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According to the report, referenced in The Guardian on Tuesday, 390 priests and church leaders within the Church of England have been convicted of abuse from the 1940s to 2018.
Only in 2018 did the church receive 2,504 reports that children or young adults may have been abused.
The report, written by an independent group investigating how the church has acted in cases where children have been abused, asserts that the church did not take allegations of such crimes seriously but violated the best interests of children.
This has put the church in direct conflict with the church’s mission to work to “love and care for the innocent and vulnerable,” the report’s authors write.
– For several decades it has The Church of England has failed to protect children and young adults from sexual offenders, instead maintaining a culture where offenders could hide and victims faced obstacles that prevented them from telling what they were exposed to, he says Professor Alexis Jay, who held a hearing on which the report is based, to The Guardian.
The report addresses several cases in which priests sexually abused a sometimes large number of children and claims that the church’s reaction when it became aware of this was not fast enough and that the church did not realize the severity of the accusations.
The church also failed in the way it acted with authorities and instead of reporting the abuse to the police, it handled the allegations internally.
