For nearly half a century, John Smyth, who was a senior barrister and prominent evangelical Christian, sadistically abused boys and young men with impunity. At Christian summer camps in Dorset in the 1970s and 1980s, and later in Zimbabwe and South Africa, he groomed and preyed on victims whom he would beat savagely and repeatedly, leaving some of them with wounds that took weeks to heal.

Smyth, who died in 2018, never faced justice for crimes committed in England. A case against him in Zimbabwe after the unexplained death of a 16-year-old boy, Guide Nyachuru, at one of his camps, was dismissed. But calls for the Church of England to accept responsibility for gross failures in regard to Smyth and the Iwerne camps, where he filled leadership roles, are finally gaining the hearing that they should have had years ago.

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