How religion served child abuse

A review by Keith Makin has found Church of England failure to report to the police the abuse carried out by John Smyth “constituted a cover-up”. Hundreds of children and young men were attacked in ritual abuse by Smyth. The Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned over the cover-up.

Abuse came to light in 1982, when a Cambridge student attempted suicide, citing Smyth’s threat of a “special and more severe” beating to mark his 21st birthday. Reverend Mark Ruston carried out an investigation into the allegations of beatings, many of which took place in Smyth’s specially sound-proofed outbuilding. He reported to the church the “scale and severity of the practice was horrific.”

Smyth was not reported to the police. Instead Smyth was able to go to Zimbabwe, where he continued “brutal abuse on an industrial scale” at Christian camps. The Makin review concludes: “John Smyth was out of sight and out of mind, a problem solved and exported to Africa”.

In 1995 Smyth was charged with homicide following the naked body of a 16-year-old boy, Guide Nyachuru, being found in the swimming pool at one of his Christian camps. In 1997 he was charged with five counts of criminal injury in relation to incidents at a camp where five boys were harmed. The prosecution was postponed indefinitely, but Smyth was barred from re-entering Zimbabwe, and moved his “religious practice” again, this time to South Africa.

Smyth, who was a QC, had been a famous morality crusader.

Whitehouse

He acted repeatedly for Mary “Ban this filth!” Whitehouse, most notably with blasphemy laws against Gay News in the 1970s. He helped draft legislation restricting pornography in Australia. In South Africa he was active in opposing legalising same-sex marriage and opposing abortion rights.

AboutGay News John Smyth told the court: “It may be said that this is a love poem. It is not, it is a poem about buggery”. The novelist Margaret Drabble, called as a defence witness, was asked whether Gay News was a suitable paper to be read by her adolescent sons. She said her 16-year-old son had read it, and was denounced by the prosecution.

Establishment

The Christian establishment was agitating about “protecting the young” whilst ignoring evidence of widespread physical and sexual child abuse in their midst. That could be seen as hypocrisy.

Yet victims described how John Smyth bragged about his and Anne Smyth’s “very active” sex life. “He would say that this was a reward for waiting to be married before having sex and he wove this into his warnings about masturbation” to young people. His conservative and evangelical stance emphasised discipline, and in various reports he defended the abuse with reference to the needs of the Church.

Dr Elly Hanson told the Makin review: “…the [religious] beliefs in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice. Smyth drew on a set of beliefs that helped justify his abuse to his victims and likely also to himself. In parallel with this, his abuse is not accounted for by these beliefs (i.e. it simply being a misunderstanding or misapplication of theology)… he had deeper motivations at work, and deployed numerous strategies in service of his abuse.”

Whilst “morality campaigners” claim they wish to defend children, religious indoctrination and hierarchy and anti-sex rhetoric make children and young people less safe. With a resurgence of reactionary moral panic, the labour movement should stand up for sexual, gender and religious freedom.