Jesus Didn’t Do ‘Woo Woo Church’

Growing up, I had a short-hand for certain situations that I might come across, or read about – it was a way of mentally filing them away for the moment until I came back to them to examine them more closely, to see if that was still the label that fit best, or not. (Full disclosure, I loved researching the history of stuff, and spent many a happy Saturday in the library looking along the histories, autobiographies, biographies… yes, I was that nerd).

For example, one of my short hands was “the man from Del Monte”; it was taken from the tag line of a fruit juice advert and was my short hand for “colonial nonsense”. These personal short hands can be helpful, although I do find they work best if when you go back and reflect on that new item that you file away, just to make sure it’s stored in the right place. Otherwise you have merely the building of reflexive thought; a habit, carelessly done, maybe right sometimes but as many times wrong… the discipline of accountability, even if only to oneself from time to time, is necessary.

But those short hands don’t mean anything to anyone other than yourself; when (for example), as a white person, I am in the middle of a situation because I’ve not taken account of my white privilege and I’ve messed up, telling the Black or Brown person I’ve hurt some cute story about my short hand for colonial nonsense isn’t taking accountability and it isn’t an apology for the harm done. When you’ve messed up, the first thing you should be worrying about is the other person – not your personal public relations.

That’s what “woo woo church” is, my short hand for when I come across situations where people in the Church respond to human need with church speak, church lingo, and/or relying upon or calling on the authority of the Holy Spirit in order for a situation to occur, especially for people to choose to do the right thing. I find it especially grating in response to questions or issues around abuse and abusers in the Church.

People love the tender Jesus, and it is easy to understand what it is in the beatitudes, for example, that draws people: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted; Blessed are the peacemakers. (Matthew 5: 1-12) Come ye, all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest (Matthew 11): Jesus comes with rest, with gentleness, with liberation for the oppressed, for the downtrodden. It is a tenderness with a purpose: compassion with calling, with a vision. We find a lot of Jesus’ tenderness in Matthew. Equally, in very particular matters, we also find that part of Jesus we are sometimes less sure of in Matthew; the strong, immovable, blunt Jesus who has no tolerance for abusers, their enablers, and the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ (aka false prophets, aka abusive church leaders). That Jesus – who never once resorted to ‘woo woo church’ answers but instead demanded accountability from his church – sometimes seems like an odd, uncomfortable juxtaposition: on the one hand full of endless compassion and forgiveness for all, and then telling abusers that the blame lies with their own choice and the only way to liberation is through disciplined self-sacrifice and repentance.

God knows, and so Jesus knows, that if you allow an abuser to hide behind, or put responsibility on, anyone else in any way, shape or form, then that abuser will never repent. The abuser who confesses his sin on a man on the cross and can leave it there feels no compunction to take any responsibility for the hurt, shame and blame he has placed on others. Only the abuser that metaphorically cuts off his own flesh, that self-sacrifices, that is disciplined in their sacrifice and repentance, has any chance of being liberated from that sin. Jesus is not unforgiving, but honest – this is what you must do and there are no short cuts; if you are genuinely sorry, then you will do it, he says.

Matthew is as close as you get in scripture to what’s left of the Arab Jesus they tried to bury, and once you understand Jesus as an Arab, as a Palestinian Jew he begins to make a great deal more sense. The manner in which he responded to abusers was defined as much by his Arabness as by his devotion to God: his teachings on the issue are a clue as to why Muslims revere him as prophet in Islam. The local Arabs were, with the Jewish population who had joined them generations before, living under occupation. The region – which the Romans would name Palestine – had been occupied by the Romans for generations. Occupation breeds resistance, and resistance requires courage – and courage requires love. Jesus’ response to abuse is the response of a disciplined, self-sacrificing Arab Jew who locates the responsibility for abuse wholly on the abuser.

Gouging out one’s own eye, or cutting off one’s own hand, however metaphorically, comes with an obvious need to ensure that the hand stays cut off, or the eye remains gouged out. Discipline requires accountability, and it requires accountability to more than just the self. Silence is one of the many things that helps abuse to continue, and talking about it openly not only reduces the chances of it happening, but also encourages victims to realise that they are not to blame.

Abusers are very good at leaving their victim feeling as if they were to blame. It is not the only, or even necessarily the predominant, impact on a victim, but it is a common experience. They will often also gaslight their victims into feeling as if their experience might not have been ‘that bad’, that their victim is made to feel as if they are ‘overreacting’ in some way. Depending on the type of abuse, victims can be left with feelings of shame, guilt, anger, self-loathing and can experience mental health impacts including trauma related mental health injuries (such as flashbacks, hyperfixation, disassociation, depression and anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviours and others).

2000 years later the Church continues to debate what they are supposed to do about abusers, as if the one for whom they are named never spoke on the issue. And when asked to stand by the victims of abuse, resort either to silence, or to ‘woo woo church’ replies to justify that silence.

Personally I would tremble at the thought of having to stand in front of Jesus one day and justify that.

The Lessons That Must Be Learned Pt 4: The Police Ableism & Corruption That Charged Auriol Grey

It’s time to put a few awkward facts back in the room, look at why what happened on that fateful day was nothing more than a terrible accident, and explore some of the potential factors behind the scapegoating of Auriol Grey – the big picture, which everyone worked so hard to conceal.

The Road Safety Act & The Highway Code Much was made of Mrs Ward being an experienced cyclist, but that meant she would have known that it was for her to give way to Auriol, who was the physically disabled pedestrian, it wasn’t for Auriol to give way to Mrs Ward. Mrs Ward’s age didn’t change that. Nor did the status of the path – even if (and it remains a very big if) that path had been a dual use path at the time of the accident, Mrs Ward was still obliged to stop and give way to the pedestrian. She didn’t deserve to die, and Auriol didn’t deserve to be blamed for a horrible accident because the police didn’t understand her reactions when startled and stressed.

Missed Factors in Understanding a Terrible Accident A factor that was ignored in whether Mrs Ward felt threatened by Auriol’s verbal reaction to being startled is Mrs Ward’s hearing impairment. Her hearing impairment was severe enough to prevent her from cycling on the roads; the chances that she didn’t hear Auriol, or didn’t hear Auriol well, are actually quite high, (given the noise of the background traffic) and this was probably one of the reasons why she continued to cycle on rather than give way. She failed to acknowledge Auriol’s signalling motion of distress and could not hear her verbal one. Whether Mrs Wards hearing impairment would have had any impact on her balance can’t be known, so it’s not possible to say if that was a factor in her fall. There are also other external potential factors. Mrs Ward was balancing a lot of shopping on the bars of her bike. The ground was still damp after rain and her cycle may have caught something still wet enough to cause her wheel to veer off suddenly – a motion that is noted in the appeal judgement.

What I don’t intend to do is re-litigate what happened – the appeal found conclusively that no base offense could be established and that had Mrs Ward lived, Auriol would not have been charged with assault because there was no evidence of any physical encounter. It is important to try and help people to understand that Auriol’s behaviour was not aggressive and that the police and prosecution’s description’s of Auriol’s behaviour were interpretations – not definitions. The only person who can define how Auriol behaved that day was Auriol and she describes her behaviour in the context of being startled, but also acting in an unconscious way because of stress, because of the fear of collision and the fear of falling during collision. She had every reason to fear a collision, because of her disabilities, but this was never acknowledged, far less respected.

The Status of the Path There were a lot of questions that were being asked about the status of that pathway – was it, as the police, prosecution and judge all claimed, a dual use pathway at the time of the accident, or not? If it was, why wasn’t the County Council able to confirm that, even by the time that Auriol had been sentenced? If it was, why does it meet literally none of the parameters of a dual use pathway and was not signed as such until 2022 (although even if it had been at the time of the accident, that didn’t mean Auriol would have seen the signs).

My question is why did that confusion exist at all, and who was responsible for it? The police and prosecution could argue that there was space enough for the two women to pass each other, but if it were actually a dual use pathway, there would be no argument. So why did the police – in the first place – and then the prosecution and then the judge make the claim that it was?

Given that it meets literally none of the parameters for a dual use path lets assume, for a moment, that it hadn’t been dual use at the time of the accident. Let’s assume, for a moment, that it was a pedestrian only footpath at the time of the accident. How would it benefit the police, prosecution etc to claim that it was when it wasn’t? Given that it would involve a degree of risk to lie like that, when they already had no actual case, what would be the purpose of it?

Prior to the success of Auriol’s appeal, I wasn’t entirely sure why the police would want to muddy the waters so greatly by claiming that a pedestrian pavement was a dual use path. I had seen some hints, in comments made to me and in online chatter, that prior to that fateful day there had been local grumbling about the way in which cyclists used the path, and that police had done little to address the issue. So I had wondered if police were acting to protect themselves. Given that Mrs Ward didn’t give way to Auriol, I had also wondered if the police thought they were protecting Mrs Ward; this was an accident, and since the police must have realised that Auriol could not have actually pushed Mrs Ward, why the need to point the finger – why the push to treat this as a crime?

As I read through the appeal judgement what crystalized in my mind was the realisation that it had been both of those reasons, but most especially the former, whatever noble narrative the police and others might have told themselves. There’s this trope in certain detective & police novels and tv shows where the culprit is the one who keeps pointing the finger of blame at others and giving the detectives confusing red herrings. That was what I was reminded of in the way the police, then the prosecution and finally Judge Sean Enright pushed to blame Auriol despite having no case. The appeal judgement read as if it were entirely accidental that the police, prosecution, and judge could get all the way through the end of the second trial without establishing a base offense – but how realistic a proposition is that really? It was in the way they picked on using Auriol’s entirely valid opinion’s about dual use path’s, and then equated it to a personal hatred by relying on tropes about cognitive impairment and learning disability; it was in the erasing of Auriol’s voice from the process, and once erased, she was blamed for her silence; it was in how Auriol had an appropriate adult with her during questioning and yet the police still weaponised Auriol’s disabilities against her, or denied them entirely, for example denying the impact on her memory that trauma has by assuming she would not have experienced trauma because of her cognitive impairments. (Sometimes the police, when they know they will have to use an appropriate adult, will call in one they know to have little experience with the relevant disabilities, or one that is sympathetic to the police, or is relatively inexperienced. Or they will allow a friend of the person being questioned to sit in without making them aware of their role and parameters properly.). It was in how they exploited the tension between disabled pedestrian and cyclist – and that between disabled working aged adult and elder person. It was in how they were even prepared to exploit an elderly widower. Because why would anyone need to exploit those things if they have a case? Or if they have nothing to hide?

What if the people at fault for the accident weren’t the cyclist or the driver – what if the people at fault for the accident were the police, for not ensuring that cyclists were using that area safely?

What if the fault the police were trying hardest to hide, was their own?

What if that’s why there was no base offense established – that it wasn’t by accident, but by design? That they had no case but needed a scapegoat to cover their failure to do their job? And that because Auriol’s legal representatives simply didn’t have the disability awareness, they weren’t able to recognise it?

No, I don’t know how they would have convinced the CPS to proceed – I’m not an investigative journalist. It feels like the judge had his own agenda that happened to coincide with the police’s, but again, what this needs is experienced journalists asking questions, because what was done to Auriol Grey was horrifying. Explanations are required because police are not at liberty to use disabled people to cover for their own inadequacies and failures.

In the meantime, Auriol Grey deserves time, and space, to heal. So do the Ward family, because in truth the police and prosecution exploited them too and made their loss a trauma that it need not have been. They all deserve an apology from the police and prosecution, but most especially Auriol Grey, who was blamed for a crime that never was by an ablest police who were desperate to hide their own incompetence, and who suffered at the hands of a judge who was absolutely prejudiced against her.

But that she has her family around her again – for that, I give thanks.

The Lessons That Must Be Learned Pt 3: Judge Dredd

According to the chatter on cycling forums, Judge Sean Enright is a keen cyclist and maybe that’s what explained his out of the gate prejudice against Auriol Grey. On the one hand she was facing a prosecution who were basically saying – because of what Auriol was, because she was one of those disabled people, she was aggressive towards cyclists, she was nasty and she took it too far, and that’s why Mrs Ward died.

And the first thing the judge did was deny Auriol her right to a guardian ad litem during the trial, which effectively silenced her as a disabled person – treating her as an able bodied person, as Auriol’s brother-in-law has pointed out. This despite the guidance from the Equal Treatment Bench Book (under learning disability and brain damage) which he would most certainly have turned to. He would go on to say that Auriol’s disabilities “didn’t explain her actions” – but that was exactly what the prosecution was effectively saying.

The denial was done on a technicality, that Auriol’s school hadn’t been registered as a ‘special needs’ convent school at the time – it catered to girls who would be diagnosed with ADHD and ASD today, as well as cognitive impairments and learning difficulties. It didn’t formally hold special needs status because girls at that time weren’t recognised as having neurodivergence. Auriol is part of the lost generation, and it is another small miracle that she received an autism assessment and diagnosis whilst in prison.

Despite Auriol literally having part of her brain missing, he chose to deny her rights to the support that might have at the very least helped her to feel more empowered to be part of her own defense. That is the point of a guardian ad litem in such a context – to allow someone who is cognitively impaired, and/or learning disabled and/or autistic have somebody that ensures that their needs as a disabled person are being upheld, in order that the disabled person has an equal access to participation in their own defense. Those who criticise Auriol for not speaking in her own defense have little idea how silenced, and likely frightened, by then she had been. There were a lot of men around her telling her what kind of disabled woman she was, telling everyone else what kind of disabled woman she was, and the only one who Auriol could have trusted to speak for her at that point had died, (her sister, Genny, who had died shortly before the accident). I cannot imagine what a frightening, and lonely, place that must have been for Auriol at that point.

The central finding of the Court of Appeal last week was that the prosecution never established a base offense, and Judge Sean Enright’s misdirection’s in law flow from there. Although ‘flow’ would undersell it somewhat. ‘Unseemly rush’ would be more accurate.

8. In addition to CCTV of the incident, the prosecution relied on CCTV from a
Sainsbury’s supermarket, taken immediately prior to the incident, showing the
appellant’s ability to avoid obstacles and oncoming shoppers. Evidence of Police
Constable Sean Redman confirmed that the incident lasted a matter of seconds. He
estimated that Mrs Ward had been riding at 4.7 miles per hour. Finally, the prosecution
relied on the comments made by the appellant in police interview to demonstrate her
disapproval of cyclists on pavements.

9.The appellant’s defence case statement indicated that she was not aware that cyclists
were permitted to use the pavement. She had felt anxious and feared that she would be
hit by the cyclist who was approaching her at speed. She remembered moving her arm
to alert the cyclist and shouting in her direction to make her slow down. She had acted
instinctively and lawfully to prevent the cyclist from colliding with her.

11. The prosecution now accepts that, by the time that the judge summed up the case to the
jury, there was no evidence which could make the jury sure that the appellant had made
any physical contact with Mrs Ward. The evidence was that the appellant had
gesticulated and shouted at Mrs Ward using a swear word. There was however no
evidence to make the jury sure that the appellant pushed or in any way touched Mrs
Ward.

R -v- Auriol Grey 8 May 2024

Judge Enright’s direction to the jury took two parts: written, and verbal, and I’ll start with the latter. In his summing up to the jury, the judge said:

“The Crown case is that the defendant was angry at the sight of
the bike approaching her. She could have stopped, could have
stepped aside but, instead, kept moving forward, shouting
angrily and striking out in anger and, whether that blow
connected or not, it caused the cyclist to topple slowly sideways,
perhaps in apprehension of a blow. That’s the Crown case and

the Crown say if you apply the legal directions, there can be only
one outcome.
The defense say, essentially, that she may have been taken by
surprise by the sight of a bike coming down the pavement and
feared for her safety and acted instinctively; accident, self defense.”

R -v- Auriol Grey 8 May 2024

The Judge’s description of events (never mind the prosecution’s case) speaks volumes – he took the wholly disingenuous idea that Auriol’s valid objections to dual use pathway’s as a visually impaired person somehow equated to a personal hatred Auriol has never once verbalised towards cyclists, and gave it his own interpretation. Her arm motions too were wildly exaggerated – in fact apart from the brief moment when Auriol pointed toward the road, her arm never goes higher than her waist and follows a precise rise and fall. It isn’t a threatening motion, but a signalling one, but once again every aspect of her disabilities were weaponised against her. Her gait, her anxiety, her own experience of being startled – because of her visual impairment – were entirely erased or used as evidence of her supposed guilt. And everyone was ignoring the fact that as the disabled pedestrian, she had had right of way. It had been for Mrs Ward to give way to Auriol, not the other way round. Mrs Wards age didn’t change that.

For the judge, having himself so directly participated in weaponising Auriol’s disabilities, to later say “your disabilities don’t explain your actions” must have felt like a sore wound being rubbed open.

But that he encouraged, expected and urged the jury to find Auriol Grey guilty, with or without a base offense established, of that I have no doubt. In paragraph 12 the appeal court judgement notes that the judge, in his written direction to the jury, that the issue left to the jury was whether the defenses of accident or self-defense were made out, and if not whether a “sane and reasonable person” would realise that their actions “would expose Mrs Ward to harm”. They note that sane in this context should be “sober”, but that the error is immaterial.

I disagree. I don’t think it was in error and I don’t think it’s immaterial. I think it is further proof that the judge wanted Auriol Grey convicted, and had done from the outset of the trial. The Appeal Court goes on to document Judge Enright’s failure to establish the base offense and the correct matters the jury were required to consider, given that the charge was manslaughter – the conduct element, and the mental element: in other words whether the appellant’s behaviour caused the deceased to apprehend violence, and whether the appellant was aware that their behaviour would have that impact on the deceased.

Instead, the judge focused the jury on whether it was legitimate for Auriol, as a disabled person, to claim self-defense as disabled pedestrian: the judge set her up and asked the jury – who do you believe: this nasty, angry, aggressive disabled woman, or that poor elderly woman cyclist (as if it were mortal combat between the two). In such a competition, Auriol Grey would always lose.

25. The judge’s legal directions did not address any of these issues. They focused instead
on accident and self-defence. The route to verdict first asked whether “what took place”
was or may have been an accident. This could not have greatly assisted the jury on the
facts of this case. In one sense, “what took place” was an accident. No one suggested
that the appellant intended that Mrs Ward would fall into the road and be killed.

R -v- Auriol Grey 8 May 2024

The guilty verdict was exactly the one that the judge, the CPS and police had been crossing their fingers for – it seemed as though they had pulled it off. Despite having no case, and no proof, they had managed to convict Auriol Grey on the strength of the power of suggestion. And everyone was buying it.

Three days after the jury found Auriol guilty, and despite court ordered medical reports not having been completed, let alone sent to the judge, Judge Sean Enright set Auriol’s sentence at 3 years. What was the rush? Why wasn’t he able to wait for them?

Just why were so many people working so hard to put one extremely vulnerable, very innocent disabled woman in prison? Why the reluctance to accept that Mrs Ward’s death had been, however terrible, an accident, for which nobody could be blamed?

Why had there been so much difficulty establishing the legal status of that pathway? What was the bigger picture that everyone was missing?

Most articles reporting on the judges decisions during the trial appear to have been embargoed, I suspect because decisions are being made about legal action. Suffice it to say, anything I say here is my opinion on what happened, not a legal interpretation – although it is said with a view to Auriol’s rights as a disabled person under the Equality Act 2010, which were completely ignored. (Much like the Road Safety Act and the Highway Code, but a lot people in this case wanted to throw the baby, the bathwater and the bath out).

The Lessons That Must Be Learned Pt 2: Old Tropes, Flaming Torches & Shifting Sands

I said from the start that the police and prosecution had to pull off a slight-of-hand in order to succeed in convicting Auriol Grey, and that’s essentially what the appeal judgement describes; an unsafe conviction, made without establishing any actual criminal or base offense, just the implication of one – implicated by Auriol’s disabilities, and the story the police would go on to weave, based on a manufactured hostility to cyclists.

Manufacturing that hostility provided a “motive” for an offence even if they couldn’t provide any actual evidence for one, and made it harder to establish any possibility that suddenly becoming aware of the approaching cyclist would make Auriol feel anxious or self-defensive – Auriol doesn’t become aware of Mrs Ward until they are barely 2 feet apart, due to her vision impairment. Whilst the publicly available CCTV can’t tell you many things, slowed down it reveals more than the police would like it too. Like – that arm waving isn’t actually very wild. In fact it has a very precise motion. In terms of communication at moments of stress somebody who is cognitively impaired isn’t going to communicate in the same way as other people. Think for a minute: you’re driving along a motorway and there’s a car stopped on one side with the bonnet propped open, looking a bit smoky, and a man standing next to it waving his arms up and down. What do you understand that arm motion to mean in that moment?

Choosing to manufacture a hostility against cyclists which Auriol, as a visually impaired person, didn’t have, whilst leaning on ablest stereotypes about learning disability and cognitive impairment should have been as low as it got; it is doubtful that Det Sgt Mark Dollard was aware of the history into which he was striding with his big blue boots – though he shouldn’t have had that excuse since at least March of last year. During the consultation period over dual use pathways, run by the Department for Transport, the visually impaired community made strenuous valid objections to their usage, on the grounds that bicycles are essentially silent and, crucially, that visually impaired people are unable to see the signs. Those objections were supported by academics such as Dr Alan Dodds who was the Director of the Blind Mobility Research Unit at the University of Nottingham during that period. Dr Dodds wrote a letter to the Guardian to remind readers of that history and to criticise the sentence given to Auriol by the judge.

(Are all visually impaired people now profiled as criminally suspect by the police? I think we should be told).

At the heart of the crime-that-never-was is a question – is it reasonable that a disabled, visually impaired pedestrian is more likely to be afraid of a cyclist? And in order to make it seem less likely, the police – and the prosecution – had to rely on ablest stereotypes about cognitively impaired and learning disabled people that were all too easy to conjure up. When the police are seen, in footage of polices interviews, getting Auriol to admit that she disagreed with dual use pathways, whoever the appropriate adult was should have challenged the line of questioning as discriminatory – for a visually impaired person its a perfectly valid opinion to hold. But from this it was implied, via tropes about cognitively impaired, learning disabled people, that Auriol was “aggressive” towards cyclists, and because even Auriol’s defense team were so egregiously untrained and unaware, they never noticed that this base assumption was what stood in place of any actual offence, far less evidence.

21. It is common ground that the appellant could only be convicted of manslaughter if she
had committed the offence of common assault, this being the only possible base
offence. It is also common ground that the elements of the base offence were never
specified at trial, whether by the prosecution or by the judge, nor was the failure to do
so recognised by those then representing the appellant. This was not simply a failure to
provide a label for a base offence about which the jury were otherwise properly
directed. The jury were provided with no directions at all about any of the elements of
the base offence, whether relating to the actus reus or the mens rea. They were simply
not asked to consider the factual elements required to prove a common assault. This
amounted to a failure to direct the jury about an essential ingredient of the offence of
manslaughter

29 Even if this [the judges summary of the case to the jury] accurately encapsulates the prosecution’s case, it follows from this that, the prosecution case taken at its highest was that Mrs Ward perhaps apprehended a blow.
It was not enough however for the prosecution to prove that the appellant’s conduct
may have caused Mrs Ward to apprehend immediate unlawful force. The prosecution
had to make the jury sure that the appellant’s actions did have that effect. The jury
were simply never asked to consider that issue.

30 The prosecution appear to have approached this case on the basis that hostility on the
part of the appellant was enough to establish that her actions were unlawful. The legal
directions did nothing to correct that misunderstanding. There was no focus on the
appellant’s subjective state of mind. There was no identification of what the appellant
needed to have appreciated in order to establish recklessness. No attention was given
to whether she recognised that there was a risk of Mrs Ward apprehending that she
would be violent towards her. The jury were not asked to determine what circumstances
were known to the appellant or to decide whether she ran an unreasonable risk in those
circumstances. The mental element of common assault was simply not addressed at all

36 In all the circumstances, we have no hesitation in concluding that the appellant’s
conviction for manslaughter is unsafe. The judge’s legal directions contained
fundamental and material misdirections of law. That stemmed from the failure of all
involved to properly identify and address the issues to be determined by the jury. Had
the need to identify and prove a base offence been recognised, the evidential
insufficiency of the prosecution case would have been recognised. There was, in our
judgment, simply no proper basis for the appellant to be convicted of manslaughter in
this very tragic case.

R -v- Auriol Grey

Most staggeringly of all, Simon Spence, KC, requested that the case be sent back to the courts for retrial once the appeal court had delivered its judgement. He was denied.

Even with her conviction quashed, much of the media coverage is still unable to let go of the idea that Auriol Grey was culpable, with Sky News, BBC News, and other MSM titles carrying articles that still framed Auriol as having caused Mrs Ward to fall into traffic. Surprisingly it was The Telegraph who managed to locate Auriol correctly as a “Disabled Pedestrian” in the context of what happened that fateful day, but mostly it’s a shit show of continued ableism, as the tired tropes of Auriol’s supposed (and entirely fictional) “aggression” are laundered through the courtesy liberal hand wringing.

But while some, including local, press carry family criticisms of the way Auriol was treated in court, and sympathetic interviews with Alisdair Luxmoore, Auriol’s brother-in-law, who essentially picked up the baton left by his late wife, there is no follow through – nor are any serious questions apparently being asked of the CPS or the police, despite the fundamental flaws in the case stemming from the investigation up.

It was, perhaps, the biggest shift that those coming against Auriol hadn’t accounted for – that she would start to trust her brother-in-law to help her, and whilst her first appeal last May failed, a new legal team, working pro bono, were able to detach from the mess of the trial the legal trick-of-the-light that so nearly ruined an innocent disabled woman’s life. But in the family statement following the overturning of her conviction read another miracle – a thank you to the women and prison officers who had helped to look after Auriol whilst in prison. They saw what others would not – a vulnerable disabled woman, who was anxious and trying her best. A little piece of my heart will always be with those women and staff.

But why had the police, CPS and judge even done this? Was it because the police simply couldn’t believe that Auriol hadn’t caused it in some way because of their prejudice? Were they just assuming it had to have been caused by Auriol? Or was there something else going on – something that would persuade the CPS and the judge to push such a flimsy, non-existent case against an innocent disabled woman?

Last year, a number of ardent admirer’s of a certain YouTube legal content creator were keen to tell me how wrong I was and how I should check out their fav’s take on the case; but I guess we all have our off days, since he hadn’t spotted that the prosecution hadn’t established a base offense, and could note that Auriol didn’t speak at her trial, without noting that the judge denied her a guardian ad litem. So I think his belt is less black than khaki in some circumstances and perhaps, like a lot of other legal professionals, he needs to take advantage of the disability awareness training that they are meant to in order to better understand disabled clients circumstances, and how disabilities can impact on a disabled person’s behaviour (or be wrongly stereotyped as such).

This was a tragic accident and instead of dealing with it as such, a profoundly disabled woman was scapegoated by the police, CPS and the judge as her disabilities were first weaponised and then criminalised. How? We’ll start with the judge, and look not only at the misdirections in law, but also at how Judge Sean Enright denied Auriol her rights under the Equality Act 2010 in part 3.

poem: your whispered sorrow

It might as well have been hours, not months turned into years

for I have barely begun to undo myself from the decades of your lies

and silence spun; you who whispered truth from behind your death

and similarly your late regret;

it is too soon, too fresh, too raw

for you to ask for forgiveness yet.

How can it have been any more than mere days, surely not I have

wept for so long; and yet so much was taken, and I, complicit, where

others hearts must too, be spared; you leaned on that –

but in the leaning, took me for a fool;

it is too soon, too fresh, too raw

let me have truth, and let me choose.

The Lessons That Must Be Learned Pt 1: Using The Media To Weaponise Disability & Monster A Disabled Woman

I said from the start that the prosecution and police had to pull off a slight-of-hand to convict Auriol Grey because, by the very nature of her disabilities, she could not possibly have pushed over Mrs Ward without falling over herself. Let me break it down:

1. Auriol has loss of muscle strength down her entire right side due to part of her brain being removed as a baby. She has cerebral palsy, which affects balance, and talipes (a birth defect of the foot).
2. Auriol is visually impaired as a result of the operation as a baby. Because of her particular disabilities she has to focus on where she is walking so that she doesn’t trip up over something: that particular pavement has raised metal drain covers down one side (they are why Auriol is unable to give way), so the pavement is made narrower and harder to navigate from Auriol’s perspective. Because of her visual impairments, Auriol does not recognise that Mrs Ward is approaching until they are barely 2 feet apart.
3. Auriol is cognitively impaired, and was assessed as autistic whilst in prison. Her brain underwent severe trauma at birth, and further trauma as a baby, and she processes the experience of trauma differently – it takes her brain a while to fully process any information it receives at moments of extreme stress.
4. Auriol was clutching her shopping bag up to her chest with one arm, which remained the case as the two women passed each other, and she is still doing so as she turns around when she realises something is wrong and see’s the accident unfold.

The closest thing to any physical contact the police had was a still frame picture of Auriol’s left hand as it had brushed against Mrs Ward’s chest as they passed each other – the path being so narrow at that point that you can, if you blow up the CCTV and play it slowly, see Mrs Ward push to get her bike through. This is a detail that the appeal court missed – the path becomes much narrower where a lamp post is cited, and it was at that point that the two women passed each other. We know this because the police released interview footage of them showing Auriol those still frame photo’s, as if someone with her cognitive impairments, already under extreme stress, would be able to explain them.

Without anything to be able to show that Auriol had actually made any physical contact with Mrs Ward – and possibly aware by this point that Auriol would have been unable to do so without falling and injuring herself as well – the police needed to be able to provide a motive, something that could be made to retrospectively paint Auriol’s actions in a more aggressive, criminal light. What they chose says everything about the root ableism at the heart of the original charge against Auriol – the police chose to question Auriol’s feelings, as a visually impaired person, about shared use pathways (pathways designed to be used by both cyclists and pedestrians).

It’s the one other piece of interview footage the police released – and crucially the crux of the prosecutions case. Rather than believe that a physically disabled, vulnerable woman felt scared that she might have an accident when startled by the presence of a cyclist, the police chose instead to use Auriol Grey’s response to monster her, first to a jury, and then to a hungry media.

They were helped by a judge who we now know made misdirections in law – but he also denied Auriol a guardian ad litem, even though she has, not to put to fine a point on it, part of her brain literally removed, as well as being cognitively impaired. Why was he able to do that? Why did he sentence Auriol before receiving court ordered medical reports? What was the rush?

And why scapegoat Auriol in the first place?

What there should have been, as the police fed their ablest narrative to the media, was someone willing to critically engage with it and wonder why the police would be dehumanising so profoundly this profoundly disabled woman.

You think Auriol has no feelings or empathy because you are relying on ablest stereotypes about cognitively impaired and learning disabled people, and the police have been weaponising those stereotypes against Auriol from the start. After her conviction, Det Sgt Dollard ‘revealed’ that some of the CCTV had to be withheld because – he suggested darkly – of how horiffic it supposedly showed Auriol to be.

Again – where were the questions? The simple interrogation of such statements? Incidentally, the link, which includes Det Sgt Dollard’s statements, is to some local news reporting that did actually challenge some of the police, and the judges narratives around the pathway on which the accident occurred.

In Part 2 we’ll look at how, before the overturning of her conviction and since, the media continues to be relentlessly ablest, and unable, to discern the corruption that tried to destroy an innocent disabled woman.

The Lessons That Must Be Learned: The Systemic Discrimination’s & Judicial Abuses Which Jailed Auriol Grey

Last year, before I had to step back to look after both my dad’s health needs and my own, I made a number of video’s concerning what was evidently to many of us in the disabled community a miscarriage of justice – that of disabled pedestrian Auriol Grey, jailed for 3 years for manslaughter, after her actions, having been startled by the presence of the late Mrs Celia Ward coming towards her on a bicycle, supposedly caused Mrs Ward to fall off her bike into the path of an oncoming car.

For reference: Auriol Grey is cognitively impaired – following a birth trauma (the umbilical chord had been wrapped around her neck, and she had been starved of oxygen), she suffered severe seizures, and she had brain surgery as a baby: for clarity’s sake, part of her brain was removed. She is visually impaired and has muscle weakness down the full right hand side of her body as a result of this. Auriol also has cerebral palsy and talipes; she is learning disabled and was diagnosed with autism following an assessment whilst in prison.

The late Mrs Celia Ward was 77 and was hearing impaired, to the extent that she only cycled on pavements and dual use & cycle pathways.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal agreed that this was indeed a miscarriage of justice:

In our judgement, the prosecution case was insufficient even to be left to the jury.

Mrs Justice Yip & Mrs Justice Farbey, R -v- Auriol Grey, 8 May 2024

Whilst I disagree with some elements of the judgement – I would strongly refute that any of Auriol’s actions made any difference to the outcome of that tragic accident, and that there are several other factors which have been entirely ignored due in large part to societal conventions loosely associated with not speaking ill of the dead – the judgement itself is clear. That this was a clearly unsafe conviction is so named, and for that I am grateful. It places a great many questions before the CPS, and these can now be carefully examined in light of this judgement.

But the judgement has its limitations, and there are questions it is not designed, nor has no authority to answer.

The spotlight on the judge’s misdirection’s in law do not similarly come with a spotlight on his deliberate withholding of Auriol’s rights under the Equality Act 2010, but then neither does it, nor can it cover the abuses and discrimination’s that led to Auriol being charged in the first place.

And for that, you have to start with the police Det Sgt Mark Dollard who, after Auriol’s conviction, having successfully weaponised all of her disabilities against her, then did much of the heavy lifting when it came to monstering Auriol to the press, who in turn repeated it, uncritically.

Where was the critical media, asking why a Detective Sargent was referring to a profoundly disabled woman in such profoundly dehumanising terms? Where was the critical journalist’s eye that was able to ask the hard questions?

Auriol Grey deserves peace, and time and privacy and the right to heal because she is and always was an innocent woman. We, in the meantime, need to discuss the many discriminations and systemic failures that led to an innocent woman being imprisoned for a crime that never was.

And part one needs to be the media. We’ll start there.

Why I’m an Advocate: The Women Who Advocated For Me – My Maternal Grandmothers

It often comes as a surprise to people when I say that my autism includes being selectively non-speaking – I am an advocate, and so I end up speaking a lot (although thankfully much of it these days can be in written form, which is helpful now that I also have dysphasia).

I was born into a family where both of my parents and my sister, who was also learning disabled and later physically disabled, suffered from severe, and extremely stigamtised, mental health illness during a time when there was no medical treatment for them, and the pressure to keep it hidden was tremendous. Nevertheless, as a mental health carer to each of them, they all needed an advocate in different ways. I was the eldest child and a carer from the age of 5. But I wouldn’t have known how to advocate, how to do that, if I hadn’t had my maternal grandmothers, who were also advocating for me, and under tremendously difficult circumstances.

If you have read any of my most recent poetry, you might have gathered that I am coming to terms with another facet of my mother’s death almost 3 years ago: she never told me the truth about my biological father. In fact she never told me anything, not even to acknowledge that the man I grew up calling dad wasn’t my biological father. She had decided I wasn’t ever to be told, and perhaps more fundamentally, didn’t believe I had a right to know. She saw it as a secret about her, and if I were to be told, that could only happen if I “earned” her trust. I was never going to be able to do that.

And yet I knew from the age of 5 that my biological father was not my dad. How I discovered that is a story for another day, but I am deeply grateful that my grandmothers – my mother’s mother and grandmother – had both prepared for the day it would happen.

When my mother ignored my questions, I turned to them; because I was already acting as carer to my parents and helping my mother with my sister, they were helping me in turn as much as they could. We had a language between us, a code: I knew I could rely on them to be honest with me.

A promise had been made to my mother under the assumption that she would tell me once I was old enough – an assumption that my grandmothers were now regretting. So my grandmother told me there was a truth to be told but that I was a little bit too young to understand; and that, hopefully, my mother would tell me when I was a little older. [Note to parents: your child is old enough to be told, in an age appropriate way, at the age they ask the question]. In the meantime, if I was mixed race, then I should try to remember it was nothing to be ashamed of (quite a lot of people, most of all my mother, were acting as if it were), and my grandmothers would always remind me – and my mother – that I had no reason to feel ashamed.

What had led to my questions wasn’t ignored either; my grandmothers had my back, and what could have been an isolating and frightening situation was dealt with: they made sure that I would be safe, and I was; and I was particularly lucky because they found an ally in my Infant School headmaster. It was only later in my life that I realised that my grandmothers had also provided me with necessary tools that made so much difference by ensuring that I started school with the ability to read, and write, well beyond the normal scope of a 5 year old.

It hurt my great grandmother especially – she had never known her biological father, but her mother had been truthful with her all her life, and her step-father had given her his name and adopted her, which was very unusual for the time, so she had long since come to terms with it. And had my biological father been just another white guy, she would have been perhaps less hurt by mother’s dishonesty, but she had played a big part in my mothers upbringing and my great grandmother was a passionate (and active) anti-racist. She had raised my mother better than to seek to both hide my father and his identity from me, and me from my father – because of his identity.

I have universal vitiligo; its the rarest form of vitiligo and I’m scared to talk about it openly, because when it started my mother absolutely freaked out in a way that terrified me. We live in a post-Rachel Dolezal world, so that also makes me nervous: I’m in my 50’s and have never admitted to something which is pretty fundamental to who I am. Vitiligo is an autoimmune condition, the first that manifested in me, and can also be genetically inherited. I don’t know if that’s the case for me. I can’t know, because of what my mother did.

I was left with 2 patches of darker skin: one on my neck, which eventually also faded after my children were born, and another on my torso, which I somehow managed to keep hidden from my mother (although being a carer, as opposed to being entirely dependent on my parent probably helped that). I learned the hard way not to make any reference to it – my mother could be very nasty when she wanted to be and any reference at all to anything to do with my father’s identity always provoked that side of her.

The last time I ever tried was when I was about 16. We were clearing away in the dining room after tea one Sunday evening. Dad was asleep on the chair, my siblings were elsewhere in the house. I pointed to the patch on my neck.

“Where do I get this from anyway?” I asked, trying to keep my tone super casual and light.

“It’s just dirt, you need to clean your neck properly,” she replied. The response was fast, her tone flat, and cold.

I honestly don’t know what hurt more about the response – that I actually went up to the bathroom and tried to scrub it off, or that she had said it at all. I only know that I literally cried with relief the next morning when I woke up and it was still there.

I escaped to my grandparents’s house in Norfolk for a weekend to spend time with my grandmother. My grandmother was deeply creative, and was always looking for ways to reassure me I had no reason to feel ashamed – and later, she started looking for ways to tell me at least something about where I came from, and how I got here. That weekend we went to the local market and ‘happened’ to find this beautiful, silky mustard coloured material, decorated along the bottom with Arabian horses mounted with Ottoman horse riders. I suspect she had found it already and had asked the stall holder to save her some. She made me a skirt with it, which I loved. And sometimes, when my mother was being especially unreasonable, my grandmother would put herself directly between us and give my mother A Talk. She did that after that visit too. I won some peace for a while – but I lost the skirt. My mother found it.

Throughout all those years, gently, insistently, persistently, my grandmothers kept trying to get my mother to see that I needed the truth. My mother put me under an insane amount of pressure, and held my father’s identity over me like the Sword of Damocles: I couldn’t be trusted because of my father’s identity, so I had to earn her trust, but could not earn her trust because of my father’s identity. For a long time I couldn’t acknowledge, even to myself, the real problem; no mental health condition causes racism.

My great grandmother took care of the spiritual stuff; she made sure that, before I ever came to faith, I understood that Jesus was an Arab Jew, and a revered prophet in Islam. She loved her Muslim neighbours; she loved cooking with the women, baby sitting for them when they needed it, and loved learning about the Islamic faith. She made sure my prayer life ran deep, and that I trusted my faith and my instincts. She was CofE, but also Quaker, Baptist, Anglo-Catholic – she worshipped as she felt led and that ability to see beyond denomination, beyond creed is very much part of my faith DNA now.

And then when I was 19, my wonderful great grandmother had her third stroke and moved out of her beloved corner of London to move in with my grandmother and grandfather. (His role in all this is ubiquitous, but again, that’s a story for another day). I could tell that my mother felt like she had won a reprieve – she became more strident at home again, getting angry at things in me that ought to make any parent happy: patience; forgiveness; loyalty; compassion. She saw him in me and I just felt lost, and utterly confused. The gaslighting was starting to wear me down. And yet… I also doubled down on those things which seemed to most remind her of him.

It’s an interesting way to rebel, to seek to be more forgiving, more compassionate, more patient, more kind, more open minded. Later – much, much later – I came to realise how much of an influence my biological father has been on me, even though we have never met, and are never likely to; and there is comfort in that.

My great grandmother had always promised me that she would be there for me until I was 21, and although she had 3 more strokes, she kept that promise. She even found a way to say goodbye, just as she had promised me too. When she died, I had locked away any questions about where I came from, and retreated into treating my mother’s inexplicable pressure and distrust of me as part of her mental health issues.

It was having my children that ignited the spark of anger, I think – they knew where they came from and I did not. My parents had divorced and still my mother could not tell me the truth. She had re-married and divorced again, and still could not tell me the truth. When she came to visit my ex-husband and I where we lived in Sheffield, with a vibrant Muslim community where I was making many friends, my mother stayed in our flat the whole weekend and refused to leave it, even to visit the Moroccan coffee house around the corner that displayed local artists work which you could buy.

One of the many things I had also personally been struggling with was serious gynecological issues for many years and whilst I was living in Sheffield I was due to have a scheduled hysterectomy; as they began the procedure they discovered I an ovarian cyst (my wonderful woman surgeon was seriously impressed with the size of it) which had just gone nuclear so my scheduled surgery became emergency surgery. My heart was re-started twice (it feels like an elephant has jumped on your chest), but they saved my life.

I returned to my home city as a newly single parent minus more than just a toxic spouse. It didn’t take long for my mother’s faux sympathy to melt and very soon she was once more wearing me down with endless criticism, pressure and gaslighting. My grandmother happened to phone after a particularly bruising encounter and for the first time in a few years I gave voice once more to my frustrations.

“What did I do? What is this thing that stands between me and her, Nan? I know I didn’t put it there, whatever it is. Why won’t she talk to me about it? Oh, gods, I’m sorry, it’s not your fault. Are you okay? How’s granddad?”

She soothed me. I know a phone call to my mother followed, and once more my grandmother put herself between her daughter and her granddaughter. It was an unenviable position to be in and I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for her. I was so much more aware by then of course, being a parent myself by that point, hence my apology.

I needed to find a way of advocating for myself to my mother.

It was the last time I ever asked my grandmother to advocate for me – I didn’t want to put her in that position again. She was becoming frailer herself and very soon was going to need my mother to help take care of her. She did not this making that harder.

Slowly – very slowly – I began to find my voice. I began to think more clearly than I had for a long time. I thought about the ways my mother herself could not contain the secret, how she saw my father in me every day, all the time, and as a result, said and did things that revealed small, tiny details that would seem like nothing on their own, but taken collectively began to make up more pieces of a shattered jigsaw puzzle.

I thought about all the ways that my grandmothers – knowing better than I would for years that my mother would not relinquish the truth – found creative ways of communicating little details to me. The skirt my grandmother made for me; my first school photograph, hung with my siblings first school photographs in my grandparents house – their pale skinned, red haired faces with mine, pre-vitiligo, always hung opposite the front door so that it was the first thing my mother and I saw when we visited. A reminder to me that I had a truth to fight for, and to my mother that she had a truth to tell. The summer my grandmother made me an Arabian Princess costume for a fancy dress competition at the village fete, when I was 7… my mother’s sucking-lemons face was priceless. (I won. My grandmother beamed). And my great grandmother, who taught me about listening to my instincts, to my inner voice, and how to trust God in prayer, who blessed me with a faith you could bend a rock around whilst still having a wide open heart.

Neither of them were perfect. My grandmother was a nightmare mother-in-law and my poor aunt put up with a very great deal over the years, with a great deal of grace. And my great grandmother had her own faults – mine is in averting my eyes from them. We shared the experience of not knowing our biological fathers, but more than that, she trusted me. She trusted my instincts and encouraged other people to trust my instincts too.

They held in the balance for decades an impossible situation – because whilst the reasons that my mother kept the secret of my paternity had nothing to do with her mental health, any attempt to raise the subject was taken as an attack and provoked issues with her mental health. And so they made skirts, and fancy dress costumes, taught me to trust my instincts, and blessed me with faith.

It was the best they could do, and when I got my DNA test results, it confirmed that it had been more than enough, because I had understood correctly what they had found a way to say to me, without words. I guess it helps that I’m also selectively non-speaking to be honest.

I do not know my father’s name, and that hurt’s in ways I cannot put into words. I know that he is patient and kind, forgiving and open minded, loyal and compassionate; I am proud of him too, and pray for him constantly. There are some other things I might know too, because my mother was never very good at keeping secrets, but whether I will ever be able to confirm them, or find out what my father’s name is, I do not know.

My mother hid my existence from him, because of his identity. And whenever the pain of that bites down, I remember that my grandmothers fought to teach me pride, to help me remember where I come from, creatively, with great love, so that I can at least know I am some of the things that my father is. And I will try to honour him, and honour God with that – and advocate for anyone who is isolated, alone, and marginalised, as my grandmothers once advocated for me.

[*In the cover photograph, my grandmother is the woman on the left, my great grandmother is the woman on the right. The tiny white haired woman in the middle is my great great grandmother and the baby she is holding is my mother.]

Matthew 18 & The Disobedient Church: Is It Time That It Cut Off It’s Hand?

I’m taking a break for a few days or so from twitter which, apart from Reddit, is the only social media platform I use (the vagaries of my dysphasia mean I struggle to process other forms of social media). But when on there in the last few days, I expressed my exasperation at the attempts on the part of some in the charismatic church to draw a parallel between the Charismatic church and their response to the abuse committed by Mike Pilavachi, through his various ministries run via Soul Survivor, and the way in which the L’Arche community handled the revelations of the appalling abuse committed by Jean Vanier, their founder.

Not all of my expressions of that exasperation were well put, however – and with apologies to Natalie Collins for a rather inept response to her thoughtful engagement, I want to dig into that with a little more clarity, and reflect both the direct teaching Jesus gave to the abused, the abusers, the Church, the ways in which the Church as a whole (and individuals within it) disobey him to whom we are discipled – and in some cases even twist the very direct teachings of Jesus into attacks on those they abuse.

Jesus was always consistent in his message to abusers – in Matthew 5:29 he points to the men who divorce their wives in order to marry other (younger) women. He reminds them that adultery is abusive, and makes it clear that they should act radically to improve their own behaviour and have better self-discipline (that they should “gouge out their eye”). In Matthew 18, he warns against abusing “little ones” (children and the vulnerable), and his message is equally as stark. It is better that you drown than harm them, says Jesus (vs 6), but he goes further, harking back to his earlier message to abusive husbands – if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off, he says. (A warning to those who would inflict physical forms of abuse). If your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out – a warning to those who look upon children and the vulnerable with with a consumptive or salacious eye. And this isn’t an exclusive list of the abuses Jesus is concerned with – See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my father in heaven, he says (vs 10). Be warned, then – for every abusive thought and deed against the vulnerable, God will know.

If you choose to do what is wrong, says Jesus, then you are making a choice from a bad place and you must act – you must excise that which is bad within you, and you must do whatever is required to that end. Jesus leaves no room for ambiguity here. Only radical action and self-discipline will suffice.

But then Jesus widens the teaching, for this is not just for the individual – Jesus instructs his Church in the matter. If someone in the Church is sinning (behaving abusively) against their brother or sister, and will not change after they have been spoken to in private (vs 15 &16), then it becomes a matter for the Church to deal with. And if that person who is behaving abusively still will not change, then Jesus instructs the Church to “…treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

In other words, to shun them. To cut them off, like that hand – or gouge them out, like that eye.

We know how shocking this teaching is to the disciples because Peter immediately asks about the frequency of forgiveness in light of it. Jesus does, after all, teach us that forgiveness is so important – and he reassures us that this teaching continues to allow forgiveness to happen as part of an ongoing process (vs 22 “…”I tell you not seven times, but seventy-seven times”) and warns against bearing unforgiveness where one has been forgiven.

Apart from a brief statement on his facebook page that made no real acknowledgement of his decades of grooming children, of psychological, physical and spiritual abuse of young people and the bullying and gaslighting of innumerable colleagues, Mike Pilavachi has shown no real repentance and no willingness to change. He has not and is not ‘cutting off his hand’, or ‘gouging out his eye’.

Similarly, the majority of Charismatic church leaders have been utterly silent about the episode – the Rev Coates soft soaping, ticket selling stint in Premier Christianity notwithstanding. Some have complained that those calling for leaders to speak up in solidarity with victims “have an axe to grind” against Charismatic theology. And whilst there have been those who have individually provided thoughtful, careful, victim-centered responses that reflect Jesus’s love for those who have been hurt – corporately, Charismatic Church leaders have chosen to ignore every human pleading, seemingly more concerned with the reputation of their tradition than with the hurting and the vulnerable, or with obeying Jesus. Some, like JJohn, have shown support to Mike Pilavachi, but had not a single word to say about those he harmed.

They are not, in light of Pilavachi’s lack of repentance, treating him like a ‘pagan or tax collector’.

They also number some of those most resistant to the idea of independent safeguarding in the Church of England. Along with a great many victim-survivors, and those who have advocated and campaigned about this for a very long time indeed, I shake my head in wonder – at the intransigence, and the utter inability to recognise that safeguarding and redemption are not at odds with each other, but are entirely bound together. But why are independent safeguarding procedures in the church so necessary?

If Mike Pilavachi isn’t enough of an example, you need to look at the example of Alan Scott and Jeremy Riddle, not just because these are church “leaders” who deny the authority of any oversight – but because these are church “leaders” who have openly used Matthew 18 to attack victims, or used it to avoid answering accusations from abuse victims..

Strictly speaking, Matthew 18 doesn’t deal with how to treat abusive Church Leaders. But then strictly speaking, “leaders” like Jeremy Riddle and Alan Scott work very hard to ensure that they are not ever accountable to a Church with oversight in the first place. This is another facet of abusers – in whatever role they inhabit, they will always seek to Avoid Accountability because if you’ve found yourself in a situation where abusing your position is providing you with the power you have come to crave, avoiding accountability is necessary to surviving and thriving as an abuser. Whether you are using others to shield yourself and your abuse from view – as Jean Vanier appeared to use L’Arche – or removing your church from the group of church’s that provided oversight, as Alan Scott did, or simply operating outside of a Church’s nominal oversight, by being “unorthodox”, as Mike Pilavachi did, ensuring that accountability doesn’t happen is necessary to success as an abuser.

Therefore twisting Jesus very clear message of freedom to the abused – and equally clear message to the abuser, if they want the same freedom – must itself be subverted once it is inevitably invoked. Perhaps to some it would seem astonishing that the wife of a man accused of abuse, and an account representing Alan Scott, also accused of years of abuse, would feel so comfortable turning Jesus’s words of liberation for the abused, against the abused, so freely on social media. To others of us, however, it is less astonishing than it is entirely predictable.

Jesus says to the abused: I believe you; you did nothing wrong – you are not to blame. Come. Rest.

Jesus says to the abuser: You have done wrong – change your ways. It is on you. Come. Work hard.

To the abuser who is not prepared to acknowledge their guilt, that message is death, not life. It is life, but they have to be prepared to accept their guilt, and take full responsibility for their choices.

For abusers in the Church, Jesus offers no escape; he never says to them, in any way, “but don’t worry guys, I’m going to sacrifice my life so that you don’t have to answer for your sin”. In Jesus’s teaching, guilt is fully located in the abuser, and in Jesus’s analogies it is the flesh of the abuser which is cut off, or sacrificed because of their sin – not that of Jesus. This is not a sin that can be pinned to a cross in some wordy-but-meaningless confession. Jesus will not accept their sin on his being.

In a culture where there is a great deal of money to be made for the successful, for the entrepreneurial, for the charismatic/Charismatic, for the evangelical Christian “leader”; where disability is a thing to be cured not accommodated, let alone seen in leadership (ironic, when so much of the New Testament was written by an epileptic); where you still can’t be a woman without being a sin by default, whatever your state of coverage, and whose leadership is still more likely to be defined by that (either because it’s directed towards other women generally, or because it’s concerned with women generally); where to be LGBTQ is to be debated, “prayed away”, patted on the head with “love the sinner not the sin”; where race and racism collide with terrifying frequency and antisemitism is shockingly rife across all traditions – and see how fast the room clears whenever someone dares to remind anyone that Jesus was an Arab Jew – in such a culture it is easy for the eloquent grifter and the abuser to thrive.

Strictly speaking, Matthew 18 doesn’t deal with abusers of the type that are Mike Pilavachi, Alan Scott and Jeremy Riddle, because the teaching that Jesus gives us about the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” – the false prophets – is found in Matthew 7, and his instruction to the Church is again equally stark, and clear: cut them off. They bear false witness and bad fruit.

The problem is that the Church continually fail to recognise the “bad fruit” that these false prophets produce – Mike Pilavachi, Alan Scott, Jeremy Riddle, Mark Driscoll et al – because they become so enthralled with the numbers of bums on seats: which isn’t the “fruit” they bear. The work of the Holy Spirit cannot be ascribed to the hand of man. The “bad fruit” these false prophets bear is the pain, suffering, hurt, humiliation and shame that they inflict on their victims, and it is immensely frustrating that the Church still needs to be told, repeatedly, that it is ignoring this evidence continually.

Safeguarding and redemption, within the context of a society that treats people as things to consume, is and must be bound together; and in ensuring it is independent, it is the Church obeying Jesus’s own teaching of doing whatever is required in the face of the abuser; of cutting off it’s own hand in order that abusers cannot thrive; of cutting off the abuser directly – it is the shepherd, protecting the flock from the “ravening wolves”.

L’Arche responded to the reports of Jean Vanier’s abuse, after his death, by ordering a full, top down inquiry into the whole community and organisation, with its priority being Vanier’s victims and the disabled members of the community. By doing so, it exposed how Vanier used L’Arche to cover his own abusive behaviour – a revelation that caused great, and lasting, pain and harm in and of itself. If the Charismatic Church had the stomach to order an investigation into itself over Mike Pilavachi’s ministry, (it has not) it would still be difficult to draw a parallel, because “community” is itself a word that get’s located, and re-located, depending on which leader you follow. And when will it do something about it’s ableism, which is systemic, and abusive, in and of itself?

When you proclaim you are proudly “counter cultural” whilst being part of a Church that is hyper-consumerist, inexorably tied to increasingly right wing political parties, and all whilst appealing to the working class with the wicked, false “prosperity” gospel, which proliferates in one form or another across more than just Charismatic and Evangelical circles; when you have stood to one side in silence as Christian Nationalism and Christofascism have raised their ugly heads once more; when you disobey the one to whom you are discipled, whose name you carry, so that not even a victim of abuse can be safe in his house, you cannot then claim parallel with those who do obey, and who do care about the little ones and the vulnerable.

Your lip service, I assure you, does not count.

Dear Anglicans: Why Did the South African Communion Declare Israel an Apartheid State?

If the Israeli governments vote to ‘settle’ (take yet more of Palestine from the Palestinians) the Gaza envelope – as well make further illegal land grabs in the Palestinian West Bank, and continue to threaten the incredibly small Armenian community – isn’t enough to persuade you that the people, and land, who are under threat are not, in fact, the Israeli’s, perhaps you will listen to your brothers and sisters in the Southern African communion.

For reasons that require no illustration, Black people in South Africa are the experts on apartheid. They lived under it for far too long and their release from that bondage, from that oppression, was a long overdue answer to a million prayers. But they knew that they were not the only ones to suffer that oppression, and Nelson Mandela was very clear that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid could not leave behind their brothers and sisters in Palestine.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” President Nelson Mandela, 1997

Bishop Desmond Tutu, until his death in 2021, was a constant prophetic critic of the Israeli governments, whose theology spoke to a God who favoured the enslaved and oppressed over those who sought conquest and brought oppression – and was therefore on the side of the Palestinians, yet never losing sight of Jewish humanity. His vision and message began with the God of Exodus, the God of liberation: “When our people groaned by virtue of the burden of racist oppression, we invoked the God who addressed Moses in the burning bush… We told them God was notoriously biased in favour of those without clout; the poor; the weak; the hungry; the voiceless.” (Generation Palestine: Voices From the BDS Movement 2012).

For Black people in South Africa, then, the reality of the oppression suffered by the indigenous Arab people of Palestine – Muslim, Christian and Jew alike – is a cause that has never been far from their hearts or minds, and in taking to the International Court of Justice the case for the genocide being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza, Naledi Pandor and her colleagues follow in the footsteps of some of South Africa’s most committed liberators.

To answer why the Anglican Church of Southern Africa declared Israel to be an apartheid state last year, we can look at some of the evidence gathered by B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. As they describe plainly: “One organising principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another, Palestinians.” You can also check out information from Amnesty International here.

That underlying principle – the supremacy of Jewish people, not just in Israel, but eventually the whole of Palestine – is the key to understanding all of this. It is, and has always been, the driving principle of Zionism and any even cursory reading of the founders of Zionism and the first leaders of Israel (who enacted the Nakba in 1946-48), makes this very clear. The goal has always been to remove every Arab from Palestine.

“From the River to the Sea” has never been a genocidal cry – but a cry for freedom, a “groan by virtue of the racist burden of oppression.” When Archbishop Thabo Makgoba released the Church’s statement last September – in what was widely interpreted as a rebuke to Archbishop Justin Welby’s de facto declaration that there was no apartheid in Israel – he said:

“When Black South African’s who have lived under apartheid visit Israel, the parallels to apartheid are impossible to ignore. If we stand by and keep quiet we will be complicit in the continuing oppression of the Palestinians.” (Emphasis mine)

And so I ask – how many babies must be buried alive, or blown apart, before the Anglican Church repents of its complicity? How many women? How many children? How much death and oppression and ethnic cleansing is required before the Church of England says – we were wrong and we are sorry?

How much genocide does it take?