Victims

Neil Todd met the Bishop of Gloucester (pictured) in 1993 at 16 years old while acting as his trainee
and was the first victim to tell senior clergy about Ball's sex crimes. Source: MailOnline

Yet again, child sex abuse has been dominating the news headlines. Another harrowing report Commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham found that "A paedophile grooming gang was left to roam the streets of Manchester - and police knew who they were and exactly what they were doing:

- Social workers knew that one 15-year-old girl, Victoria Agoglia, was being forcibly injected with heroin, but failed to act. She died two months later.

- Abusers were allowed to freely pick up and have sex with Victoria and other children from city care homes, ‘in plain sight’ of officials.

- Greater Manchester Police dropped an operation that identified up to 97 potential suspects and at least 57 potential victims. Eight of the men went on to later assault or rape girls.

- As recently as August 2018, the Chief Constable refused to reopen the dropped operation.

Greater Manchester Police's Operation Augusta was set up to tackle "the sexual exploitation throughout a wide area of a significant number of children in the care system by predominantly Asian men".

From The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997 – 2013):
"By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire
period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how
best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem,
which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the
ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction
from their managers not to do so."

Not so reticent was former home secretary Jack Straw who was accused of stereotyping Pakistani men in Britain after he accused some of them as regarding white girls as "easy meat" for sexual abuse. "We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way."

Leading the attack against Jack Straw, Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee said it was wrong to "stereotype a whole community". Vaz was suspended from the Commons for six months after he was found to have "expressed willingness" to purchase cocaine for male prostitutes. He stood down before the General Election.

Many of the gangs' victims lived in child care homes, often miles away from their families but their plight was ignored for fear of being accused of racism.

Also ignored but in more comfortable surroundings were the victims of Anglican bishop Peter Ball and his accomplices. His friendship with Prince Charles made the paedophile bishop 'impregnable' while establishment figures rallied round to support.

There was a presumption of innocence, as there was in the case of Carl Beech who accused senior politicians, army and security chiefs of sadistic sexual abuse and claimed to have witnessed boys being murdered in the 1970s and 1980s. He was jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice, fraud and child sexual offences. The Metropolitan Police spent £2m looking into Beech's allegations, all of which proved to be false.

Bishop Peter Ball escaped such scrutiny. When charged with improper conduct towards Neil Todd a young novice monk he was given a caution and released after pressure from establishment figures. It was made clear that many bishops of the Church of England from the top down knew of the allegations. When Ball was cautioned other victims came forward, writing to Lambeth Palace detailing similar behaviour. The letters were not handed to the police.

 The story unfolds in the BBC documentary Exposed: The Church's Darkest Secret. Had it involved one apparently holy man manipulating victims and supporters alike, the deception would have been understandable. What is not is the blatant disregard for Ball's victims by bishops who knew of the abuse, withholding evidence, and the establishment campaign to discredit victims and avoid further investigation.

Another of Ball's victims, the Rev Graham Sawyer, had been introduced to him under a scheme Ball had started in 1980 called Give a Year to God, where teenagers and young men would go to live with him to 'learn the ways of a holy man'. After Sawyer rejected his advances, Ball said he would make sure he would never be ordained. He was true to his word. Sawyer was rejected for ordination. He moved to New Zealand where he was ordained three years later.

At The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), a solicitor for five survivors of abuse by Peter Ball told panel members:

"But what is now very clear is that in the Church of England, Peter Ball found the perfect cover for his offending. If a charlatan with an insatiable appetite for abuse wanted to secure a continuous supply of vulnerable young victims, there was no better way of achieving this than by founding a religious order not subject to any external supervision, and by making his victims' participation in the abuse a religious duty obligated by their oath of absolute obedience. Not for the first time, theology and religious ritual provided the ideal mask for abuse, with the evil of what Peter Ball did being compounded by his nauseating claim that the abuse was spiritually uplifting.

"Most of all, however, Peter Ball found in his fellow bishops in the Church of England the perfect accomplices, prepared to turn a blind eye to his abuse over many decades, to collude in the lie that the abuse of Neil Todd was an uncharacteristic aberration, to cast doubt on Ball's guilt, to smear his victims, and to rehabilitate him.

"It is now clear that for many years before the 1992 investigation, there were many in the Church of England who knew of or must have suspected his offending, and decided to turn a blind eye to it, and later tried to evade their own culpability by claiming that Ball had never really offended at all. Eric Kemp, the Bishop of Chichester, was aware of serious concerns about Ball well before 1992, yet in 2006 he repeated the lie that Ball's resignation had been the 'work of mischief makers'."

One would have thought that such a damning indictment would have seen many heads roll but this is the Church of England. Instead they continue as they wish. So there are more cover ups, this time in the evangelical wing, again going right to the top. Video HERE.

In no way comparable to the suffering inflicted by abusers on innocent children and young men, those who have looked for guidance to bishops now shown to be guilty of duplicity may be classed as spiritual victims of bishops who have been shown to care only for themselves and the establishment, not for those supposedly in their care.

Postscript [16.01.2020]

From Church Times:

Belated apologies from bishops and church leaders, praising survivors of the serial abuser Peter Ball for their bravery, after their testimonies appeared in a new BBC documentary on the case, broadcast this week. The church leaders also condemned the “cover-up” of abuse by the Church. Full report HERE.