Abuse of clergy to be researched with state funding

Jun 1, 2018 by

by Abigail Frymann Rouch, Church Times:

The survey is being carried out by academics from Royal Holloway University of London, with £5000 funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government via the police’s anti-hate crime website, True Vision.

A ministry spokesman said: “We have responded to the Christian community’s concerns around hate crime by funding Church Watch via True Vision to research the scale of the problem and to develop support to prevent incidents from occurring. Once we receive the results of this research we can decide on the next steps.”

Professor Jonathan Gabe from the department of criminology and sociology at Royal Holloway said: “We’ll be asking if clergy have experienced any form of verbal abuse or threats or assaults, how they manage these situations, and what precautions they take to minimise the possibility of these occurring.”

The survey will also ask whether the priest has reported such incidents to his or her diocese or the police. An area of inquiry not covered in the last survey of its kind, carried out by Royal Holloway in 2000, will be online harassment.

Professor Gabe added that he was also interested to see whether clergy received less respect today owing to increasing secularisation.

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