Three weeks ago, I testified at the UK Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse.
This is the largest public inquiry ever conducted in England and Wales. Forgive me for making the obvious point: the scale of the inquiry reflects the enormous amount of largely undisclosed and almost entirely covered-up historic child sex abuse crimes – in churches, in residential schools and children’s homes, and in custodial institutions.
I had been waiting to testify for a long time. I was approved as a “core participant” – giving me the right to both give evidence and to ask questions of other witnesses – over two years ago. I had ample time to fully prepare myself to give explicit testimony about my sexual abuse by an Anglican church minister in the 1970’s, which occurred when I was a teenager.
The Scale of the Cover-Up
It is worth noting a couple of the extraordinary details that were disclosed during a week of testimony by a series of Anglican Bishops, both past and present, from my home diocese of Chichester. These included:
- Numerous examples of complaint letters describing sexual abuse by clergy going “missing”, or “misfiled” in the diocese office;
- A mysterious bonfire in the courtyard of the Bishop’s Palace of a number of unidentified personnel files;
- The existence of a filing cabinet described in a handwritten human resources memo as the “Naughty Boys Cabinet”.
If you would like to listen to my personal testimony, you can do so here.
At the end of the three weeks of hearings designated as “Chichester case study”, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York – the leaders of the Anglican church – wrote formally to every Anglican parish in England and Wales saying that the church “must not simply say sorry” to the survivors of clerical sex abuse, but “demonstrate clearly” that lessons have been learned that will inform future practice and decision-making.
Better late than never – but the fact that sorry is not enough is something that I, other survivors, and the lawyers who work with us, have been pointing out for many years.
The Fight for Access to Justice
I have candidly disclosed my experiences of sexual violence as a child, a teen, and as a young woman, and I have written elsewhere about my experience of suing the church. What I want to focus on here is what my experience, and that of other survivors, means for everyone who fights for access to justice.
Because despite my personal privilege, and my access to education, resources, and support, that is what my testimony and that of every other survivor of sexual violence cries out for.
Just like the SRLs I work for at the NSRLP every day.
Access to Justice is Personal, not Objective
Each of us has our own, deeply personal understanding of what we need in order to feel that justice has been done. That understanding may evolve, and even change out of all recognition, over time.
For decades I thought I didn’t need to do anything about my abuse or my abuser. As I grew up, started to apply my legal training to advocate for vulnerable people, including children, in turn had my own children, and solidified my values, that changed.
No one knows better than you what you need to feel that justice has been achieved. This is why so many SRLs want control over their case strategy, and to be allowed to make their own decisions. It is why many SRLs tell me that no one can possibly know better what their case is “really” about than they do.
“Know” here does not mean just the intellectual framework of legal arguments – it is a deeper understanding that I believe we each have to reach for ourselves.
Justice Takes Many Small Steps
Achieving justice often takes a long time. Sometimes it feels as if nothing will ever happen to realize our needs. That what we want and need is always just that little bit out of reach. That even sustained effort – time, money, emotions – gets only the smallest amount of traction.
But I have learned that every small step matters. Even if a step seems so small as to be practically invisible, and even when any consequences only appear much later.
Because Access to Justice consists of lots and lots of small steps. These may be hard to measure while you are taking them, but they become clearer when you can look back on where you began, and compare that to where you stand now.
Access to Justice is a Journey, not a Destination
For many experiences of conflict and abuse, there may be no final retribution, vindication, or solution that will replace what went before.
I consider myself fortunate to have worked through many aspects of my abuse in both my personal and professional life in a way that has brought me some closure. But that does not mean that I shall ever be really and truly done with it.
More than 40 years after I was sexually terrorized by my church minister, I also think that I understand, finally, that “final” outcomes are often illusory. What is much more meaningful is coming to terms with the place we have reached on our journey, however near or far it may be from a solution that we once dreamt of.
Understanding Access to Justice this way frees us from our dependence on experts, or being held hostage to something that an outsider tells us we ought to want or deserve. It allows each of us our dignity and the ability to set our own goals. It is a far richer and more complex idea of Access to Justice than we teach at law school, or can find in the courts.
Don’t get me wrong – I think parents should pay child support, that women and men should be paid equally for equal work, and that corporations should pay their taxes, to give just a few examples of rights issues that are important to me. But I have mediated enough cases to know that there are few picture-perfect Access to Justice outcomes, and that we respect ourselves the best when we choose our own.
Heartfelt and so well said