The Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) announced last week that moderator Rev Trevor Gribben is to stand down after a review found “serious and significant failings” in central safeguarding functions from the period 2009 to 2022.
Former senior police officer Jim Gamble was head of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command (CEOP) Centre until 2010 and is now Chief Executive of INEQE Safeguarding Group, which offers safeguarding services on a consultancy basis.
In the wake of the PCI news, he told the News Letter:
:: There is no responsibility on any statutory body to actively audit the safeguarding systems of a church or charity
:: The system for checking such things in charities in Northern Ireland is effectively self regulating
:: There is no country in the world that has got a system in place that he would recommend
:: PCI urgently needs to get an independent professional team to to a full audit of what went wrong
"When I first saw the statements from the Presbyterian Church on this, my first thought was there's clearly much more to this than meets the eye, and more to come," he told the News Letter.
His team is currently carrying out independent safeguarding audits of all 42 dioceses in the Church of England after a public inquiry found serious child safeguarding failures.
He said there is no statutory body in the UK which regularly audits a charity's policies and culture to determine if their safeguarding systems have collapsed or are functioning well.
PCI is registered as a charity with the Charity Commission.
"That is why charities have trustees who can be struck off," he said.
"There is a complicated and complementary network of mechanisms within most charities to ensure that safeguarding responsibilities are being met. But it is primarily self regulation, though effectively under statutory guidelines, that is the way it is across the board.
"You must remember that every year a charity must make a report to the Charity Commission. If they have a serious incident that they fail to report, they'll be found wanting."
He said there was no country in the world that had a statutory monitoring system of charities that he would recommend.
Whilst there are few safeguarding records in PCI since 2019, he would expect to see records and minutes of meetings at all levels from internal safeguarding memos and the general assembly to Kirk sessions.
He was very concerned that the review mentioned by PCI so far was internal.
"The lessons learned from the Church of England, the Catholic Church and other environments, is that internal investigations do not generate the level of public confidence in safeguarding that is required when things go wrong.
"These reviews must be fundamentally independent and driven by a team of experts - not an individual - who are not from within the church. And their findings must be made public in full.
"That is the only way you can deal with these situations.”