On November 12, Justin Welby announced his resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury following an independent report by Kevin Makin into serial child abuser John Smyth. Commissioned in October 2019 and published in November 2024 – with haste following a leak – the long-awaited Makin Report (also known as the John Smyth Review) investigated the Church of England’s mishandling of the scandal.
The British barrister John Smyth, who died in Cape Town in 2018, was accused of abusing more than 100 boys and young men. He is believed to have assaulted boys he met at Christian summer camps he helped run in Dorset over the 1970s and 1980s. These camps were funded by the Iwerne Trust, of which Smyth was chairman between 1974 and 1981. A victim in the report described them as “activity-based holidays for public school boys who were accepted from a list of 30 elite boarding schools […] all of which had their own Christian Forum/Union organisation, run by staff member(s) at the individual schools”.