‘The Church of England is not survivor focused when it comes to safeguarding’

Jasvinder Sanghera CBE was sacked last week from her role as survivor advocate on the Church of England’s Independent Safeguarding Board amid claims of a breakdown in relationships. In this interview, she sets the record straight

Steve Reeves, my fellow board member, and I are in total shock. We feel that the decision to remove us from the board was made because we were not prepared to accept and tolerate the Church of England frustrating the work of independence anymore. What is really shocking is the fact that I am hearing people from the Archbishop’s Council say that we did not engage with them. That is simply not true. We were actually in the process of dispute resolution. We have an email from the General Secretary with seven points in terms of how we were moving forward. I only received that last week, and we asked for an independent mediator to seek a resolution. That is hardly the actions of independent board members not willing to engage in a broken down relationship. It is simply not true to say that we have been removed and our work of 19 months destroyed because of a relationship breakdown. That is a lie.