Secular Education Forum
The Secular Education Forum (SEF) provides expert and professional advice and opinion to the National Secular Society (NSS) on issues related to education and provides a forum for anyone with expertise in the intersection of education and secularism.
The SEF's main objective is to advocate the value of secularism/religious neutrality as a professional standard in education. The SEF welcomes supporters of all faiths and none. It provides expert support for the NSS working towards a secular education system free from religious privilege, proselytization, partisanship or discrimination.
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Education blogs and commentary
A selection of blogs and comment pieces on education and secularism. For education news from the NSS, please click here.
Schools should be liberated from the compulsion of worship
Posted: Thu, 16th Sep 2021
As a bill to reform collective worship progresses in parliament, Stephen Evans argues that the time has come for lawmakers to recognise that laws mandating worship have no place in modern Britain.
This article is available in audio format, as part of our Opinion Out Loud series.
It was a tale of two bishops in the House of Lords last week when peers debated a bill to replace the duty on schools to hold acts of Christian worship with a requirement to provide inclusive assemblies.
The retired Anglican bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, supported reform of the law, arguing that the present legal situation "simply does not reflect the society in which we now live". The serving bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, speaking from the bishop' bench, argued that the "present arrangement works well".
The proposed law, tabled by Baroness Burt, would leave faith schools, including those controlled by the Church of England, untouched – and would only apply to schools without a religious designation.
Nevertheless, the bishop, who had only just finished leading prayers in the same chamber, urged his fellow parliamentarians to block it. He said worship was a "vital part of what it means to be human" and the majority of the nation's children and young people shouldn't be denied "the experience of spiritual, moral, social and cultural development connected to a living tradition". His tradition, obviously.
Underneath the self-serving rhetoric was a warning that the values of Western civilization are essentially Christian—and if Christianity withers on the vine, the associated values might die with it.
The extent to which the values of a liberal democracy flow from a Christian moral framework is debateable. But given that we're already living in a post-Christian society, it is clear that what we value in Western society holds strong, despite Christianity's decline. For many people, Christianity's diminished influence has facilitated a freer and fairer Britain. It's no coincidence that the least religious societies tend to be the most peaceful, prosperous, and equitable. And let's face it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a more useful and relevant ethical blueprint than the Ten Commandments, with their prohibition of free speech and talk of slaves, oxes, and donkeys.
The idea that without a strong Christian presence in public life, we'll all go to hell in a handcart, is simply false. It certainly doesn't justify religious worship being imposed on people through legislation.
The bishop, not relying solely on this line of argument, said collective worship has other practical benefits, providing "a time to pause and reflect; to gather in community; to mourn in times of tragedy; to foster common values; to celebrate festivals, and to build religious literacy".
All the above can be better delivered through inclusive assembles, which Baroness Burt's bill proposes, along with a renewed commitment to citizenship education. Schools play a vital role in transmitting the common values of society to future generations. Acts of religious worship are neither helpful nor desirable in achieving this aim.
In defending compulsory Christian worship, the bishop was merely using his privileged position to further the interests of the Church and try to justify the unjustifiable.
The simple truth is that laws mandating worship don't belong in a modern, pluralistic liberal democracy – especially one that respects the principle of freedom of religion or belief. Young people should be given the tools and the freedom to develop their own beliefs.
This is also the view of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which has called on the UK to repeal legal provisions for compulsory attendance at collective worship in publicly funded schools, and to ensure children can independently exercise a right to withdraw from any religious observance that does take place.
The retired bishop, Richard Harries, told peers he supports the Bill "because Christianity is fundamentally committed to free choice. The only good reason for believing in a religion is because you believe and personally recognise it to be true."
Free choice is one thing reasonable people of all faiths and none should be able to agree on. It should be a matter of deep shame for the Church of England that its bishops still support their religion being imposed by law.
Thankfully, peers rejected the bishops' plea and the bill progressed unopposed. However, without government support, it is unlikely to become law.
The current collective worship requirement is a dead letter law that brings the UK into disrepute. The government should recognise this reality and liberate schools from the compulsion of religion.
Image: davidf, Shutterstock
Major reform is needed to ensure equality and fairness in marriage law
Posted: Mon, 13th Sep 2021
Marriage law in England and Wales has failed to keep up with changing social realities. Russell Sandberg, the author of a new book on the topic, calls for change to put couples – not religious institutions – in control.
The Marriage Act 1753 is often understood as providing the foundations of the modern law on marriage. It stated that all marriages except for Jewish and Quaker weddings were to take the form of a public ceremony in the parish church at which a clergyman would officiate according to authorised rites and it required that the marriage be preceded by banns or licence. Breach of any of these requirements, which had previously made a marriage irregular, would now render it void.
Although it was not the first attempt to regularise the performance and registration of marriage, the Marriage Act 1753 is often regarded to be a pivotal moment providing certainty as to who was married and stopping marriages taking place in ways that the state was unaware of. This was problematic because marital status bestowed certain legal rights and social attitudes at the time saw children born out of wedlock as being illegitimate.
Rebecca Probert's work has questioned whether the act largely reinforced existing social conventions, rather than stamping out a serious and prevalent problem of marriages being conducted in various and unusual ways. But the effect of the legislation was clear. Legislation was thought necessary so that the law and social practice on marriage coincided.
Today, the law on marriage in England and Wales is governed by the Marriage Act 1949, a statute that brought together laws that were much older. It can be argued that the perceived problems that led to the Marriage Act 1753 apply once more. There is a disconnect between social practice and the law on intimate adult relationships.
English and Welsh law has failed to keep up with the social reality of how relationships are formed and recognised in the 21st century. Though welcome changes have been introduced in terms of civil partnerships and same sex marriage, a number of relationship forms now exist outside the scope of the Marriage Act 1949.
This includes the increasing numbers of cohabiting couples as well as two other relationship types that I discuss in my new book Religion and Marriage Law: the need for reform. The first is what may be styled as 'non-religious marriages': those ceremonies that are conducted by belief organisations such as Humanists UK or by independent celebrants. Marriage law provides no means by which these can be legally binding in their own right.
The second category is 'unregistered religious marriages': these exist where the couple undergo a religious ceremony that does not comply with the Marriage Act 1949. Religious marriages are recognised under the act but in relation to religious weddings other than Church of England, Church in Wales, Quaker and Jewish ceremonies the ceremony must take place in a registered place of religious worship in order to be legally binding. Otherwise, though the couple are married in the eyes of their faith, they are not married in the eyes of the law.
Marriage law, therefore, discriminates against those who hold non-religious beliefs as well as those religions who are without a building or who have a tradition of marriages taking place outside places of worship.
Couples who enter into either category of weddings need to undergo an additional civil marriage ceremony in order to become legally married. This causes additional expense and is viewed by many, not least the couple themselves, as being unnecessary: who refers to their wedding as the happiest days of their life?
Moreover, many of these couples do not get around to the additional civil ceremony in the registrar office. In some cases this is not a voluntary decision on the part of both of the parties. And it means they lack the legal rights that they often think they will have in the event of separation or death. They are in the same legal position as cohabiting couples under English law. Unlike many jurisdictions, there are limited rights afforded to them on relationship breakdown in England and Wales.
My new book synthesises the debate to date and considers how a new legal framework on intimate adult relationships could be developed. It argues that there is a need to move from a system that regulates buildings to one that regulates officiants. It proposes that because of the difficulties of defining the terms 'religion' or 'belief', the right to nominate officiants should be afforded to any organisation that meets certain minimal requirements. Further, independent celebrants would be able to be registered.
Such reform would solve the concerns around non-religious marriages and would lessen concerns about unregistered religious marriages, since the discriminatory requirements concerning buildings that prevent some religious weddings from complying with the law would be removed.
However, there would still be some unregistered religious marriages – and some of these would not result from a voluntary and witting choice by both of the parties. The introduction of limited cohabitation rights on separation would deal with this, and I recommend the adoption of a system similar to the Scottish model. This would allow a cohabitant to seek a financial order in circumstances where they have suffered a financial detriment as a result of the relationship coming to an end. Cohabitants who don't wish to be bound by these rules could opt out.
My proposals would bring about a modern marriage law that provides no special treatment on grounds of religion or differential rules based on historical quirks. It would allow couples the freedom to choose how they wish to marry and would also provide protection to those marriages that are outside the scope of the current law.
There is a need for a 21st century version of the Marriage Act 1753 – but one that starts from a pluralistic perspective, and which puts the couple themselves in control, not the institutions of organised religion.
Religion and Marriage Law: the need for reform is published by Bristol University Press
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.
Why can’t charity regulators tackle child abuse in faith groups?
Posted: Mon, 13th Sep 2021
An inquiry's report has highlighted the barriers which regulators face in dealing with child abuse in religious charities. Megan Manson says this should prompt reforms – including in how charity law deals with religion.
Religions have a privileged place in charity law. 'The advancement of religion' is a recognised charitable purpose under the Charities Act 2011, which means an organisation can effortlessly become a registered charity by virtue of promoting religion.
As a result, an immense number of religious organisations are registered charities. There are approximately 34,000 faith-based organisations registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales – about 20% of all charities.
These figures were included in the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)'s recent report on child protection in religious organisations and settings. It's not surprising that so many faith groups take advantage of their privileged status in charity law. Becoming a registered charity endows significant tax benefits, including the potential to claim Gift Aid.
Many would expect that an organisation given generous tax exemptions would be robustly regulated to ensure it adheres to the highest professional standards – including, of course, safeguarding the welfare of children. The public has a right to regard charitable status as a 'seal of approval', a mark that a charity is properly regulated and managed to high standards of ethics and professionalism. But IICSA's report suggests there is a yawning gulf between these expectations and reality.
In its analysis of inspection and oversight of religious organisations, IICSA found that the Charity Commission can do very little to help keep children safe in religious settings.
According to IICSA, registration with the Charity Commission "does not amount to quality assurance of its conduct". This includes matters of safeguarding.
The commission expects all registered charities to have child protection policies, but it does not routinely ask for them or require them to be provided. Indeed, the commission "has no discretion to refuse to register a charity if there are concerns about the charity's safeguarding arrangements or policies", except in "extreme cases where an organisation may fail the public benefit requirement". And as the National Secular Society's 2019 research highlighted, the threshold to meet the public benefit requirement appears quite low – especially for religious charities.
Furthermore, the commission has no role in investigating individual incidents of abuse. It does not have "the resources or the powers" to provide an auditing mechanism.
The commission told IICSA that it often relies on information in the media or complaints from the public, because not all charities use the system of reporting 'serious incidents' consistently or at all. Perhaps due to this lack of reporting, only "a very small minority" of statutory inquiries undertaken by the commission relate to child protection in religious settings. Between April 2014 and November 2019, only 13 of the 622 statutory inquiries which were opened related to safeguarding in charities whose objects included 'religious activities'.
As IICSA put it, the commission "cannot and does not monitor the policies, practices and procedures of each individual charity in the way that an inspectorate would".
So one has to ask: if the Charity Commission is unable to regulate issues of safeguarding in religious charities, what is the point of a regulator in the first place?
It should be stressed that the Charity Commission's inability to tackle child abuse in religious charities is, for the most part, not its fault. It's the system that's at fault.
On the one hand, the commission is deprived of both the resources and the legal powers to adequately tackle child abuse in charities. On the other, charity law creates a legal duty for organisations with a turnover of over £5,000 a year that provide services defined as "charitable" in law to register with the commission. This essentially means any organisation meeting the financial threshold that could be considered to be 'advancing religion' must, by law, register with the commission.
Consequently, every month the commission is swamped with hundreds of new charities on its register. Between 1 January and 1 September this year, 2,670 new charities were added to the register, of which 575 had charitable objects classified as 'religious activities'.
The lack of resources and legal powers, combined with a law that's geared towards constant inflation of the charity sector, mean the commission is likely to find itself increasingly ill-equipped to handle safeguarding issues in charities. And if the commission is to play a greater role in keeping children safe, there will also need to be considerable reforms both within the commission and in wider charity law.
The Charity Commission must make it easier for members of the public to file a complaint. At present, it says members of the public must "complain directly to the charity first" about any concerns they have. But there are numerous reasons why a complainant may not want to complain to the charity or its trustees directly, or why to do so would be completely ineffective. This is particularly true when it comes to safeguarding issues. In fact, complaining to the trustees before reporting a charity to the commission may make it harder for the commission to investigate, as giving the charity a 'heads up' may prompt particularly unscrupulous trustees to conceal or destroy evidence of wrongdoing.
We must also consider removing 'the advancement of religion' from the list of charitable purposes in the Charities Act. The public benefit of advancing religion is no longer recognised by a large proportion of the public, and the teachings and activities of some religions are regarded as harmful by many. Some of the ideologies promoted by religious organisations can in fact contribute to safeguarding problems – for example, IICSA highlighted the patriarchal nature and censorship of any matters relating to sex as barriers to effective reporting of child abuse allegations.
Removing 'the advancement of religion' would not, and should not, prevent religious organisations that provide a genuine public benefit from securing registered charity status, as they can register under another charitable purpose. But it would result in groups that are only interested in promoting their religion no longer being eligible for registration. This would help to slim down the bloated charity sector by ensuring only those organisations that do provide a public benefit can register, significantly cutting the number of charities the commission has to regulate.
And this in turn would give the Charity Commission greater capacity – enabling it to work more effectively in protecting children in all charities, religious or not.
Indonesia mosque attack is a reminder that Ahmadi Muslims’ human rights need defending
Posted: Thu, 9th Sep 2021
After a mob attacked an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in Indonesia and anti-Ahmadi rallies took place in Pakistan, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid says the failure to defend this marginalised group has far-reaching implications.
On Friday, a mosque was attacked in Sintang district of Indonesia's West Kalimantan Province, by an Islamist mob of at least 200 people. The mosque, belonging to followers of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, was vandalised and had parts of its structure demolished, because Ahmadiyya beliefs are deemed 'heretical' by Islamists of other sects.
The Sintang mosque destruction is the latest attack on the increasingly persecuted Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world. In 2008, the radical Islamist Hizbut Tahrir targeted a rally in support of Ahmadis, injuring 34, at Jakarta's National Monument. Instead of taking action to protect the attacked community, Indonesia passed a decree eight days later banning the preaching of Ahmadiyya Islam.
An anti-Ahmadi surge has been witnessed over the next 13 years since the decree, with an increasing number of mosques attacked, and worshippers assaulted and killed. Members of the community describe Manislor village in West Java province as an 'Ahmadi ghetto' with Ahmadi Muslims denied state IDs over their beliefs.
Ahmadiyya Islam is deemed sacrilegious owing to the sect's belief in its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as an Islamic messiah, which representatives of other sects deem contradictory to Muhammad's status as the final prophet of Islam. Founded in the late 19th century in the Punjab province of British India, since partition most Ahmadis have lived in Pakistan, where they have been constitutionally excommunicated and widely persecuted.
On Tuesday, rallies were organised across Pakistan, with state patronage and security, to commemorate the 47th anniversary of Ahmadis being officially declared non-Muslims following the second amendment to the Pakistani constitution in 1974. From Islamist leaders, to leading politicians, to prime minister Imran Khan's adviser, all celebrated the founding of a veritable apartheid against Ahmadis, dubbing it a fitting tribute to Islam's prophet and Khatm-e-Nabuwwat (the finality of prophethood).
Transforming Pakistan into the only country in the world where self-identifying as a Muslim, or even performing Islamic rituals can be criminalised, the local anti-Ahmadiyya movement in Pakistan streamlined itself as the global organisation Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (Assembly to Protect the Finality of Prophethood). The Islamist umbrella, known commonly as Khatm-e-Nabuwwat, has spread anti-Ahmadi bigotry and hatred across the world, from Turkey to Bangladesh, to India, to the US and indeed Indonesia.
Anti-Ahmadiyya violence has also reached the UK, where the community has established its headquarters, amid exodus from Pakistan and other parts of the world. An Ahmadi man was killed in Glasgow for his faith five years ago, with the murderer linked to UK branches of Khatm-e-Nabuwwat. Insider accounts reveal how Khatm-e-Nabuwwat plots the boycott of the Ahmadis in the UK, where calls for mass murder of the Ahmadis have echoed for years. The Khatm-e-Nabuwwat has also been an affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain, which reacted to the British Ahmadi's murder by saying that there was "too much pressure" on the organisation to accept Ahmadis as Muslims.
As is evident, Islamic organisations and groups, both in Muslim majorities and minorities, are upholding theological differences as grounds to deny an entire community their freedom of conscience and suppress their fundamental human rights. This is continuing to transpire in the rabidly Islamist Pakistan, the officially secular Indonesia, and even the West, where those clamouring against 'Islamophobia' rarely speak up for the unparalleled persecution of Ahmadi Muslims around the world.
One can imagine the outrage if non-Ahmadi Muslims were criminalised for reading Islamic scriptures and preaching Islam anywhere in the world, or if any organisation in the West was inclusive of everyone but Muslims. While many liberals in the West admirably speak up against the marginalisation of Muslims within their countries, and elsewhere, they fall lamentably short of questioning the persecution within Muslim communities, perhaps for fears of being labelled 'Islamophobic'. It is evident that Ahmadis are among the many Muslims that progressives in the West have abandoned, while catering to Muslim narratives of victimhood often shaped by Islamists.
Indeed, much of the onus to curtail Ahmadiyya persecution lies on progressive Muslims, many of whom have failed to back the marginalised community's right to self-identify, even while condemning the overt violence against them. While the murderous blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries have silenced many, even those living in the safety of the West have generally remained quiet on whether Ahmadis should have the right to call themselves Muslims. Seemingly, many equate supporting the right to belief with support for the belief itself.
It shouldn't be particularly hard, especially for those claiming to uphold pluralist progressive values, to disagree with the differing Ahmadiyya views, while at the same time accepting it as an interpretation of Islam. Failure to do so has now amplified hardline Sunni Islamists to call for the Shia to be similarly treated in many Muslim-majority countries.
Moreover, by pushing a question of basic human rights into the realm of theology, such voices are inadvertently emboldening anti-Muslim far-right groups, who are increasingly claiming that there are ideas exclusive to Islam that make Muslims as a whole incompatible with Europe. For, if Muslims uphold a set of beliefs that defines all Muslims, it allows Muslimophobes to use a different, more contentious, set to label all Muslims.
Conflicting interpretations are also critical to uphold a progressive version of the religion, and much needed Islamic reform. For, anyone that claims there is only one 'true Islam' — including indeed members of the Ahmadiyya community — plays right into the hands of jihadists and radical Islamists. When multitude of interpretations is rejected, literalism takes over.
To prevent that, both Muslim majorities and minorities should be encouraged to question if they're denying the many rights which they take for granted in the West to their own marginalised sections. And the plight of Ahmadi Muslims should provide sufficient grounds for self-reflection.
Image: The Baitul Futuh mosque, an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in south London.
Fundamentalists are still being given too much of a free pass on child abuse
Posted: Wed, 8th Sep 2021
The IICSA inquiry's latest report on child abuse in religious organisations and settings provides welcome evidence of significant problems – but is still too light on much-needed solutions, says Richard Scorer.
The report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) into child protection in religious organisations and settings was published last Thursday, and gained widespread publicity.
IICSA's investigation – looking at child protection in minority religions such as Judaism, Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses – is one of very few such investigations worldwide. Similar issues were examined by the Australian Royal Commission into institutional abuse, but whether due to political sensitivity or other reasons, child abuse in minority religions has tended to escape close examination. So the very fact that this investigation took place at all is important; hopefully it will be the beginning of a long overdue process of scrutiny.
What should we make of IICSA's report? I represented seven individuals and organisations in this part of the inquiry, all of them working on behalf of victims and survivors. Inevitably they have a range of views about the report, and the following is my personal view.
A very welcome feature of the report is its analysis of the problem of unregistered schools, which have become a haven for the physical and sexual abuse of children, and the legal loopholes which enable them to continue to operate. I wrote about this issue during the inquiry hearings. Even when Ofsted investigates, it lacks the necessary powers to close illegal schools. Many of these schools are religious – of the religious ones about half are Islamic, a quarter Jewish and a quarter Christian. Around 250,000 children receive 'supplementary schooling' or out of school provision from faith organisations. Most of these are provided by fundamentalist religious groups. The lack of regulation and enforcement in this area is a scandal and IICSA's report has helped to highlight this – it will hopefully be an important step towards legal change.
Another welcome feature of the report is its systematic analysis – at least in general terms – of the barriers facing victims and survivors of abuse in religious settings – barriers both to disclosure by victims, and to getting the organisations themselves to take action. These issues – victim blaming, shame and honour; approaches to discussions of sex and sexuality; the use of religious texts and beliefs; patriarchy; abuse of power by religious leaders; resistance to external agencies; a focus on reputational protection at the expense of children; and an instinct to self-police – have rarely been enumerated before, in such a comprehensive way, in a public document.
Last Thursday the media sat up and took notice. This is very important. These issues have led to what I described as a "catastrophic" failure of safeguarding of children, one which cannot be allowed to continue.
That said, IICSA could and should have done more to investigate the extent of that failure, particularly in fundamentalist religious settings. IICSA's reluctance to probe further caused particular anger amongst victims and survivors of abuse in the Jehovah's Witnesses, as my client Lloyd Evans explained last month.
IICSA's rationale for its refusal to "get the data" appears to have been that this was a thematic investigation, and that there was no justification for treating different religious groups differently in terms of the extent of disclosure demanded of them. If so this is misconceived. Religious groups vary in their levels of openness, their willingness to acknowledge the problem of sexual abuse, their willingness to engage with secular society and assimilate secular expertise into their internal safeguarding procedures, and their attitudes to women, sex education, the autonomy of children and human rights generally.
Quakers and liberal Jews approach these issues differently from Jehovah's Witnesses, ultra-Orthodox Jews or fundamentalist Muslims. As we saw in the hearings, some groups like the Baptist Union have made serious and sustained efforts to improve safeguarding; others deny that child abuse happens at all in their settings. And whilst all religious groups have succumbed to the tendency to conceal abuse, groups differ in the prevalence of abuse and the extent to which they are prepared to take active and organised steps to conceal it. The Jehovah's Witnesses have long been accused of organised concealment, and given that backdrop the inquiry needed to probe further – something it was unwilling to do.
My concern is that underlying this may be a reluctance to single out fundamentalist religious groups. If so, this is wrong. In a free society, people have a right to be Jehovah's Witnesses, and that right should always be protected. But we also need to be open and honest about how religious fundamentalism creates the ideal conditions for child abuse and cover up. Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters, another of my clients in the inquiry, made that point powerfully in her evidence. There can be no tiptoeing around this. When it comes to child protection, religious fundamentalism is a serious problem; we should not pretend otherwise.
A linked problem with IICSA's report is that, although it is effective in highlighting, in general terms, the barriers to disclosure, and the deep-seated cultural problems in religious settings, it seems at times to shy away from spelling out the implications for particular religious groups. Yehudis Goldsobel, the founder and CEO of Migdal Emunah, an organisation which works with Jewish survivors and one of my clients in this investigation, has spoken powerfully of the problem of 'disguised compliance': in other words where organisations appear to adopt safeguarding policies but in practice act in a way which is designed to obstruct or undermine them.
Whilst highlighting this problem in general terms, the report then pulls its punches. The report notes that the Union of Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella group for ultra-Orthodox Judaism, has only recently – in June 2021 – adopted a safeguarding policy. But it says nothing about the obvious risk of disguised compliance in this instance.
The report notes that the Jehovah's Witnesses have adopted a safeguarding policy which (the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses claims) means that allegations will be reported to the police. (This claim is contradicted by a careful reading of CCJW's own evidence to the inquiry). But the report makes no observation as to whether those policies might also be a form of disguised compliance – when the real life, first hand experiences of survivors, and their advocates like Lloyd Evans who gave evidence to IICSA, would suggest exactly that.
And then, in its recommendations, the report states that all religious organisations should adopt a safeguarding policy – again without saying anything about the obvious and real risk of disguised compliance. Victims and survivors may feel that IICSA is happier to talk about barriers in the abstract than to name and shame the worst culprits.
Perhaps the biggest issue I have with this report, however, is that after five years and numerous investigative reports and other publications from IICSA we still have no real sense as to how it intends to address the problems it has identified. Its reports are a long and well evidenced litany of institutional cover up and failure – and thanks to IICSA we know vastly more about abuse in religious settings than we did in 2015. But what everyone wants to know now is: where do we go from here?
IICSA's position is that it will present its main recommendations in its final report next year. I accept that logically, definitive recommendations should come after all of the investigative work is complete. But by this stage of the inquiry one might have expected a sense of the direction of travel. In particular, is IICSA intending to rely on voluntarism and goodwill from religious organisations to address these problems, or has it concluded that they can only be addressed by statutory legislation? And if so, what sort of legislation might it have in mind?
The lack of clarity on that makes it difficult to make sense of where some of IICSA's observations in this report fit into any wider framework. Quite rightly, for example, the report contains some damning comments about the Jehovah's Witnesses' 'two witness rule' – the rule that in the absence of a confession of abuse, two witnesses are required to prove the allegation, something almost never possible in abuse cases. It is crystal clear that IICSA thinks that the rule serves to protect perpetrators.
So what does IICSA, a statutory inquiry empowered to make recommendations, think should happen now? Is the inquiry recommending that CCJW scraps the rule? It appears so, but nothing along these lines is included in the report's recommendations. But in any case, the Jehovah's Witnesses are a fundamentalist religious cult who interpret scripture literally, which is why they have the two witness rule in the first place. CCJW isn't going to change the two witness rule of its own volition, and a report which fails to acknowledge that is simply not facing reality. Does IICSA believe that the state can or should intervene legislatively to force CCJW to change its internal procedures? The report doesn't say, or give us any hint as to the inquiry's thinking. So the section of the report which identifies the two witness rule as profoundly harmful to children simply hangs there with no hint as to what, if anything, parliament should do about it. Five years into this inquiry, this feels unsatisfactory.
As I've argued many times before, the only effective answer to the problems identified in this report is new law, particularly in the form of well-designed mandatory reporting. Self-policing has failed. In its place we need a completely new legal framework, and to address serious weaknesses in regulatory agencies. Anything less will leave yet more generations of children at risk of sexual and physical abuse.
IICSA can still recommend that, and I hope it will. But this report – good and path breaking though much of it is – is better at identifying problems than pointing us towards to those much needed solutions. And victims and survivors may feel that for all the powerful analysis of failings and worse, religion – particularly of the fundamentalist variety – is still getting too much of a free pass.
Image: Namning/Shutterstock.com.
