Lord Carey’s forced resignation is an injustice: he, too, was a victim of Peter Ball

Jul 4, 2017 by Jill

by Martin Sewell, via Archbishop Cranmer:

This is a guest post by Martin Sewell, a retired Child Protection Lawyer and a member of General Synod. He considers here the wiles and manipulations of child-abuser Peter Ball, and advances a plausible defence of former Archbishop George, now Lord Carey.

If one reads the Gibb Report, with the child abuse story organised and catalogued in a single document, Lord Carey’s serious errors and misjudgements are obvious, especially through the lenses of our modern understandings of abuse. Life is experienced in a much more haphazard and diffuse way, however, and the story evolved over a lengthy period. For substantial periods the name of Peter Ball fell off the agenda, and when he returned it is of the nature of everyday life that it was not always the case that ‘joined-up thinking’ resumed.

We also need to recall that Peter Ball operated in a period when it was seriously advanced on behalf of abusers of children that ‘all children lie’, that they did so for trivial advantage, and quite seriously by some psychiatrists, that all little girls fantasise about having sex with their fathers. These were times of a very different mindset, and Ball lived and operated in a church which simultaneously condemned gay orientation and acts, yet comprised of men like George Carey who felt compassion for their plight and vulnerability.

Like Jimmy Savile, Ball’s professional reputation and successes within the Church conferred upon him a degree of untouchability which he knew, understood, and exploited. Like Savile, Ball worked within a large institution where many developed collective amnesia, willing to acknowledge ‘rumours’ but without a sufficient structurally rigorous safeguarding regime to collect all the evidence and force the key question to be asked: ‘What does all this mean?’

The comparison with Savile needs to go a stage further.

Read here

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Child abuse in the Church of England: hypocrisy, inconsistency and ongoing cover-up by Archbishop Cranmer