and as a result of that, these victims and survivors have been left in limbo. yes, they are still contacting myself and steve. i have brought that to the attention of the archbishops council. what s their mental state like? they are their mental state is horrendous. i ve listened to one survivor describe to me her suicide plan. i ve had a survivor telling me they ve taken two overdoses since. i ve shared all this with the church of england and what i don t understand is why they will not just sit down and talk with us in terms of developing a plan for these individuals. i can t ignore them and i am not going to ignore them. well, the church says it s not ignoring them either. it points to the fact it has now appointed a new sort of independent supervisor of the whole safeguarding professor alexis jay, who ran that independent
we re trying to manage. and incidentally, stephen, in november last year, in 2022, myself and steve travelled to york to sit with both senior bishops and i remember the email, sending the email at 3am in the morning as well, before that meeting, to say, we are at a crossroads. the crossroads is this. we are doing what you told us to do. we are following the terms of reference which you approved, that is on the website, publicly on the independent safeguarding board website, but every turn we go to, our independence is being thwarted. you re not allowing us to be independent. so, we presented them with what looks like an independent model and we were told that, we will seriously consider this. and the reason i m saying that is because taking out a dispute notice against the church of england was a very difficult decision for me and steve. yeah, because, i mean, this is a tragedy for the church and it s a tragedy for the individuals who have experienced terrible
we tried to make decisions, to be that very independent body, our hands were being tied. let me give you an example. so, one of our roles is to receive complaints from victims and survivors into reviews of their cases. what we need to do that is collect information from the national safeguarding team or across the church of england, so we established an independent service level agreement between the independent safeguarding board and the church of england and we signed that but they didn t sign it. so, we couldn t access any information. an independent body, surely, should have no no go areas but we were finding ourselves in that position. yeah, i mean, we ve spoken to the church of england and they ve given us a response. yeah. they reject many of the accusations that you make, specifically about things like you claiming that
what went wrong? and what are the lessons? jasvinder sanghera, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. you are an abuse survivor and we ll talk about that. you re also a lifelong advocate for survivors of abuse and you were hired by the church of england to be part of their independent safeguarding board, but you ve been fired. does all of that suggest
on there, and explained to them that victims and survivors are tired of apologies. they need to be heard. they want change and change is very slow for them. and today, as i sit here, as somebody who was removed from that role and accused of being too survivor focused by a very senior member of the national safeguarding team, i feel aggrieved for victims and survivors, in all honesty, stephen. well, i m going to stop you there because before we get into the detail of your relationship with the church of england. and i should just say, as you ve made one specific allegation, they have specifically said that they did not accuse you of being too survivor focused, so we will revisit that. ok, that s fine. ..and much more detail. but before we get there, i think, for people to understand the passion you bring to this wider subject, we do need to revisit a little bit of your own story, your own past.