Cautiously stepping out to name what I think is a major, unspoken cultural factor in the Church of England's failure to address allegations of sexual abuse properly:

Our clergy formation and training, which can perpetuate a cycle of abuse that reinforce clericalism.

A thread:

One of the salient features of the #IICSA report on safeguarding failures in the Church of England is that in several key cases, senior figures failed to act according to our own procedures. This is attributed to several key features of our 'corporate culture'.

These are named in section B6 of the report and include clericalism, tribalism, naivety, desire to protect reputation, and fear and secrecy around sexuality. None of this will be a surprise. They are all things the church needs to repent of and learn from.

The policies that existed in the past often said the right things (e.g. report any allegations of sexual abuse you hear to the police/the diocesan safeguarding adviser), but weren't followed in practice due to these cultural factors. The IICSA report suggests better processes

... and by and large, these are things I personally support, particularly anything which will help rebuild trust with survivors.

But policies are only as good as the culture that underpins them. And here we have a real problem.

Many of the responses from my fellow clergy and other interested Christians to valid criticisms of our culture will not do. Some responses that bewail clericalism betray the same tribalism that IICSA criticises - 'It's people who are not like me who are the problem'

Nobody believes clericalism is good - well, apart from one or two loons. If you're going to talk about clericalism, you need to talk about its causes.

So here goes: a major cause of clericalism in the Church of England is how it forms and trains clergy.

For those not familiar with it, our system of training has two parts: 1) training in a college (part-time or full-time), which instills the church's theology and spiritual practice 2) an apprenticeship ('curacy') where you learn from an experienced priest how to 'do the job'.

Both of these have serious systematic failures I will expand on:

The college system often operates on a model where training is there to 'break you down, in order to build you up.' You're taken out of the world, and formed into a priestly shape.

But in practice, as one tutor at my college put it, "We're very good at breaking people down. We're not as good at building them up again."

In my own training institution, the 'breaking down' process could include things like (perhaps inadvertently) belittling ordinands' previous work experience, church traditions, or their own accounts of how they understood their theology.

Unwritten rules were also a problem: about what could and could not be said in discussions, what would and would not be tolerated in terms of ordinands' social lives, how the liturgy was to be participated in etc. All this contributed to the 'breaking down'.

There were some nasty cases of something like coercive control, including ordinands sent for psychiatric assessment without clear medical need and ordinands whose places in training were jeopardised because of 'wrong views' on issues of doctrine and church discipline.

The worst experience I had as part of this process was being sent to a priest for training in counselling. This priest had been cautioned against working with young men after a string of incidents, the police had been involved, and he was removed from officiating later that year.

Needless to say, being sent to this creep was not a pleasant experience - even if nothing happened to me, and I didn't realise quite what was bothering me at the time. It is also a sign of how safeguarding culture is only skin deep in some parts in the church.

But my main point is this: the effect of this 'breaking down, to build you up' process isn't formation. Instead, it makes you fiercely protective of the people you trained with, as you got one another through the process together.

And it teaches you that going through unpleasant experiences to follow God's calling is simply something you have to deal with in the Church of England.

All of this combines to produce clergy who will be singularly incapable of dealing with abuse allegations: on the one hand, you will be inclined to protect your brother and sister priests. On the other, you will be inclined to see abuses of authority as 'something that happens'.

I've heard similar things said about curacy, the second part of training: 'everyone had a horrible time in curacy, so we don't take it seriously when things go wrong; bishops see it as an endurance test you have to get through'.

Curacy is, of course, a much more varied experience, as it all depends on the training incumbent. But training incumbents often have had little or no training in managing others, and often no background at all in psychology or even how to understand other people's views.

As a result, curacy is a minefield of potential problems, especially around bullying, though senior clergy can be very effective in tackling those problems once they are involved in a curacy that has broken down - the semi-autonomous college system has less accountability.

Now, there will be many clergy with happy experiences of both college and curacy. It is also possible that those who train part-time or in 'mixed-mode' training do not experience some of the 'breaking down' that full-time ordinands get.

And even those who train full-time will have varied experiences depending on where they trained, the staff at their college, and the culture of the institution. "Your mileage may vary," as the Americans say. There are some excellent people in our colleges and great TIs too.

But the fact that cycles of abuse exist in the Church of England's formational process, where people have a miserable time in training, then expect others to endure the same thing, and expect abuses of power to happen, will have a knock-on effect for handling the abuse crisis.

If you've experienced unfair treatment, your perspective on others' experiences changes: you may become more sympathetic to victims of abuse, but you may also defend others in your institution or see abuse as another 'thing that happens', without considering its severity.

And none of this is to suggest my, or anyone else's, experience of training in anyway justifies the Church of England's failures. Nor that anyone's experience in training comes anywhere near to the horrors survivors have endured at the hands of the church.

But if we're serious about change, we need to be serious about what causes our institutional culture - and patterns of 'breaking down to build up' in training drive clerical defensiveness in a way which is deeply unhealthy.

(And the fact that all sat in my draft tweets for five hours, in case I got 'in trouble' all goes to show the extent of the problem!)