“Jasvinder Sanghera: Abuse and the Church of England”, BBC World Service HARDTAlk
Stephen Sackur interview of Jasvinder Sanghera, January 29, 2024
(Unofficial transcript).
Welcome to HARDTalk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sackur. My guest today, has used her own traumatic experience of abuse to become a passionate advocate for other abuse survivors.
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Jasvinder Sanghera was born into a family of Indian Sikh immigrants in the English Midlands. The expectation was always that Jasvinder, like her six sisters, would accept an arranged marriage, in her case to a much older man. As a teen, she rebelled, which led to abuse and de facto imprisonment in the family home. Eventually she ran away, leading to a rift with her family that has never healed. Her sister Robeena did not run and ended up so desperately unhappy in a forced marriage that she took her own life.
Now these experiences led Jasvinder Sanghera to write a memoir, “Shame,” which became a bestseller. She set up a charity, Karma Nirvana, to help others affected by so-called honour-based abuse and forced marriage. In 2021 her advocacy work for survivors prompted the Church of England to appoint her to an independent safeguarding board set up to investigate allegations of abuse involving members of the church. But just a few months ago, she was fired. The board was dissolved. The church suggested it had failed to deliver on its remit. She went public with accusations that the church didn’t really want independent scrutiny and was disregarding the rights of victims.
Now the dispute has become bitter and it’s divided the church. It’s also raised wider questions about the willingness or otherwise of key institutions and professions to open themselves up to thorough scrutiny and genuine accountability when it comes to the protection of the most vulnerable. Well, Jasvinder Sanghera joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.
JS: Thank you.
SS: 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 to you that key institutions might talk the talk about protecting the vulnerable, but maybe they’re not so good on delivery?
JS: Absolutely, I would agree with that point and specifically my role was survivor advocate. So my role was specifically to be a voice for victims and survivors who had experienced spiritual abuse by the hands of members of the clergy across the board, and to ensure that their views are not only heard but embedded across policy and practice. So from my perspective, I did that job. I sat with victims and survivors. I listened to the harrowing stories of abuse, but equally those they went to who often looked the other way. And I shared those experiences with the highest of highest, so the Archbishops Council members made up of the most senior bishops, various people 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.
SS: Well, I’m gonna 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 focussed. So we will revisit that and much more detail.
JS: Ok, that’s fine, yeah.
SS: 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. You were born into a pretty traditional Sikh family, parents migrated from India to the UK to the Midlands in England. They wanted to arrange your marriage. Indeed, I think from the age of eight they were talking about who you would marry. You as a teenager rejected that, didn’t you?
JS: I did. I was promised to somebody by the age of eight, and I’d watched my sisters being taken out of British schools to marry men in photographs. When it was my turn, it was in order of age and I said no. I was born in Britain. I wanted to go to school, dare I say college or university. And I say that because growing up within that household we were not allowed to have thoughts of independence or freedom. So I became the perpetrator actually, the person who was not following the norm, the status quo. And as a result of that, I was taken out of school and kept a prisoner at home until I agreed to the marriage.
SS: I’ve already used the word abuse, but it’s not something that’s always easy to define. What you’ve just told me about the way your family, your parents brought you up, the assumptions they made, the behaviors they practiced upon you. Do you categorically regard that as abuse?
JS: Absolutely. I was a child, and the role of parenting is to protect your child, to protect them physically, emotionally, from harm. And from my experience, I was being conditioned to believe that it was part of my tradition, my religion and my culture to marry this stranger in a photograph. And that growing up in Britain does not mean you have rights, independence or freedom. My mother would say to me the only reason I’m sending you to school is because it’s the law. So from my perspective, they’re in a position of power as parents and that position was being abused.
SS: You ran away. I think you were actually 16 when you when you ran away.
JS: I was.
SS: And that in essence broke relations with your family, particularly your mother, forever. Is there any time in your life when you’ve looked back and thought I could have handled it differently?
JS: Absolutely not, because from the age of 16 and leaving, for the next 16 to 20 years old, I begged for their forgiveness as if I had done something wrong. It took my sister’s suicide to realize that actually I was the victim, not the perpetrator. The point is this.
SS: Just let me stop you for a second because what you’ve just said is shocking. I believe she was called Robeena your sister.
JS: She was, yeah.
SS: She, unlike you, agreed to go ahead with, I think, what you would always call a forced marriage and in her 20s, deeply unhappy, she took her own life.
JS: She did. You have to remember I was still disowned by my family then, so my family never spoke to me again. And my sister was very unhappy in a marriage and went for help to members in the community, religious leaders also and family members and they sent her back and told her it was her duty to make the marriage work. She tragically set herself on fire and she died and I felt that somewhere because of that experience, my mother would say, come back, you know, we forgive you. Not that I needed forgiving, you know, I was asserting myself in terms of not wanting to marry a stranger. But she actually made the point, this doesn’t change anything, you know, you cannot come back even though Robeena died in this way, you mustn’t show your face at the funeral, etcetera, which is why I set up the charity Karma Nirvana and started to speak out.
SS: And interesting that you do hold your mother of all family members primarily responsible for inculcating this particular sort of atmosphere and practice and behaviour in your family. You say, “I’m ashamed to say that women do uphold these so-called honour systems. They are the gatekeepers of abuse.” Do you think the work you’ve done in Karma Nirvama, this NGO that you established afterwards, has made any difference to the mindset of people, including women like your late mother?
JS: I think it has. I think it’s made an influence in terms of sending out that strong message. I mean, our campaign for the criminalization of forced marriage I’m hearing from the younger generation today is acting as a deterrent, as almost a tool to negotiate with family members.
SS: To be clear, you achieved that. I mean that legislation was passed.
JS: Absolutely. And younger people are telling me now that we’re able to say to our parents, you can’t do this to us. It’s against the law. You’ll go to prison. But I have to say, change is really slow in that community where this is happening. Where the change is happening, is the increase in reporting. I mean Karma Nirvana, I left in 2018, has a national helpline now. You know, we have a civil criminal law. Recently the age of consent of marriage for children in England and Wales has been increased from 16 to 18.
SS: Yeah. You can’t marry before under 18.
JS: No, No. So we’ve changed things significantly in terms of leaving that lasting change. But the point is, in 1993, nobody was talking about this. You know, today the reporting is it thousands, hundreds of thousands. Across the UK.
SS: And yet we can still think and look at terrible cases like that quite recently of Somaiya Begum, who was a young woman who was murdered, brutally murdered by her uncle because she had reported her father’s threats of violence after she refused to accept an arranged marriage. She was supposedly being protected by a forced marriage protection order, which was part of the legislation that you had worked so hard to get. And yet still her own family, her uncle in this case, murdered her. It just suggests to me that all of the work that you’ve done has taken you some way, but it’s still, that’s still an awful long way to go.
JS: You could not change—If my mother was still alive today, you could not change her views.
SS: Really.
JS: Absolutely. And my family still don’t talk to me. You know, I read on Facebook two years ago that my brother died. They still refuse to acknowledge me. I’m talking about sisters who were born in this country and raised in this country, who still see me as an individual who has shamed the family. It’s going to take a really concerted effort of awareness, people in schools, teachers need to be talking about this because they’re the most effective group, children and young people. So yes, we’ve created laws, but to shift a culture and a mindset, we’ve got to continue speaking out and accepting this is not part of somebody’s culture.
SS: And on this question of implementation, you and others, including Trevor Phillips, the former chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, have talked about what they see as a problem from policing to politicians with public officials who worry that if they are too interventionist in some of these cases, they will be labeled racist.
JS: Absolutely. If people see culture before they see abuse, we’ve got a problem. I saw that in my role at Karma Nirvana. I recall a police officer calling the helpline and I used to have beggar belief box on my emails and this police officer rang the help plan and he said, I’m ringing you because you deal with the cultural stuff, don’t you, as an organization. And the call handler listened to this call and he said, I’ve got to a man with me who’s from an Afghanistan background here in Britain who’s in a full blown relationship with a 14 year old girl and he’s telling me it’s part of his culture and his religion. So I don’t want to offend him. Could you just tell me if that is acceptable? So the call handler stopped. And she said, look, can we just remove culture, tradition, religion, whatever it is you’re thinking it could be, and look at the possible raft of offences here?
SS: Look at the law.
JS: Absolutely.
SS: Now, you obviously have a very high profile for the work that we’ve just discussed. The Church of England, going back many years now has realized that it has an issue with abuse within. And how best to deal with it, to credibly say to the world that we are aware of our own problems and we’re tackling them, we are going to be open, we’re going to be accountable. In 2015, current Archbishop Justin Welby said this: “whether the perpetrators are alive or dead, survivors of abuse within the church must come first. The church has to get this right. There are no excuses for getting it wrong.” And as a result perhaps of that feeling in 2021 you were asked to join this independent safeguarding board. Did you at the time feel absolutely convinced that the church was serious about truly coming to terms, confronting the abuses within.
JS: I think the first thing to say was I wasn’t asked to go into that role of survivor advocate, I applied for the role. I left Karma Nirvana after 25 years and I thought, now what do I want to do? I want to put myself somewhere to make a difference. So I watched the IICSA inquiries (the Independent Inquiries into Child Sexual Abuse) and I watched for a whole year the testimonies of men and women who had been abused by members of the church and I could see the journey the church was on and I wanted to make a difference. So I applied for the role. And I felt they were serious about this because, you know, it wasn’t an IICSA recommendation to have an independent safeguarding board, they took it upon themselves to say we’re going to develop more independence. It is needed within the church. So I did feel they were serious. Absolutely.
SS: You now claim, at every turn, we– that is the safeguarding panel board, and there are two key figures on it, yourself and Steve Reeves, who seem to have cooperated quite a lot—at every turn we’ve been told you can’t do that even though we’re supposedly independent. You seem to be saying that having said this border, they had no intention of letting you and the board members do the real work.
JS: I’m not just saying it, I can give the evidence of that. I mean, I’ve been on the board since September 2021, right up to June 2023. So I had the experience of being part of a board that was developed in the Church of England to ensure independent oversight of safeguarding, to ensure that we also had an oversight of the National Safeguarding Team that the Church of England has to deal with safeguarding. And what was happening to us was that at every point 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. Well 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 sign 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.
SS: Yeah, I mean we’ve spoken to the Church of England and they’ve given us a response, they reject many of the accusations that you make specifically about things like you claiming that you were told by officials that you were too survivor-focused, they say that is a complete misrepresentation of what you were told. They also say that you and Steve Reeves behaved in a way which made the functioning of the board pretty much impossible. And to add to that, Meg Munn, who was the interim chairman appointed to this board of three, she says of you and Steve Reeves, although they initially welcomed my appointment, the two existing board members, that is you and Reeves, routinely ignored emails, failed to respond to reasonable requests, declined to have meetings. I was staggered that this unprofessional behaviour, particularly when it concerned such important issues.
JS: OK, so the first thing to say is that we’re an independent body. After the first chair resigned because of serious data breaches, she resigned. The second chair should have been somebody appointed in the same way we were appointed, openly, recruited and she wasn’t. She was imposed upon us. This is nothing against Meg Munn, by the way. So the point here is, the Archbishop council make a decision for the independent body to appoint a chair who within 48 hours, 74 victims and survivors contact us to say do not under any circumstances share data with this person because she’s part of the church. She sits on the National Safeguarding Steering Group which we scrutinize. So, we’ve got a problem.
SS: Well, I need to say because the legal issues here are complex, but they’re quite important, that the first chair of your board, Maggie Atkinson, absolutely rejects the characterization you’ve just given as to why she left. And she’s described your views of why she left as partial, biased, and deeply prejudiced against her. So we need to put that on the record.
JS: OK.
SS: Surely what really matters here is you, for good or ill, have now left the board. The board has been dissolved and the real impact here is on survivors of alleged abuse inside the Church of England. I believe there were at least a dozen active cases that you were working on when the board was dissolved. What are you saying to them, you’re still in touch with them, I imagine? What are you saying to them now on?
JS: Well, on June the 21st, we were given an hour’s notice to tell us that they’re disbanding the board. My colleague Steve Reeves contacted the General Secretary to say please give us more time to prepare the survivors. Those cases we are dealing with–you have to remember these were people who came to the Independent Safeguarding Board with their experiences. They had to go through a process to be accepted for a case review. Some of them were complaints. We were not afforded that time 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 Archbishops Council.
SS: What’s their mental state like ?
JS: 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 2 overdoses since. I’ve shared all of 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’m not going to ignore them as a survivor advocate.
SS: Well the church isn’t ignoring them either. It points to the fact it has now appointed a new sort of independent supervisor of the whole safeguarding scene. That is, I think we’ve referred to already, Professor Alexis Jay, who ran that independent inquiry on child sex abuse that you referred to. They also point to several other initiatives they’ve taken, including putting more than 100 and well over £100 million into programs to help the victims of historic abuse. So they say, look, victims, be aware we’ve had a problem with the board, but we are moving on. To quote Archbishop Welby, we’re resetting. And clearly the message from the church is victims, you can have faith in our commitment.
JS: Unless victims and survivors own and believe that and see the evidence of that–
SS: But are you telling them they shouldn’t believe it?
JS: I’m not telling them anything. I’m at the end of the line, as is Steve Reeves when they contact us to say, what is happening? We don’t know what is happening. We’ve been told options are being developed, but nobody’s talking to us. So we’re still the data controllers. When we left, we were told you’re only to deal with the data, nothing else. So that is something 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 e-mail sending the e-mail at 3:00 AM 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.
SS: Yeah, because, I mean, this is a tragedy for the church and it’s a tragedy for the individuals who have experienced terrible abuse at the hands of people within the church.
JS: Absolutely. Absolutely.
SS: Surely, you know, you as a survivor more than anybody should be sort of thinking to yourself, what is the best way that we can move forward in the interests of those survivors? Are you sure you’re handling this in the best interests of those survivors?
JS: Absolutely. As soon as we were told we were no longer needed and were only to handle the data and we had a huge response, we still do have this response from the 12, we had emailed the senior, the most senior people to say please work with us to find a way forward. I have to say–
SS: Maybe you’re being a bit negative really about the way, where the church is today because as you know, I interviewed an influential Bishop in the church, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, just the other day and she said the truth is that the church is appalled at what went on in the past, the church has changed, and to quote her memorable phrase, if you sneeze now in the church and it looks like a safeguarding problem, you are out. That’s her confident assertion.
JS: But that is not the assertion of victims and survivors, I can tell you that for sure. And I can also say that actually what the church needs to do is look quite openly at what happened with the Independent Safeguarding Board.
SS: We’re almost out of time, but I need to ask you this last question then. If you are still so appalled and so lacking in trust in the most senior church leadership, can you still call yourself a practicing, believing Church of England Christian?
JS: Well, my faith is personal to me. These people are not—
SS: Has this rocked your faith?
JS: Well, it has rocked my faith slightly, but I’ve met victims and survivors who are no longer part of the faith because of it. But for me, the church needs to be more compassionate and needs to be very honest about what has happened here. Bring on a review of the Independent Safeguarding Board. I respect Professor Jay, but that’s a longer term plan. There are things right now that need to be addressed and people are being harmed because of decisions that they have made that need to be tackled immediately.
SS: We have to end there. Jasvinder Sanghera, thank you so much for being on hard talk.
JS: Thank you.
If you found this interview interesting, you might want to listen to my conversation with the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, with the Church of England. Beset by arguments over gender, sex and safeguarding, I asked her if the Anglican Communion can hold together. You can find that interview on BBC Sounds, or wherever you get your podcasts.