“Oh Alan!” What The Celebrity Traitors can teach the faithful about creating safer spaces

For Rachel Bourne, Celebrity Traitors was unlike any other series of The Traitors. Not just because of the dazzling cast but because of her role as a Regional Officer for Safeguarding - North East, in which she is learning about grooming, power, and who we listen to.

As Kate Garraway would say, she was flabbergasted.

The Celebrity Traitors was unlike any other series of The Traitors for me - not just because of the dazzling cast. For my new role as a Regional Officer for Safeguarding in Training, I am spending a lot of time learning about grooming, power, and who we listen to. I watched the series open-mouthed with all my developing safeguarding senses tingling – as Kate Garraway would say, I was flabbergasted.

In case you haven’t seen it, The Celebrity Traitors is a BBC TV series where 19 celebrities are put in a castle together, with three people being secretly chosen as ‘traitors’. The ‘faithfuls’ have to work out who the traitors are, while the traitors have to ‘kill off’ the ‘faithfuls’ (who then leave the show). The last person standing is the winner. It is everything and more. Secrets, alliances, betrayals, fabulous outfits, beautiful scenery, ridiculous challenges. It’s camp, it’s goth, and even features a national treasure nervously breaking wind.

But as well as all of this, for nine hours of incredible TV, we watched 16 famous people be mercilessly groomed, power being exploited, and voices being ignored.

The question of how Alan Carr pulled off his victory is bouncing around the internet. Celia Imrie summed it up perfectly in a post-show interview on spin-off show The Celebrity Traitors Uncloaked; "You just think why didn’t I see that - it’s ridiculous you know but everyone was very good at covering up". As I mulled this over, it dawned upon me that this quote could have been taken from any number of cases in the Methodist Church’s Past Cases Review.

Let me be very clear - The Traitors is just a game. It would be offensive to compare the horrors of experiencing abuse to a reality TV show. But as I watched it, it got me thinking about what we can learn about protecting our church communities. So, please humour me for a few minutes while I dissect the first series of BBC Celebrity Traitors for hidden shields about safeguarding.

How did the sweating, giggling, nervous-cheese-eating Alan Carr slip under everyone’s radar? How did Jonathan Ross survive so long, despite being suspected by just about everyone? Everyone was groomed.

Previously, we have understood grooming to be about the way that perpetrators build up a relationship with victims/survivors to exploit them. It is now recognised that to gain and maintain access to victims/survivors, perpetrators have to groom everyone around the victim/survivor. In many cases looked at in the Past Cases Review, church folk were groomed - or manipulated into trusting and valuing perpetrators, meaning that they gained access to people to abuse, and that any suspicions were easily brushed away.

This year, the faithful were not just average people, they were celebrities; academics, actors, journalists, comedians - professional people-readers. More than that - they were also all aware about the possibility of being groomed and trying to look out for signs of it - but just couldn’t see it. Everyone was friends, and within those friendships, the attitude of ‘it couldn’t happen here’ pervaded.

We need to be honest about the reality of abuse in churches - it has happened, and does happen - it could happen here, and does happen here.

That’s the dirt, but where are the shields?

1 Work as a team

Something about power skews our judgement of people. Jonathan Ross as the ‘Big Dog’ leader of the game, Cat Burns’ sheer coolness, and Alan Carr’s smooth charisma all threw the faithful off the scent. The faithfuls mostly just couldn’t see past it.

However, as we saw, when the faithfuls started to work together, to share concerns, to listen to each other, and to suspend disbelief that powerful people they respected could be traitors - even big dogs - they were cooking on gas.

As the Past Cases Review pointed out, safeguarding is a team activity - we can’t reliably make good judgements about people based on what we are presented with - we need systems to provide a foil to our sometimes questionable judgements. We need to be following safer recruitment policies, we need to be clear about appropriate boundaries and behaviours for different roles in the church, and we need to be talking things through with our Regional Officers for Safeguarding to get a second opinion.

2 Reflect on your power

One of the beauties of The Traitors, is that we get let into the turret, and get to see how the power and responsibility of being a traitor changes people.

Watching the three traitors plan their first ‘murder in plain sight’ was hilarious - they were all flapping (and sweating) with nerves. Several episodes later, watching Alan murder Celia in plain sight, it was a breeze. The traitors were so aware of their power, and self-consciousness at first, but by the end of the game - it had gone to their heads.

As the Theology of Safeguarding report recognises, power is part of church life, and something that we all have in different ways. We might have power because of our role, personality, or expertise - these sorts of power are often easier to spot: e.g. he’s a knight of the realm of course Sir Stephen Fry should lead Round Table discussions! However, there are other kinds of power that we might hold that can be harder to spot; we live in an unjust world, so we know that just by being white, non-disabled, male, of a higher socio-economic status, older and wiser (or younger and fitter depending on the situation), you hold power over others.

We see in the Theology of Safeguarding report that 'the key question is whether power is being exercised responsibly, wisely and lovingly'. Praise be to God, we aren’t using our power to murder people every night. But are we self-aware about the power we hold, and the impact it has on others? As I’ve been mulling it over, I’ve been reflecting on who do I rush to talk to at the end of a service, and who do I ignore? Who do I listen to in a meeting, and who do I talk over? Who have I ‘written off’, having decided that they have nothing much to contribute?

The more we can be aware of these power dynamics and challenge ourselves and each other each when we don’t use our power responsibly, wisely and lovingly, the safer our communities will become.

3 Get better at listening

I can’t have been the only one shouting at my screen when Nick Mohammed voted to banish Joe Marler at the 11th hour. In the last episode, Nick seemed to be hearing Joe but not listening to him.

From day one in the castle, people listened to some voices, and ignored others, and it cost them. Is there something about power here? Were the more well-known and better-connected voices more credible and therefore listened to more?

Time and time again, we see this pattern play out in safeguarding, where survivors of abuse have the courage to speak up, and are ignored. In fact, Past Cases Review workers worked with many, many survivors of church-based abuse who said that it was the first time that they had been properly listened to in the Church.

One of the key recommendations was that we need to all get better at listening. As part of my training as a Regional Officer for Safeguarding, I get the privilege of sessions run by the Methodist Survivors Advisory Group. At the last session, one of the members pointed out that most of us think we are good at listening, but most of us aren’t actually - it’s a skill to learn. They are so right. I work in safeguarding; I like to think I am top class at listening, but I know if I’m honest, I’m mediocre at best. I’m too busy thinking about whether to buy digestives or hobnobs, or waiting for the person to stop talking so I say something that’s a little bit relevant but is mainly just to make me look clever/funny. When we don’t listen properly, we miss important things, and this has devastating consequences.

The Past Cases Review summed it up by saying that local churches will not become really safe places until 'the understanding of safeguarding, and abuse of power in relationships, is understood by the whole congregation'.

The uncomfortable truth that emerged from The Celebrity Traitors, and the Past Cases Review, is that we tend to show a bias towards the powerful. Thankfully for us, the Gospel is Jesus consistently shows a bias towards the powerless, and this is what we are striving for as a Church.

There will be people in our communities intent on causing harm, but when we recognise this, treat safeguarding as a team activity, and learn to listen better, we can make our communities safer.