The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) is scheduled to publish its final report on Thursday, after seven years investigating abuse in institutional settings.
This follows a series of 19 reports on its individual investigations, including case studies on the Archdiocese of Birmingham and Benedictine schools and an overarching report on the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as well as reports on the Church of England and other institutions.
A Catholic council to assist the Inquiry was established when IICSA began in 2015, to support Church bodies in cooperating with enquiries. It is chaired by Baroness O’Loan.
The council’s membership was based on the subjects of case studies and the Church’s existing safeguarding structure – then the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission and the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service. The membership has changed in accordance with the changing personnel of these organisations.
The clerk to the council, Canon Christopher Thomas, general secretary to the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, told The Tablet that as “IICSA draws its formal work to a close, the council will review the final report and hand it to the [bishops’ conference and Conference of Religious] for further study and implementation and the council’s work will come to an end.
“It will then be work of the two conferences to decide who is best placed to implement and embed the IICSA report recommendations in the life of the Church.”
IICSA was critical of the Church in the report on its investigation, published in 2020. It found that the first recommendation of the Nolan Report, the Church’s 2001 investigation into clerical child abuse – that the Church should become “an example of best practice” in safeguarding – still “remains an aspiration”.
“The response of Church leaders,” it said, “has too often focused on child protection structures and processes. While this is important, there is insufficient focus at present on the substance of its response.”
The publication of IICSA’s 2020 report coincided with the Church’s own Elliott Report on safeguarding structures. This led to the reorganisation of the two safeguarding bodies, which were replaced by three new entities: a national tribunal for clergy discipline, the Religious Life Safeguarding Services, and the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency (CSSA), the last chaired by the distinguished prosecutor Nazir Afzal.
Earlier this month, the chief executive of the CSSA, Colette Limbrick, and Christine Evans, a senior staff member, resigned from the organisation. Both had previously worked for the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service, as director and safeguarding manager respectively, before the reorganisation in 2020.
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