`Gazette' warns on work with children

An end to "the casualness" with which volunteers are recruited to work with children has been urged in the current issue of the Church of Ireland Gazette.

Stating that the abuse of trust within the churches has been particularly damaging for victims and their families, the editorial calls for trust to be earned once again, "and earned not with words but with trust-building action".

For that reason there was no official launch of "Safeguarding Trust", the Church of Ireland code of good practice for ministry with children. Patterns of working with people must change, it says, as there were people inside and outside the churches who carried the emotional scars of things which have happened in their lives.

It might be said, it continued, that a culture of trust was being replaced with a culture of suspicion within the church, not least in questioning whether clergy should run mixed sex confirmation groups on their own. This was not so, it suggests. Rather, a culture of openness and awareness was being adopted, "awareness that we need to work in such a way as to minimise the possibility that abuse might take place and to maximise the safety and protection which are the rights of every child."

The culture of casualness when it came to recruiting volunteers to work with children had to change also, it says. People who worked with children must be known, as must their background. The benefits of such regulations, it concludes, would be that children, clergy, and church workers would all be protected. The alternative was that "there will be many, particularly those who work with children in other settings in their professional lives, who will feel that to work with children on a voluntary basis in a church setting is a risk which they cannot afford to take."