Time for Action: Part 05, Investigation of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest
Time for Action is a series of posts detailing ACNAtoo’s July 15 open letter to Archbishop Foley Beach,
expanding on the action items listed and providing background regarding why they are of paramount importance and continue to deserve a public response.
Finally, our open letter requests a set of actions that will permit the Diocese of the Upper Midwest and the Anglican Church in North America to operate with transparency and accountability. The first two action items are as follows:
In the interest of transparency, we ask that you publish the full names and credentials of every member of the new Provincial Response Team who will “take up oversight of the investigation” going forward, as soon as this team is selected.
We ask that you commit publicly not to hire an investigative firm until the #ACNAtoo survivors and their advocacy team have approved both the firm, scope, and parameters of the investigation.
Likewise, we ask to be given the opportunity to correct any public statements made about the investigation before they are published.
The remaining action items relating to the investigation will be discussed in our next post.
Provincial Response Team
We are pleased to see that the Province has announced the PRT members and shared their credentials online. We are deeply concerned, however, that the province began soliciting stories from survivors on July 30, 2021 - a full month before the PRT was even seated.
Soliciting stories without informing survivors in advance what will happen to those stories is not trauma-informed care. The PRT should create a safe place for survivors to share their stories by communicating clearly and publicly what they are doing, what survivors can expect when they reach out, and what will be done with the stories they provide in trust.
Instead, survivors who email the PRT often wait over a week before receiving an email reply which provides little to no information. This is a disheartening response from a team which is, according to Province leaders, “fully engaged with survivors.”
Given this reality, #ACNAtoo asks that the Provincial Response Team clarify the following questions:
Is the PRT conducting any immediate investigations into the stories they receive and the church leaders implicated in them, or are they merely filing them away for the eventual investigation firm they will hire?
What steps are being taken to prevent accused clergy/staff/volunteers from perpetrating further abuse and harm?
Do trauma-informed individuals reach out to survivors to help them find professional counseling and care?
Is the PRT investigating spiritual abuse claims as they receive them, or are those being saved for investigation by the eventual third party firm?
Will the forthcoming investigation firm be tasked with investigating all reports of sexual and spiritual abuse throughout UMD? Or only sexual abuse? Or only the mishandling of sexual abuse? Or only the mishandling of Mark Rivera’s sexual abuse?
Because the PRT continues to share almost no public information about their process, survivors are asking #ACNAtoo whether it is safe to reach out to the PRT. It is unclear to many why the PRT is gathering survivor stories at this time.
Is this being done in order to immediately provide pastoral care and stop the abuse? Is it being done to discourage survivors from telling their stories publicly? Is the PRT simply collecting stories on behalf of an eventual third party investigative firm?
Collecting stories for any other reason than to immediately provide care and stop harm is deeply problematic. If the PRT is collecting survivor stories on behalf of a third party firm, this could compromise the integrity and independence of the third party investigation by tainting the documentation trail. It is also potentially traumatizing for survivors to reach out to the PRT expecting an immediate response, only to learn that the PRT will be taking no action on their behalf and that they will have to repeat their story again at a later date, once a third party investigation is in place.
Ongoing criminal trials and investigations should not prevent the PRT from publicly announcing their meetings in advance and making their minutes available to survivors and their advocacy teams. A transparent process that honors survivors should include clear and regular communication and public reports available on the ACNA website.
While our previous guides for survivors included information about the PRT as one option for reporting, we have waited in vain for the PRT to publish their process, intentions, and whistleblower protections. #ACNAtoo cannot continue to endorse or encourage the sharing of privileged personal and traumatic stories as part of an unknown process.
Investigation Firm
Our second action item comes out of survivors’ previous harmful experiences with the Diocese of the Upper Midwest. The UMD promised survivors that they would be involved in the selection of an investigation firm, but later cut off contact with the survivors for several weeks and subsequently hired Grand River Solutions without their input or knowledge. Once aware that the UMD had signed a contract with Grand River Solutions, the survivors reached out to this firm directly and learned that GRS fell short of nearly every survivor-safe standard for which they had advocated.
With this history, it is imperative that the Province listen to the survivors who unfortunately know what a bad investigation looks like and what scope and parameters are necessary for an effective and survivor-centered approach. The investigation firm needs to be safe, trauma-informed, confidential, truly independent, and equipped to reach out and communicate this to all survivors and potential participants. The firm also needs to be authorized to see all relevant UMD and ACNA records in order to analyze the culture surrounding the abuse and lay out the patterns that enabled and covered it up. Survivor approval of the investigative firm and the investigation scope and parameters is of primary importance.
Our letter also requests that the survivors have an opportunity to correct public statements about the investigation before they are published. The reason for this request is that Bp. Ruch published multiple public statements that included verifiably false information, omitted crucial facts, misrepresented the situation to portray himself in a better light, drastically downplayed the scope and severity of Rivera’s abuses, and specifically referred to survivors, albeit anonymously, without consulting them to see if he correctly represented their allegations.
Not only were the survivors robbed of an opportunity to correct the statements before they became public, but the statements remain uncorrected to this day, despite immediate and urgent pleas from multiple survivors to Bp. Ruch that he correct specific misinformation.
The request that the survivors be granted the right to speak into the PRT’s investigation and public statements is not an attempt to control the investigation, but a modest move toward balancing the power dynamics by which the ACNA currently holds complete control over a diocesan investigation. The relationship between the ACNA and survivors is inherently imbalanced, since the entity that negotiates a contract and funds the investigation by definition maintains control over the process unless clear and transparent checks and balances are in place. Empowering survivors to correct improper processes or prevent public spread of misinformation does not compromise the independence of the investigation. Indeed, it is the only thing that allows an independent investigation to exist.
Our final action item in this section is the largest in scope and deserves its own post, which we will address in Part 6 of the Time for Action series.
To read the full letter and/or add your name to the growing list of signatories, you can access the original post here.