Parents as Agents in countering Child Sexual Exploitation

Pages 344-362 of Stepping out of the Traffick: Pausing for theological reflection on Christian Response to Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking, Edd Glenn Miles and Christa Foster Crawford with Bill Prevette. Regnum, 2024.

Introducing Pace

Pace¹ (now called Ivison Trust) is a voluntary charity in the UK which supports parents whose children are sexually exploited or at risk of it. It sees parents as prime agents in countering CSE. It has learnt much about how to work with parents as partners since it was founded by a parent in 1996.

Fiona was 17 when she was murdered in a Doncaster car-park in 1995. Her mother, Irene Ivison, had striven intensively for several years to help her gifted and lively daughter find her way through some difficult relationships, but she could not prevent her from falling under the control of Zeb who put her on the streets. Three weeks later she was dead. Irene channelled her overpowering grief and anger into rational campaigning action, bringing together supportive individuals from police, social services, the law, medicine, and so CROP, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping, began. Irene told her story at every opportunity, on television and elsewhere: parents whose children were being sexually exploited, or had been killed, heard and made contact with her.² So CROP grew as a coalition of affected parents in action with allies. It took some years before CROP became fully aware of the significance of this distinctive composition and dynamic. By about 2003, Carol March, its first fulltime support worker, was saying to parents, ‘You are the experts on CSE, you know it in the raw, as the pimp calls out your daughter in the middle of the night, and she feels compelled to go. You not only see what it does to her, you get close-up information about pimps, like their car numbers’. It always had parents in its leadership, and that continued after Irene’s premature death in 2000 and long before it had many paid staff. In 2013, its name changed to Pace, Parents against Child Sexual Exploitation, and its affirmation of parents as prime agents was written into the constitution of Pace, requiring a majority of the board of directors to be ‘affected parents’. Pace listens to parents, makes opportunities for them to meet and support each other, and gives them platforms to tell their stories in their own ways, thus disturbing professionals and politicians with their informed passion. Pace trains professionals so that they can make the most of parents; it does this by giving parents a significant role in the training, for they are not specimens but agents.³

But Irene’s first explicit focus was not to build a cooperative agency of parents. She identified two main objectives for CROP. One was proclaimed in the title, the reduction of pimping (there was no shyness then about using this contested and yet still true word). She held that two men had killed her daughter: the man in the carpark, who was brought to trial and imprisoned, and the man who put her on the streets, yet was left free, untouched by the law, to carry on exploiting. Now that the grooming of young people on a large scale in many places in the UK has been exposed in the media, law-courts and enquiries, it is hard to remember the complacency, even jocularity, with which pimping was widely regarded in the late 20^th century. It was not a police priority; it was assumed that young people who were prostituted were making a free life-style choice, which should be respected; pimps were not seen because they were hidden behind the name of ‘boy-friend’ and other disguises. Irene identified the strategic responsibility of the pimp in the sexual exploitation of young people: his was a power that could defeat all the agencies, professedly arrayed in her defence.⁴ All this was clearly argued by participants in the first large national conference held by CROP, under the title, ‘Who are the real criminals in Prostitution?’ – not the prostituted women and children, who were at that time not sharply distinguished, but the pimps.⁵

The second objective was closely related to the first: a reform of the laws touching on sexual exploitation, with more precise updated definitions of offences and heavier penalties. Better laws needed a step-change in enforcement, so that exploiters were sought out, brought to justice, disrupted and deterred. This improvement required a change in attitude in law-makers and law-enforcers, including judges and magistrates and the police and agencies such as social services. The greater challenge was to change the profit-driven media and the widely held assumption that sexual appetites, especially male, were irresistible. This continuing battle has been half-won, and half-lost. It is now no longer respectable or legal to engage children in any sexual way, but the highly sexualised liberalism of adult society is harder to criticise or to limit. It seems to be widely accepted that when ‘sexual services’ are paid for, the sexual activity implies no further or deeper personal relationship and obligation. Humanity is lost, when payment of money buys exemption from respecting the rights and dignity of another person.⁶

At the beginning, there was no mention of parents in the explicit objects of the Coalition and the vision and programme of work they pointed to. But so long as Irene was there, ardently drawing in and mobilizing other parents, it was impossible to deny the reality of parents and their striving for their children. They were the dynamic prophets of this distinctive new initiative; their witness had the authenticity of hard won knowledge and costly engagement. CROP was on an inescapable journey to becoming aware of itself as parents against child sexual exploitation, and that involved continuing struggle to get parents respected and included as agents and partners.

Parents – the problem and the promise

Can there be respect for parents as prime agents in responding to a major crisis in the child’s life? Can they be taken as useful, even key, partners by professionals dealing with the issue? They are often marginalised, ignored, seen as incompetent, and thus part of the problem. Where professionals said ‘No’ to parents as agents, Pace said ‘Yes’ and it has contributed significantly to a shift in attitudes and practice over twenty years.

The problem has multiple causes.

Parents of teenage children are in a natural process of being left aside. The child makes her own way for better or worse.⁷ Commonly, new adult friendly relations are being forged within the family, if only painfully and erratically. Sometimes, there is a breakdown making repair unlikely.

The groomer exploits this natural process, offering a false prospectus to appeal to the young person’s eagerness for life, presenting himself as the only one who really appreciates and understands, thus exacerbating his victim’s impatience with the limitations of home and the irksome memory of being small. Alienating her from parents enhances the control of the clever exploiter.

Professional practice in its own way intensifies the marginalising of parents. It meets some young people who have lost any practical connection with parents and so is bound to deal with them as detached individuals. This is obviously so with young people trafficked to a far country. But a majority of exploited teenagers in the UK live at home. Then the occurrence of exploitation is professionally interpreted as a sign of parental failure; the child comes from a ‘chaotic’ family, an imprecise judgmental description, which could cover many families where children do not fall to the exploiter. Often the family is suspected of neglect and sexual abuse, which is held to make the child vulnerable to extra-familial exploitation. So child sexual exploitation is treated as a sub-set of child sexual abuse. On the basis of evidence about affected families, derived from its work, Pace distinguishes sharply between intra-familial abuse and extra-familial exploitation.

Parents in the crisis present to professionals as naively innocent – they know little of CSE till it invades their lives and at first they have no facility in the technical vocabulary. They are, however, forced quickly to become front-line experts. They are, not surprisingly, distraught, angry and impatient for action, sometimes out of tune with time-consuming professional procedures and detachment. They are inclined to disrupt orderly case reviews. Pace has worked hard to equip parents to engage with professional agencies, and to persuade the agencies that their effectiveness is enhanced by working with parents.⁸

Against this triple tide of marginalisation, a reminder of human basics is helpful. Parents are prime agents in the child’s coming to be. The start of a new life often brings parents into a deeply felt lifelong commitment to a particular child or set of children. Even when parents make a sovereignly free choice to adopt a child, or when they are fully armed against any accident of childbirth by contraception, the coming of a child speaks to their spirits at a deep visceral level; they find themselves profoundly committed, irked perhaps by the loss of freedom and the threat to their precious individuality, but also seduced into love by the little one, this epiphany of new life. The relation is in nature; it is prior to choice, sometimes against the will or the life-path parents choose for themselves. The origin lives powerfully in the memory: ‘my lovely baby’ is a cry often heard when a mother mourns the devastation of her grown child at the hands of exploiters.

Parents are on call 24/7 over many years, and so, with whatever shortcomings, offer a practical reflection of the ideal of unconditional faithfulness. The relation of parent and child is resourced, as well as burdened, by the tangle of roots put down over the years. The long developed habits of care and expectant dependency do not suddenly wither and die within parent or child. The father’s house lurks within the memory of even the wanton prodigal, so that when he ‘comes to himself’ he decides to seek it again.⁹ There is no need to idealise this relationship between parent and child: its having significance does not depend on any pretence of perfection. Parents and children mostly live together on a ‘good enough’ basis. They learn resilience in the give and take of life. Parents who have not seen, or been unable to read the signs¹⁰ of what is happening to their children often wake up and respond with energetic determination when serious trouble is obvious. They then show their responsibility and wisdom by seeking help and taking advice. Parents do not need to apologise or hide their failures when they come to Pace. They are accepted as they are, non-judgmentally, and then Pace highlights the strong positive significance of their coming: they are respected for their will to care for their child even in their impotence. A shared knowledge of the reality of CSE is presupposed in the community of Pace, so that no fuss is made of it. All energies are concentrated on appropriate support.

Against all marginalisations, the promise of the parent is to be welcomed in practical ways, for it is a rich resource.

Parenting in the light of theology

The lifelong commitment of parents to children, frail and faulty as it is, reflects the commitment of God to his children, all his creatures. Parents are not God; but they are a little place where the potentiality of God in humanity is present and active. This presence may be partial, oblique and occasional (He comes and goes, like the wild lion, Aslan, in the Narnia stories). It is the kind of presence for which we wait, sometimes with thirsty impatience.¹¹ The presence of God is promise which calls for waiting with endurance; CSE gives parents testing practice in this style of life. Life is thus constituted as prayer, seeking for God and the fullness of life which God is; and as such, given this structure, parents in action for their children become living witnesses to forgiving redeeming grace, which abounds much more than sin.

Pace and the question of secularity

This essay is intentionally a Christian theological reflection on CSE and Pace. Pace is a secular agency in a secular culture. Its secularity does not rest on a sharp division between religious and non-religious, but is an inclusive pluralism, open to people of any faith and none. Pace workers and parents are of all sorts, as varied in religious as in class and cultural terms. Secularity enables them to cooperate on what seem to be the practical issues of tackling CSE for the sake of the well-being of the young people, families and society affected by it. This non-militant secularity gently reduces any particular faith to silent privacy. Some religious people accept such an outcome with equanimity, but not all. Is an openly avowed and active religious faith bound to disturb the efficiency of the secularity? Does the wider community lose anything when the problem of plurality is solved by silence rather than by letting many flowers bloom? Is it possible to be profoundly Christian, as I want to be, and also constructively affirmative within the work of Pace, as I have been?¹²

There are two stages in my response. Firstly, to offer a Christian appreciation of the kind of secularity found in Pace, thus discovering Christian freedom to join in its action affirmatively. Second, from within that affirmation to point towards deeper dimensions of its service that might be enhanced by insights from Christian faith.

A Christian appreciation of the kind of secularity found in Pace

The Gospel calls for simultaneous openness to the reality of God and of humanity. It speaks to people who know well the tension between them, yet are hungry for life that does justice to both. God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. The Gospel does not call us to give up the world, and with it, our humanity, so as to be left with God alone. According to Christian faith, there is no ‘God alone’, only God, Father, Son and Spirit, who is for his creation and is effecting his will to be with his creation.¹³ This point is made simply in a formula found in the Gospels, and repeated every time we say the Lord’s Prayer: ‘as in heaven, so on earth’.

It is a dangerous temptation to pray as though that will lift us up intoxicatingly into the heavenlies; the quality of the prayer of trust in God is the humility that lives the earthiness of humus, the dust of which we are made. In prayer, we live humanly with God; we do not pretend to climb up to bring God down, but are open to finding God walking with us, as God does in Jesus. Prayer trusts and waits for God: it is a discipline of letting God be God; only thus does it enter into the practice of the Presence of God.

Prayer is human action which trusts God to be God and does not claim to take God’s place. It takes responsibility to serve the ‘so on earth’ side of the partnership. Prayer is a deliberate, fundamental sharing in the mediation the tri-une living God realises between the divine and the human. Just as the divine Word emptied himself (kenosis) to be human in the specific way we have in Jesus Christ, so those who pray are called to make traffic between heaven and earth, from the earthly side, without holding on to any heavenly ambitions.¹⁴

Prayer thus means practising translation between heaven and earth. All translation involves some loss of substance and nuance, and so the human interpreter can only convey what he sees through a glass darkly. He picks up signs, give hints and pointers, make stabs at passing on what he has glimpsed. When Christians participate in secular pluralist operations, like Pace, they are not excused from mediation between God and world – God calls them to that service – but what they can share is fragmentary, occasional, even tentative. They present an invitation to share exploration rather than the exposition of an authoritative theory and business plan. If Christians were to try to impose a Christian plan or ideology on a secular operation, they would be abandoning the ministry of mediation to seek a dominance the Gospel forbids. In the name of Christ, they would lose Christ.

There are ways consistent with Christian truth whereby Christians may be free in spirit to work wisely and cooperatively within the secularity and even the godlessness of the world. A common obstacle in the way here is that God is often imagined and spoken of as transcendent perfection, unchangeably complete and sure in itself. What presence, then, can God have in the world which is characterised by imperfect, incomplete uncertainty? Can there be any sharing or intimacy between them? Christian faith is rooted in the incarnation of God in Jesus, whereby God freely crosses the divide, becomes truly human without ceasing to be truly God, and so translates God for our hearing and understanding. As in any translation, there is some loss or clouding of meaning, besides real illumination. Any translation adds to and subtracts from the original, thus putting it in new light or creating a new darkness. God’s free sovereign grace is evidenced in God’s living patiently and hopefully with his being misapprehended in some degree, even by those who seek God sincerely. The Spirit of God is always pressing us beyond what we think we know, because we have not yet attained; we should not resist the Spirit by refusing to learn. The incarnation is in accord with the eternal way of God, witnessed to in Scripture and beyond it: God wills to converse with human being, to be known and heard, believed and obeyed, and God strives in the Spirit with the recalcitrance of matter and the resistance of humanity. Because God is love, God the Word becomes flesh and speaks in humanity, living and dying among us and for us.

Equipped with such theological insight and granted faith by the gracious Spirit of God, it becomes possible to affirm and learn to enjoy secular action, in the state, in voluntary action like Pace, in everyday life and in the family (which in Britain now is generally secular in spirit and culture). Put simply, the secular is to be affirmed theologically insofar as it is good, marked by faith, love and hope understood in ways that show human existence coming into to line with God in Jesus Christ. Because of the forgiving grace of God, and God’s good will for all creation, this affirmation is to be ventured and sustained against and through all contrary evil. If this is how the world and God are together, Christians are given the freedom and the call to affirm and engage in the secular with adventurous generosity and hope.¹⁵ In response to the call, Christian conversion to hopeful secular engagement needs to be made again and again, in the manifold variations of the world, for it is never easy or unquestionable.

Into the Depths

Grooming disguises sexual exploitation so that it appears to the victim as an expansion of life into lavish entertainments, extravagant gifts, spurious attention, adventures into maturity. This excitement covers its own dark side, evident in the pimp’s threatened and demonstrated sanction of cruel force against the victim’s own body and spirit and against her family.

As the parents see through the disguise, which the child may collude in making, they are taken into the depths. They suffer with the child. Not being enamoured by the exploiter, they have a clearer view of what this adventure might come to. The parent’s experience of life and caring imagination leads them to fear dangers the young person dismisses. They see the child as she may be unwilling and slow to see herself: overborne, losing spontaneity, accommodating herself to disappointment by becoming emotionally erratic, depressed, even building a shell of cynical hardness. In a word, exploited. Loving parents see the child distracted and being destroyed.

Some people, including occasionally a parent, may be hard enough to write off the victims of sexual exploitation and other evils as hopeless losers. Realism, they think, requires some wastage, even of human beings, to be accepted. Is such helpless equanimity not, in truth, the way of the world?¹⁶ But in relation to their own children parents generally are like the Good Shepherd, who will not accept even a 1% wastage rate, but searches until he finds.¹⁷ Happily, the Good Shepherd is not alone in the world. Some parents venture into red light areas seeking their child, sometimes for months on end. That is just one of the costly ingenious ways of not giving up on the child. Such faithfulness, dogged by the realisation of what the child is being put through, takes parents into the depths with the child.

Teenage is a time when young people experiment with life. They need space for protected learning through making mistakes that are grievous to them in the moment, but do no longterm damage. When a child is groomed that space is taken away: they are tightly controlled, by force and infatuation, by the exploiter. They do what he tells them, dissent and independence are ruled out. They lose the freedom essential to emotional and social maturing. They frequently truant, or lose interest in school. In some instances, the effects of ‘the lost teenage’ last for years, and people come into adult responsibilities deprived of competences they should have gained at the right time.¹⁸ They are ill-equipped for adult independence and challenge, and their age makes it harder to access care from social services. No help is available to make up for lost time and opportunity and little research is devoted to their plight. Because the exploitation put them through years of malformation, they end up lonely, lacking the skill to make friends, to negotiate and to trust. Through all this abandonment and beyond, it is only the parents who stay the course with them in more or less close support. In time, parents may well become caring grandparents as the effects of CSE flow down to the next generation. The depths can be a long dark valley.

Parents are taken into deep darkness¹⁹ by the child’s being exploited. They are taken beyond the ordinary run of family troubles which come to most people and are topics of everyday conversation. CSE makes parents lonely, because conversation partners are often hard to find: who can be trusted to understand? Who will not give crass advice on the basis of their more secure family situation, implicitly criticising while sympathising? Friends are often embarrassed, not knowing how to respond. When ‘other helpers fail and comforts flee’ people come close to the One who cried in the darkness, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ CSE is one of those intolerable situations where we sense Death invading life. Fears and sorrows crowd upon us, so that loneliness is not enjoyable solitude, but exposure to enemies. It puts a great strain on parents.²⁰ Few succumb to pure despair, so that they can do nothing. Most carry on doing what they can, hiding the fear and grief within the run of little thoughtful acts that keep alive the tradition of love which is the heart and substance of the parent-child relationship working well. But the darkness is a sapping sorrow, eroding the foundation rock. Good partnerships break up under the strain.

Parents know the evil of CSE by living through it with the child. They name it with no titillating fancy. They see it from within their resistance to it, holding on for the promise of the child’s growing towards and along the way of freedom, in love, health and peace.

What does supporting anyone in the depths require?

CSE is usefully approached as a set of practical problems. Problems are defined according to the specific capability and duty of each agency in relations to the solutions they can effect. Police and social services, academics and politicians, media and parents make different contributions. It is good when they work closely together. The co-location of statutory and voluntary agencies in a town has made for great improvements in combatting CSE. Pace has helped significantly by bringing parents into closer engagement with the work at every stage.²¹

But CSE is more than a set of problems. It confronts us with our involvement in the mystery of being.²² CSE, which embroils us in dark brokenness cannot be adequately countered by functional solutions. Parents are undoubtedly encouraged and supported when they find that their troubles can be framed as problems to which there are viable solutions. They can then keep going in hope. But solutions are often mitigations rather than complete restoration.

Does solving problems dissolve the mystery so that it no longer bothers? Given that there is little or no discussion of the mysterious in responses to CSE that would seem to be the working assumption in Pace and elsewhere.

Anyone who is in deep darkness, because of CSE, is involved in the mystery of the brokenness of the world, which cannot be turned entirely into soluble problems, leaving no remainder.

Support of parents must work by focusing problems and working on them as far as possible. There is no help in a magical or mystical leap into the mysterious, running away from the responsibilities and possibilities of earthly life. Parents are supported when they are respected by practical affirmations of their capacity and calling, so that they are enabled to do more for the child, as they want to do. They are not to be belittled by taking their work out of their hands, as though they are incompetent.²³ Nor is their humanity to be misunderstood as though there is nothing but mystery. Problems and intelligent, hard work and courage in trying to solve problems are all part of the grandeur of human being.

All that must be done, but if it leads to ignoring the mystery in which we live, we get no farther than the man who kept all the law, as he should, yet lacked one thing necessary.²⁴

Problem and mystery, proclamation and prayer

I write religiously, theologically, because that seems to me to be what reality requires and enables.

For two decades, I have worked practically within the secularity of Pace. I have had a marginal share in its great story of innovation and effective service. And all along I have had a sense that something was missing in the enterprise. I cannot eliminate the depths, darkness and mystery from my understanding of CSE and how to respond to it – and yet I am uncertain what to say or do. Now before it is too late for me, I am trying to say something constructive about this question.

I am glad that many Christians around the world are active in combatting sexual exploitation. Sometimes the inspiration and values of Christian action are largely humanitarian and short on theological reflection and articulation. It shapes itself through engagement with problems and is in danger of reducing faith to a tool for solving problems. I have already argued for the validity of secular action in God’s world. But the Christian contribution is stunted if it takes God for granted, or secludes God in the privacy of the religious circle. Can faith in God be confessed in the reality of hard secular practice? Can that practice be challenged and enriched by finding itself more intelligibly in God’s world, which is wider than, but not exclusive of, our human world?

Christian speaking tends to come from those who are secure in faith, or at least in the conventions of religion. It may then come across to the struggling and breaking person as unreal and patronising. The distance at which the confident Christian stands from those who are in the depths makes him vulnerable to pharisaism, pleased that he is not as other men. If the help offered includes the invitation to become religious in the form he represents, it may seem to be a leap of more than pure faith in God as God is in Jesus. The help offered in confident proclamation often rests upon material conditions inaccessible to the struggler; God’s free grace is blocked off by the social and financial privilege of the messenger.

The problem here seems to me to lie partly in the possession of a defined faith which can then be proclaimed. Those who know tell those who don’t know; but those who know are secluded by their knowledge from standing with²⁵ those who are in the depths and so don’t know. Sympathetic and imaginative proclaimers may talk with care and insight about ‘the depths’ and then point to the way out. But even such good talking can be false, because to be in the depths is to be silenced. The partial silence that secularity brings upon religious loquacity may thus be a merciful discipline and a sign for the confident believer who is open to learning.

What is left to us in the depths, where there is no proclamation, is the cry of prayer.²⁶ To pray to God, not to oneself, is to start from the depths of the reality of ourselves and the world; there is no boasting, no mastery in action, no confidence in the flesh, no insulating comparisons with others, but the simple plea: ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’.²⁷

How does this relate to a work like Pace? Pace is not to be faulted because religious proclamation is out of place in its pluralist inclusivism. It may already be a house of prayer, or at least not averse to becoming one. Prayer reaches places beyond proclamation, because it takes many different forms. God hears the cry of poor little Ishmael, too young to speak, and the wordless weeping of his mother Hagar and God notices the sparrow fall.²⁸ Following biblical hints of this sort, the unreligious everyday talk in caring families, between parents and with supporters, and in various therapies, may be seen as prayer. This talk is indeed often like weeping: hidden in the commonplace sharing of the latest trouble is the plea to be saved from seeing the dying of the child. Much that is done within secular limits by people who are pressed together in the depths can be understood as prayer, if we journey with God’s servant who does not break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick.²⁹ God is forever making something out of nothing, nurturing the little into life. All Christian practice should be developed in accord with this spirit and principle. Look for the heart and the substance of prayer, not for the outward form.

Putting Right and Staying With

In the depths, the assurance of Christian (and other faiths) is shaken. It is easy to sing in church of the omnipotence and constant presence of the victorious God, but what hold has it in the depths? Do we not come to see that ‘only the suffering God can help’?³⁰ Are we not cast on the paradox of the sufficient grace of God which appears as the weakness of God? If God is in Christ, who ‘took our infirmities and bore our diseases’ and was squeezed out of the world on to the cross, God is in the depths. We do not then have to make a great leap to get started but find ourselves accompanied on the path we are already stumbling in.

Like many others, I am indebted to Bonhoeffer. The encounter with circumstantial evil and his commitment to righteous action which took him into the depths with God was quite different from the evil and righteous action which takes a parent of an exploited child into the depths. But the essential human plight and divine grace are the same for both.

And from yet another circumstance, Frances Young has shone light on my path. Her son Arthur was profoundly disabled from birth. As a mother and as a theologian, this took her into ‘the wilderness’, as she names what I have been calling the depths. There the goodness and reality of God was hard to see. Conventional explanations and consolations did not bring release from the darkness. A hard way through the wilderness, eventually with surprising help, freed her from being caught in the puzzles of theodicy, trying to justify God who does not prevent or eliminate evil at a stroke. Rather, with Arthur, she gained access to ‘the deepest truths of Christianity’.

We don’t begin by explaining evil away, justifying God, excusing God for the mess made of creation. We begin by contemplating the story which tells of God taking responsibility by entering the ‘gone-wrong’ world, taking it upon the divine self, in all its horror, cruelty and pain.³¹

Ultimately the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is….about the kind of love which exposes the truth about our moral ambiguities, about the way our very virtues may be the germ of our worst faults, the kind of love which stays with our pain, with the anguish of hearts before the inexplicable mysteries of life, with the suffering of innocents, with the absence of resolution in the face of tragedy. That ‘staying with’ rather than ‘putting right’ is a perception deepened by living with irremovable disability. The persistence of the marks of the nails on the resurrected body of Christ is a sign of God’s commitment to be in it with us, and by solidarity with us God in Christ enables suffering borne in love or innocence to become itself redemptive through communion with Christ’s redemptive suffering.³²

‘Staying with’ rather than ‘putting right’ reminds us of the distinction between problem and mystery. The way God takes with humanity, in creation and covenant, focused centrally in the life and death of Jesus is accompaniment on earth. Pace practises ‘staying with’ parents even when matters are not being ‘put right’, just as parents stay with their children. How is it done, how is it sustained, without a story, of an accompaniment and a solidarity of the sort that Frances Young reports? The dominant pressure in the work of agencies like Pace is to ‘put right’. That is what Irene Ivison started CROP to achieve. But repeatedly in the struggle to ‘put right’ it becomes clear that ‘staying with’ is unavoidable. Experiments have been made by some agencies in which time limited programmed assistance is offered to parents dealing with CSE, but experience shows that the comfortable efficiency of a timetable breaks down, because parents and children cannot be abandoned while there is still need. Care which stays within cost limits will fall short. Unresolved tragedy calls for ‘staying with’.

Perhaps an organisation like Pace can do no more than be modest about, but not ashamed of, its secularity, by admitting that there are areas of reality it cannot enter – or cannot reside in, though it may mount forays into strange places. The religious, or if you prefer, the spiritual, may not be the only areas which are beyond ordinary reach. Just as the parent will go to the supermarket to buy food, not to Pace, so they will go elsewhere when they are searching for the sustaining meaning and hope of life.

If I have not love, wrote Paul, I am nothing. Love believes and hopes all things. Support of parents without such constructive affirming love is ineffective. Without love, support cannot get past the suspicion and distaste many parents have for officialdom and professionalism. Pace does not read the Bible or quote this text, but in its human warmth and caring, it knows this loving.

Support requires sensitivity, flexibility and freedom from prejudice, components of the capacity to work with the strangeness of real people. Support should not be ventured unless there is a readiness to go into the depths, even being led by the parent who is already there. It is widely accepted that support workers are vulnerable to stress, they too are at risk from the darkness they encounter in their work, and so they are directed to look after themselves. They have to navigate a path between being with the parent and caring for their own well-being. Unlike the parent, they work within protective structures: limited hours, holidays, sick leave, good management, and professional training. All this can inhibit the readiness and ability to venture into the depths. Support workers are not paid to give their lives, as does the Son of Man, who comes to serve and not to be served.³³ Because he was like that, his example is generally dismissed as dangerous and impractical. But parents are often reckless in their loving and sometimes pay for it. As are many who support them.

Guilt

Parents often have a sense of guilt when a child is sexually exploited. As their children grow up, most parents observe them, and see happy and less happy developments. Being responsible, and knowing how much influence they have over the young child, they question their own performance when the child is unhappy or wayward, just as they take pride in what is going well. This self- questioning and then trying to do better becomes a strong internal habit, part of the mind which belongs to the parental type of human being. It persists even when the child is an adult. Happy is the parent who is absolved from any sense of guilt and failure by being able to take unalloyed pleasure in the adult child: the knowledge that the fallibilities of earlier nurture have not had lasting effect is comforting. But this happiness is not available to many parents.

Parents of teenage children are not morally or practically free to break the habit of responsible care, though they have ever less influence over the child. Teenagers need parents and other caring adults around them, even while they are seeing through and breaking away from them. So when something goes badly wrong in the life of the teenager the parent is bound to ask the question which awakens guilt: What have I done to let this happen? Where have I failed? These are responsible questions, quite different from the narcissistic self-pitying question, What have I done to deserve this?

Support of parents in this situation involves an analysis of guilt. A standard first move is to assure the parent, as Pace does, that the child’s being exploited is not their fault, but the perpetrators. Parents need to be clear about assigning responsibility precisely, however crushed and doubtful they may be. This is helpful to parents, liberating them to be pro-active for their child against the exploitation. But sometimes it can bring with it a too simple assertion of the innocence of parents: as though not being pimps, they must be good. As support for parents this is superficial; it cannot reach to what they know and feel in the depths of their being, in their self-searching reflection on the whole of their life with the child. They are not the causes of the exploitation but they are part of the tangled history which it has invaded and is reshaping. Even when they are freed from the burden of causality, they are deeply touched by the regret and pain intrinsic to the situation.

I do not think parents should be encouraged to stop such reflection. That would be to ask them to achieve the impossible, and it would be profoundly disrespectful of them as responsible sensitive and loving persons, committed to being true to the vocation they have accepted as parents. It would ask them to trash the person they have grown into through their parenting life experience. , The parent wants to seek and find rescue and fulfilment in their parental mission.³⁴ That is what should be supported. It follows that the Christian gospel of forgiveness should not be shared in ways which simplistically promise freedom from the past or the achievement of a radical newness. Being forgiven is not a supernatural miracle but a reconciliation with God whereby we live the human life given to us by the accompanying grace and love of God. Living life starts afresh every moment with our here and now, which God makes his here and now.

Guilt in the experience of parents tends to be a nebulous dis-ease, not a precisely defined fault. That is why it is insidiously disabling, creeping into every nook and cranny of our being, lurking to jump out on us at any turning of the road. It may be helpful to distinguish between guilt as causality and guilt as responsibility. Commonly, guilt is ascribed to the cause of something wrong. The parent may rightly be relieved of this kind of guilt, when the cause of the exploitation is identified as the exploiter. The parent’s continuing sense of guilt is a reflex of responsibility. It is a refusal to excuse oneself from involvement in the rotten mess of human life. So, it does not content itself with searching for the cause and finding someone to blame. It asks, rather, What is to be done now, starting from where we are?

The concept of guilt is intricately, primordially, linked with debt. Paul sheds hopeful light on guilt, not as causality but as responsibility, when he writes: ‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another’.³⁵ Indeed do all you can to avoid the guilt that arises from causality. But even if you are quite free from that guilt, never deny the debt, that may be sensed as guilt, which calls us to love one another. Guilt from the cause has a limit when the cause is identified; guilt as the debt of love may be boundless.

One line of support for parents is to point up the significance of their being responsible and caring now, whatever has happened in the past. They are called to love by the present plight and possibilities of their child, and they are responding to the call. Support which enables them, by advice, resourcing and encouragement, to carry on in faithful struggle for their child, sets them free from guilt about the past by embracing them in constructive action. This is no cheap grace. And it is a way in which the non-magical forgiveness of God enters human life and sets it free where it is to live in present hope.

Paul’s words open a wide vision. Owe no one implies love all within your reach, near and far. Anyone, including the parent, who is affected by CSE, is in touch with the wider world from a particular angle. It is not only the child the parent is called to love. Love as doing right and with good will (not love as soft feelings) is due to all. Love is not weak, it calls for speaking the truth, and being wise as serpents as well as harmless as doves.³⁶ Aiming at this kind of love is what is required in negotiating relations with support workers, social services, police, courts, media, politicians, neighbours, all of whom can make loving difficult, even when they aim to help. They do need criticism, the kind of pressure parents put on them but it needs to be in love which both understands their situation and won’t let them off the hook.

And it goes even further. The exploiter is often, not surprisingly, a demonic hate-figure in the eye of the parent. One of the possible objections to the word ‘pimp’ is that it is not cool or dispassionate, but loaded with fear and distaste. What if even the pimp is owed the debt of love? What form would it take? Certainly it includes calling them to account and taking measures to disempower them. Does it also call for understanding: what made them pimps? No one is born a pimp. They need appropriate treatment and help to rescue them from their psychological and cultural mal-formation and bad practice. Such a constructive response does not come from a purely punitive hostility.

That this is a hard challenge became clear at a conference of the European Baptist Federation network on prostitution and trafficking, after the singing of a hymn. It began easily enough:

God of the moon and stars, God of the near and far,

God of the fragile hearts we are, I come to you

God of the rich and poor, God of the princess and whore

But, a little later, dared to go on:

God of the pimp and paedophile, I come to you

That line provoked sharp discussion. What does it really mean? Should it be sung? If sung, how was it to be acted on? A crucial moral and Christian issue had burst upon them.³⁷ What is it to owe the pimp, love?

To conclude inconclusively

Christians may rightly desire to bring the ‘deepest truths of Christianity’ to the notice of parents and others in Pace, believing that it speaks to a real need and is a real help which Pace can at most only skirt and lightly touch. Christian mission and proclamation should not invade the integrity of an organisation like Pace, disturbing its functional secularity. Pace can only point towards the spiritual and theological, for it is beyond its remit and secularity. The church can only make its offering, praying with the prayers that are there in the life of Pace. The church needs to be near and intelligible to a community like Pace, but on the other side of a cordon sanitaire. On both sides, we need to learn to communicate and share, without being intrusive, let alone aiming at domination.

Can anything be achieved on these terms? Many traditional forms of mission, such as campaigning, proclamation and chaplaincy are unserviceable. What then? I am inclined to think that the only way is for all who are in the depths or through the wilderness to speak the truth given them and to try to make it accessible to those for whom it is a foreign language. Christians and other religious believers speak in a tongue which is alien to many good secularised fellow-travellers.³⁸ The division of languages becomes the basis of exclusive sectarianisms and non-cooperation. Christians are vulnerable to the temptation to become an embattled sect against the secular, and then to split into embattled sects against each other. Much hard work and penitent living is required to swim against this tide. Secular society likes to think it is the escape from religious divisiveness but it manifestly has its own problems in this area.

Whatever faith Christians have to confess and share, can only be communicated by speech which is integral to faithful practice, such as parents staying all the way with their child, and accompanying other parents and anyone who is in the depths. It will be done through the manifestation of authentic rooted living, not by proclaiming an imported ideology. It will be inspired and enabled by sources from outside the territory and idiom of Pace, but translated into a language of life accessible in the secularity. It will take care not to be off-putting. The manifestation will fluctuate, sometimes a burst of light, an epiphany, sometimes a dim glow as dark clouds obscure the sun. Frances Young drew from Christian theology, but not so as to impose it on her experience, but to discover, in her sometimes overwhelming experience, the reality theology does no more than point to. Along that path, she found what could be passed on in testimony. It is not given to all participants to testify as she does, but some testimony needs to be accessible in the particular depths to help many others.

Notes

1
https://ivisontrust.org.uk/ Some CROP/PACE publications and papers are archived in https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1500/special-collections
2
Irene Ivison, Fiona’s Story: A tragedy of our times, (Virago, 1997)
3
This training by Pace is immensely valuable. Little attention seems to be given to parents in the normal training and formation of professionals. Remedying this omission at an early stage in their formation would make for significant improvement.
4
Irene diagrammatised the problem as she saw it:

A phalanx of protective agencies were unable to prevent the pimp gaining his prey. Why? she asked.
5
The conference report, Stopping the Pimp (1998) is a significant historical marker, showing how much wisdom and vision was available then. It has an abiding challenge, not least in the testimonies of victims. Its neglect is to be regretted, though it is not surprising given the impatient forward looking activism of many who are at the forefront of the struggle against sexual exploitation.
6
Rachel Moran, My Journey through Prostitution: Surviving a Life of Prostitution and Drug Addiction on Dublin’s Streets, W.W.Norton (2015). ‘The best work by anyone on prostitution ever, Rachel Moran’s Paid For fuses the memoirist’s lived poignancy with the philosopher’s conceptual sophistication.’ – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24724603-paid-for
7
Luke 15.11-24; Mark 10.7. In this paper, the feminine pronoun is used for convenience in referring to all victims of exploitation. Most victims are female, but not all. Pace has supported parents whose sons have been exploited.
8
Parents Speak Out: crucial partners in tackling Child Sexual Exploitation (Pace, 2016). There has been significant improvement but constant effort is needed to maintain it.
9
Luke 15.17
10
CROP’s first publication, written by Irene Ivison, was Advice to Parents who are concerned that their child is in an Exploitative Relationship, and included a pioneering list of signs to alert parents to what might be happening.
11
Psalm 42.
12
A lazy compromise between heaven and earth, where each loses its authenticity, is certainly useless and without taste (Revelation 3.15-22, Matthew 5.13-16).
13
Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, (1961).
14
Philippians 2.1-18.
15
Jeremiah 29.4-7; Galatians 5. 1-26
16
John 11.49,50
17
John 10.11-15; Luke 15.1-7; Ezekiel 34: this exposure of false shepherds targets more than pimps. It reaches out to the pimping cultures in which we live.
18
‘The Lost Teenage’, in Published Articles issued by CROP, and in CROP Annual Report, 2005. Happily, not all lose their teenage, despite dreadful experiences of exploitation: see, for example, Emma Jackson, Exploited (Ebury, 2012).
19
I draw on biblical symbolism here, finding its thesaurus indispensable. CSE is no place for healing the hurt of people lightly (Jeremiah 6.14;18.11). Here all God’s waves and billows go over us (Psalm 42.7; Psalm 71.20 many and sore troubles). There is deep gloom over the land (Isaiah 8.20-9.2). It is ‘Out of the depths’ that we cry to the Lord (Psalm 130.1). It is also true that ‘if I make my bed in hell, Thou art there’ (Psalm 139.8) but that does not cancel the reality of the depths, any more than resurrection takes the dark agony from the Cross, for Jesus or the world.
20
Aravinda Kojaraju, ‘The True Cost to Families of Child Sexual Exploitation’ CROP briefing paper, 2009
21
Haddon Willmer, CROP and Blackburn ENGAGE! Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation Together 2009-2011 (CROP, 2011); A Professional’s Guide to Supporting Families through the Court Process, (ENGAGE!, no date);

Lucie Shuker Empowering Parents: Evaluation of Parents as partners in safeguarding children and young people in Lancashire Project, 2014-2017 (University of Bedfordshire, 2017)
22
I am indebted, in a quite inexpert way, to Gabriel Marcel for this distinction. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/
23
Parents sometimes look to social services to provide a safe place for their child, when the home territory is infested by the exploiters: to ask for that help is an act of parental responsibility not to be interpreted, as it sometimes is, as a sign of parental unfitness. A child’s being cared for in some way by social services does not afford an occasion to supplant the parent. When that is done, the parent is demeaned, not supported, because neither believed in nor hoped for.
24
Matthew 19.20
25
‘Standing with’ may suggest better things than the more obvious ‘understanding’ does in this context.
26
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, May 1944’ in Letters and Papers from Prison: ‘We are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding…Our earlier words …lose their force and cease, and our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action amongst men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action.’
27
Luke 18.9-14; Revelation 3.17-20; Philippians 3.3-14
28
Genesis 21.15-19; Matthew 10.26-31. Remember the hymns, Prayer to a heart of lowly love/opens the door of heaven above (Nirayah Vaman Tilak) and Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire/Uttered or unexpressed (James Montgomery)
29
Isaiah 42.3.
30
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 16 July 1944
31
Frances Young, Arthur’s Call (SPCK, 2014) p 41
32
Ibid, p 121.
33
Mark 10.45
34
Frances Young, Arthur’s Call (SPCK, 2014), pp 31-37, 17; Frances Young, Face to Face, (T & T Clark, 1990), pp 142-143
35
Romans 13.8
36
Ephesians 4.15; Matthew 10.16
37
I owe this story to Hilary Willmer, Chair of Pace 1998-2013 and a member of the EBF network. The issue deserves more attention than I can give it here.
38
I Corinthians14.1-25: verse 19 is the key principle.

Parents as Agents in countering Child Sexual Exploitation

Introducing Pace

Parents – the problem and the promise

Parenting in the light of theology

Pace and the question of secularity

A Christian appreciation of the kind of secularity found in Pace

Into the Depths

What does supporting anyone in the depths require?

Problem and mystery, proclamation and prayer

Putting Right and Staying With

Guilt

To conclude inconclusively

Notes

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While it is yet day

Parents as Agents in countering Child Sexual Exploitation

Introducing Pace

Parents – the problem and the promise

Parenting in the light of theology

Pace and the question of secularity

A Christian appreciation of the kind of secularity found in Pace

Into the Depths

What does supporting anyone in the depths require?

Problem and mystery, proclamation and prayer

Putting Right and Staying With

Guilt

To conclude inconclusively

Notes

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Related posts

Leave a ReplyCancel reply