Be open and honest with us

Keeping confidential agreements from survivors of clerical abuse is no different from lying to us, says Christopher Longhurst.

When it comes to church officials and leaders of survivor peer-support groups entering into agreements around reporting sexual abuse in churches, confidentiality and exclusivity are entirely inappropriate.

In fact, confidentiality and exclusivity risk harming victims and survivors because they offend against trust, openness and transparency.

As a survivor of clerical child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of New Zealand, I have no reluctance to speak out against both the secrecy of abuse perpetrated by church officials throughout the world, and now the abuse of secrecy being perpetrated by leaders of powerful lobbying groups for survivors in New Zealand.

Making secret commercial-inconfidence agreements with the Catholic Church is shameful in itself. Refusing to disclose these agreements to survivors is doubly shameful.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, confidential agreements have been used to cover up countless offences. They have been used especially by bishops of the Catholic Church to conceal serial sexual molestation of thousands of children by priests and bishops around the world, to keep the number of incidents secret, reporting processes secret, church payouts secret, and the results of investigations secret. Bishops even paid parents to keep quiet about the abuse of their own children.

Secrecy, secretiveness, concealment, confidentiality, silence, denial and coverup have all harmed victims and survivors of clergy sexual abuse worldwide.

I am not talking about the privacy of personal information but about confidential agreements regarding processes and policies dealing with the reporting of clerical sexual abuse. Neither am I talking about people, but undisclosed arrangements between church leaders and leaders of peer-support groups.

From a survivor’s perspective, leaders of powerful peer-support groups who sign confidential agreements with churches and refuse to share those agreements with survivors create suspicion and distrust, further harming survivors. Such agreements pose obvious dangers to the

Secrecy, secretiveness, concealment, confidentiality, silence, denial and cover-up have all harmed victims of clergy sexual abuse worldwide.

wellbeing and safety of survivors.

In his latest attempt to manage the Catholic Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandal, Pope Francis titled his new procedural rules Vos Estis Lux Mundi (You are the light of the world). This verse comes from Matthew’s gospel. It continues: ‘‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds.’’

This choice of passage is telling because it implies that speaking out, reporting abuse, and uncovering the cover-ups give light for everyone.

Instead, confidential arrangements with Catholic Church officials dull the light of truth in the darkness of the abuse hidden for decades from public view.

In fact, there should be no need for support-group leaders to enter into agreements with churches in order for churches to do the right thing by survivors.

Churches have a unique responsibility to reach out to victims and survivors of clerical sexual abuse through all available means – church bulletins, notices, media advertisements, etc – and to extend support for therapy, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, job training and the like, prescinding any confidential arrangements.

So, why would such leaders sign confidential agreements with church officials in the first place? What could motivate such a tactic? Money? Power? Control? When a Catholic bishop gives money to

an organisation to deal with sexual abuse through a confidentiality agreement, this creates even graver suspicion. Could he be paying the support group to keep the abuse cases secret? If not, then why the need for confidentiality?

It is not acceptable to say that the existence of such agreements is not confidential, as asserted by one leader of a powerful lobbying group for male survivors in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Worse is when persons who are not survivors, though claim to be our spokespersons, celebrate such secret agreements with church leaders. Those church leaders are the very people on committees which have concocted elaborate schemes now being used in New Zealand to cover up the cover-ups, for example, the Te Houhanga Rongo – A Path to Healing document of the Catholic Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Confidential agreements work just the way they sound. They add to the erosion of trust in the church and in society. Abusers love confidential agreements because they prevent information about clergy sex crimes from getting to the public. Their exclusivity causes division and prevents survivors from knowing about each other.

Leaders of powerful survivor-support organisations which claim to support survivors by signing confidential agreements with churches, though refusing to disclose them, risk being seen by survivors as capitalising on our abuse. Keeping such agreements from us is no different from lying to us.

Such agreements will not lead to our healing. On the contrary, you cannot have a genuinely supportive relationship with people who keep secrets from you. Survivors must have access to the agreements made by people claiming to represent them.

For leaders of peer-support groups to become focused on their own institutions and not on survivors is to institutionalise peer support. Ivan Illich, the CroatianAustrian philosopher and critic of institutions of modern Western culture, said that institutions always end up perverting the very principles upon which they were founded to protect.

Bishop Michael Dooley of Dunedin, referring to the church, affirmed that the institution can never be more important than the protection of the people in its care. The needs and priorities of victims and survivors must be at the forefront of any institutional response, and one of those needs is for full openness and transparency.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is a victims and survivors-centred peer-support network. It holds that when it comes to agreements around reporting clergy sexual abuse and supporting victims and survivors of abuse, confidentiality (privacy) is applicable to persons only, to the safety and integrity of personal data and the good name and privacy of persons only. It is never applicable to processes and policies.

In order to avoid distrust, SNAP will always argue for full openness and transparency. In fact, SNAP sees every form of confidentiality around reporting abuse as a further form of abuse.

Confidential agreements are of no benefit to survivors or the public whatsoever. They serve no purpose other than to hide something. If there were any good intentions behind them, then sadly, at some point their purpose becomes irrelevant, though the fact that they were kept secret will not.

From a survivor’s viewpoint, it would be better for leaders of powerful peersupport groups in New Zealand to be cautious about entering into agreements with churches. If they do, then please assure that those agreements are transparent and publicly available documents.

Openness and transparency generate healing. Secrecy and exclusion cause distrust and division. The best way to support us is by being open and honest with us.

Survivors of abuse by religious leaders in any denomination may contact SNAP Aotearoa for peer support via Facebook or phone 022 3440496, and/or register with the Royal Commission into Abuse, 0800 222 727, which is looking into the abuse of children and vulnerable adults in faith-based institutions.