's spoken out about the Church's handling of abuse.
13:33You know, just on the back of a fag packet,
13:35I could think of more than 13 cases.
13:38But that's what we would be told.
13:40Did you have experience of more than those
13:41that you'd heard about locally, for example?
13:43Oh, yes, yes.
13:45Well, cases that were questionable
13:47or people who had behaved questionably.
13:49The Church had rejected a number of cases,
13:53because it thought some diocese had taken too broad a view
13:57of the need for further action.
14:00I'm very disturbed now to find out
14:03that there seems to have been quite a process
14:06of whittling down the numbers
14:08by changing the criteria of what was being looked for.
14:11And I think there was a lot of massaging going on at the centre
14:14that was deeply suspect.
14:17I think it was a real mistake not to put out all the data
14:22and not everything we had.
14:23So it was a mistake to come down on that figure 13?
14:26I think it was a very clear mistake and a very big mistake.
14:29Because I think there was too much concern
14:30about the reputation of the Church
14:32and there was not enough care for those
14:34who are themselves victims of abuse.
14:37Of the 13 cases the Church of England said needed further action,
14:42not one involved the Diocese of Lincoln.
14:45We asked the diocese if it submitted any cases at all.
14:49It wasn't able to provide an answer.
14:55But four years later, Lincoln realised it had a problem.
14:59A new employee found the list that had been compiled
15:03for the past cases review.
15:05That made the diocese look again at all its files.
15:09It was then Lincolnshire Police were called in.
15:12There was 53 names on the first list.
15:15It was a surprise, to say the least,
15:17of the number of names that were there.
15:20Operation Redstone began,
15:22run by Detective Superintendent Rick Hatton.
15:25Not all of the 53 names involved alleged child abuse.
15:30We whittled it down to about 25 names
15:32whereby we either knew that they'd committed offences
15:36or there was some issue around risk
15:39to members of the public from them.
15:42There was the ongoing concern
15:43that actually those people were still involved
15:46in not necessarily the care,
15:48but certainly working with children.
15:50So there was still a risk?
15:51So potentially there was still a risk.
15:53Detectives began searching for victims and evidence
15:57from decades ago.
15:59Trying to build a case out of nothing.
16:01You've got no forensic evidence.
16:03You've got probably no witness evidence.
16:05Trying to trace people from, for instance,
16:07school records from the 1960s.
16:09And, you know, these people were sped
16:11to the four corners of the globe, really.
16:14One of the many trails led to Canada
16:17and Roy Griffiths victim Kevin Bennington.
16:20I never told my children.
16:23They didn't really know anything about this
16:25until the contact with the police.
16:27My wife is very upset about the whole thing.
16:30Do you think your life would have been different
16:32if this hadn't happened?
16:33More than likely.
16:34It probably would have been different.
16:35I could have been a totally different person.
16:37Roy Griffiths was finally convicted last year
16:43and sent to prison for six years,
16:45nearly five decades after Lincoln Cathedral School
16:48had quietly let him go.
16:52What did you feel when there he was,
16:54Roy Griffiths, in the dock
16:56and he was sentenced to prison?
16:58It was probably one of the most emotional days
17:05I've had as a police officer when he was sentenced.
17:09You know, the feelings I had for the victims
17:12and what they'd been through
17:13and what came out in court
17:15was quite heart-wrenching, to be fair.
17:17You know, and I was really proud of the team,
17:21the job they did and the investigation they did
17:23was first class.
17:28Operation Redstone also investigated this man,
17:31the Reverend John Bailey,
17:33former Director of Education for Lincoln Diocese.
17:37He abused three girls between 1955 and 1982.
17:44For the first time, one of them has agreed to speak.
17:48Reverend Bailey was friends with her family.
17:51He would take the opportunity
17:56to come upstairs when I was in bed
18:00if they were playing cards downstairs
18:03and he would touch me under my clothes
18:07while I was in bed, between my legs.
18:14How long did it go on for?
18:16It went on from when I was four till when I was 11,
18:22and it happened quite frequently
18:26because we saw an awful lot of them.
18:31Maria Horner was a detective on Operation Redstone.
18:35Did you understand the impact
18:37that John Bailey's abuse had had on his victims?
18:40Huge in terms of trust,
18:43trust of other people, full stop.
18:47The questioning and self-doubt
18:49and sense of betrayal was palpable.
18:52Some of the victims, it was still very, very difficult.
18:56John Bailey's victim eventually told her family about it in the 1990s.
19:03I got engaged to be married
19:05and I really didn't want him to come to the wedding.
19:09So I told my parents what had happened at that point for the first time,
19:19and that I think was the hardest thing I've ever done.
19:25Sorry.
19:26The woman's parents immediately wrote to John Bailey at Lincoln Diocese,
19:33telling him of the ordeal he'd put her through.
19:37The letter was opened by his assistant,
19:39forcing John Bailey to go to his boss.
19:43We can reveal it was the then Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Hardy.
19:48My understanding is John Bailey explained the matter away as a one-off,
19:53if you like, and nothing was done.
19:57So that was a red flag that should have resulted in some action.
20:01It was a clear opportunity, a potential for taking it further, yes.
20:06A missed opportunity?
20:08A missed opportunity, for sure.
20:10Bishop Hardy told us John Bailey admitted to him
20:13he'd touched up a female in the past.
20:15The Bishop says he reprimanded him,
20:18but kept no record of their conversation.
20:22John Bailey kept his job for six more years,
20:25until another victim came to light.
20:28The diocese called in the police,
20:30but the survivors didn't want to go to court.
20:35I've never wanted anything bad to happen to him.
20:38I wanted to forgive him.
20:40But it has always been a huge concern to me
20:44whether he was a risk to other people.
20:47That has always been my worry,
20:49that it might happen again to someone else.
20:53It was only when Lincoln Diocese contacted the police again in 2015
20:57that the survivors agreed to give evidence.
21:00John Bailey was sentenced to six years in prison.
21:03Just because they were what we call non-recent cases,
21:08doesn't make them any less serious.
21:10In fact, it makes them more serious because they weren't dealt with at the time,
21:14so there's a risk from the offender ongoing.
21:16Bishop Robert Hardy told us no one contacted him directly to make a comment or complaint about John Bailey.
21:25Had they done, he would have investigated.
21:28His failure, he said, was to trust John Bailey, which he deeply regrets.
21:32The failures in Lincoln let child abusers evade justice for years.
21:40Some of that risk could have been removed earlier and wasn't.
21:45How do you see that?
21:46Well, clearly that is the crux of the matter, that is the issue.
21:52You know, there was potential and it's quite clear from some of the files
21:55that there's potential that that risk could have been mitigated there and then at that time.
22:00Lincoln Diocese says investigations are continuing and wouldn't be interviewed.
22:06In a statement it said, past matters have not been handled well.
22:10It was committed to learning from mistakes and has worked with the police to manage risk.
22:16It apologised it took so long for justice to be served.
22:20It promised support to anyone contacting it about abuse and is making safeguarding part of its DNA.
22:30Two years ago the church commissioned an independent report into its past cases review.
22:36Seven dioceses were ordered to redo theirs.
22:38The church is very clear that we are aware that we failed and I hope that we are increasingly transparent.
22:46And the church says it's changed the way it responds to allegations of abuse.
22:51We take this now very seriously. It will be my hope and as we go forward I hope it will be increasingly understood
22:58that if survivors and victims of abuse wish to come forward, what they need is a response from the church that's compassionate,
23:04that is fair, that's appropriate and that is swift.
23:09But Matthew Ineson from West Yorkshire says that's not been his experience.
23:15I've met many victims and survivors of abuse and their experience is that the church is not interested, the church does not want to know.
23:26And that's today. Not years ago, that's today. It's happening now.
23:32When Matthew was 16, he was sent to stay temporarily with his local vicar, Trevor Diva Manakam, who raped him.
23:40The first time was terrible, really, really terrible. And then it became a pattern of behaviour.
23:47Did you tell anyone at the time what had happened to you?
23:50Afterwards, yes. At the time, I didn't think anyone would believe me because I was only young and I thought, who would believe me above the vicar?
23:59Despite his ordeal, Matthew kept his faith and became a vicar himself.
24:05Finally, in 2012, he says he told a bishop he'd been abused as a boy.
24:11I didn't get a chance to name my abuser. I just said I was abused by a priest when I was youngster.
24:17He said, thanks for telling me, but I really have to be elsewhere and kept looking at his watch and was gone.
24:22And how did you feel at that point? I was shocked.
24:24Matthew says over the next year he told other clergy, including Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York.
24:32How many people did you tell?
24:35I told eight times, twice in writing, the others verbally, to five different clergy.
24:43Three bishops, one archdeacon and to the Archbishop of York.
24:47And what was the response?
24:48Nothing. The one letter I got back was from Sentamu, which said, thank you for your letter, which I have read.
24:55Please be assured of my prayers and best wishes for you. That was it.
24:59I was one of them. I was a priest. I was one of their own.
25:05And if they can treat me like they have and do treat me, what hope does anybody else have?
25:10Matthew eventually told the police and Trevor Deva Manikam was charged with six counts of sexual abuse.
25:19He took his own life two years ago before he was due in court.
25:23It's really important that we learn from Matthew Ironson. He feels he's been let down.
25:31And I'm deeply, deeply sorry that that's how Matthew feels.
25:35There is, as a consequence, going to be a review of the way that he has been cared for, the way that he's been treated.
25:41The Archbishop of York said he believed Matthew's allegations were being dealt with, so there was no need for him to follow up.
25:52One bishop told us no disclosures were made to him. Another didn't comment.
25:57A third said Matthew hadn't given a name or details, and Matthew's complaints against him had been dismissed.
26:04The Archdeacon couldn't comment because of the new review.
26:07For victims who've kept a secret for decades, the only way to help heal their wounds is to bring abuse into the light.
26:20I hope if I can share what happened to me, maybe one other person might find it easier to share what happened to them.
26:29And it might help to prevent it happening.
26:31Until we respond in a way that's more like the Good Samaritan than an uptight institution trying to keep its nose clean and hide behind the sofa chattering to the lawyers, I think that we won't get anywhere with this.
26:48So is the church now ready to come clean about the extent of abuse in its past?
26:54How many cases have there been in the past and today?
26:59I was chairing a meeting only a few days ago when actually we gathered many, many statistics, and we're very happy now to put those figures into the public domain.
27:09We're not trying to hide things.
27:10What are those figures?
27:11We're building an ongoing picture between years to see how many cases we're looking at, what sort of cases they are.
27:18So is it dozens? Is it hundreds? Is it thousands of cases? What are we talking about?
27:23When we're looking at our cases in the past, the cases that are happening today, my concern is to make sure that prevention is at the very heart of what we do.
27:31So you're not going to give me those figures?
27:33Looking at overall numbers isn't, I don't think, the most helpful way.
27:38Those numbers are being brought together at the moment. They will be made public.
27:42The church says it will send numbers to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.
27:49But some campaigners say the church is incapable of putting its own house in order.
27:55They're now calling for a new law.
27:58I think that we cannot rely on institutions like the church to police themselves.
28:04I think all allegations of childhood sexual abuse should be reported outside of that institution.
28:13And I think this should be made into law.
28:16The Church of England aims to hold the moral high ground.
28:20Survivors say it can only do that if it rebuilds trust shattered by decades of hidden child abuse.
28:27Details of organisations offering information and support with sexual abuse are available at the BBC Action Line website.
28:43Or you can call for free at any time to hear recorded information on 0800 077 077.
28:50The Church of England
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