Acacia’s Approach to Abuse Response
Guiding churches and charities through the allegations and realities of abuse cases has been a key part of The Acacia Group ’s mission since the law firm was founded four years ago.
Now, co-founder Faye Sonier believes the time is right to ensure Christian communities across Canada are aware of the suite of abuse response services Acacia offers across its legal, governance and particularly communications teams.
“Unfortunately, abuse – or allegations of abuse – occurs,” Sonier says. “We get calls seeking counsel on it throughout the year from campgrounds, schools, religious communities and denominations.
“We’ve made a focused effort as a team to get specific training on trauma response and survivor care. We’ve pulled together the various divisions of Acacia in such a way that when an allegation of abuse is made within a community and clients call us, our whole team is able to respond,” she adds.
In fact, Sonier and her late husband Albertos Polizogopoulos established Acacia during the period of Covid-19 with the realization that other law firms typically contract out services such as communications to specialized public relations agencies in ways that don’t serve the holistic needs of faith-based communities.
“Having a team under one roof permits us to look at all the different angles of an abuse allegation,” she says. “We can look at what (a client’s) own internal policies require, what their obligations are, what the reporting requirements are in their province, whether provisions of the Criminal Code have been triggered, whether they are able to investigate on their own or require a third-party investigation to deal with health and safety considerations.”
All of that, she stresses, is done through the lens of the particular impact that abuse – proven or alleged – has within the specific contexts of faith-based communities.
“Because we serve primarily religious communities, we’re able to come alongside them and help them navigate what it means to respond to these crises from a biblical perspective within their church polity, their theology, their church orders and governing documents in a way that honours their beliefs,” Sonier says.
For Acacia strategic communications specialist Jonathon Van Maren that means helping to bridge the chasm between those faith communities and a reflexively hostile secular culture in the event abuse allegations are splashed across the media.
Van Maren notes, for example, that the very need to assist with that kind of external communication frequently brings into play a need to advise on internal communication among members of the faith community as well.
“What makes Acacia unique is that while most law firms dealing with an abuse case will share with (faith) organizations what their legal obligations are, we help with both external and internal communication,” Van Maren says.
“A difficulty with abuse cases is the natural instinct to ask ‘is this going to be in the newspaper?’ There’s a need to know what needs to be said – and not say what shouldn’t be said,” he adds.
“But the order of business most people forget is how to communicate it within the organization – to employees, to members of the congregation, to the parish. It’s as important for the community because how you convey an abuse investigation, how you convey how the leadership has been dealing with it, can be the difference between bringing the community through the crisis and having it tear itself apart,” he stresses.
People typically see themselves as having an intuition about what and how traumas such as abuse should be communicated, Van Maren notes. But “abuse cases are very often an instance of where your intuition fails, where what you think intuitively is the right thing to say is actually the wrong thing to say.”
A key example he cites is the instinct of church leadership to recognize that both an alleged perpetrator and the survivor have souls that need pastoral care. That is a proper Christian response, but one that equally requires emphasizing that the whole community’s safety is being cared for, too.
“The intuition often is that there are people here who need pastoral care, which is obviously true, and that therefore what’s needed is for church leadership or the pastoral care team to communicate that it is being addressed. But that’s not necessarily all that the community needs to hear. It can actually inadvertently come across as callous,” Van Maren says.
That can, in turn, compound the natural mistrust of many faith communities who see themselves as routinely mistreated by secular institutions and authorities, which they view as implicitly hostile to Christian faith, Van Maren cautions.
As Sonier notes, that’s where the Acacia governance team can be called upon to help reassure faith groups that the “crisis” isn’t being dealt with in a “one and done” fashion but is attended to with care for the long-term health of the church, school or similar organization.
“When abuse happens within a community, it takes years to work through everything – for the victim/survivor, for their family members, for the community itself. We’re deeply aware of how abuse could split or shatter a community, so we use the tools of our governance team to ensure the health of the community as we go through the process. Something horrible has happened in the community. We try to set healthy expectations, to take a long view of what (healing) looks like,” Sonier says.
That might involve assisting in the development of new policies to calm fears of a reoccurrence. It might also mean guiding the “hard conversations” that need to take place within the leadership or the community. It might mean an honest examination of faith identity.
“I think something we do that’s unique when we’re called in for these services is that the first question we ask our clients is ‘What do you want to be known for?’ For Christian ministries, our witness to the world is one of the most important aspects of who we are. We want to be a voice of presence for Christ in the world. Well, a very powerful witness in this situation is how you respond to injustice and abuse within your own community because the world is watching,” Sonier says.
If your church or organization is facing an abuse-related issue or needs assistance developing policies and protocols to prepare for future concerns, contact us in confidence. We are here to support you with diligence, discretion, and care.
Peter Stockland leads the Strategic Communications division at The Acacia Group and is the author of The Acacia Arc newsletter. He has decades of experience as a Canadian journalist, including as editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, vice-president of English language magazines for Reader’s Digest Canada, and Publisher of the Catholic Register. Peter also enjoys writing short-stories and other fiction, which have been featured in numerous publications across Canada.