Dark Pedagogies in Comparative Perspective: Remembering Institutional Child Abuse

Abstract

This article sketches three cases of institutional child abuse in different historical contexts and places—St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay (Canada), Parramatta Girls’ Home in Sydney (Australia), and the Closed Juvenile Detention Center in Torgau (German Democratic Republic). I propose Katharina Rutschky’s concept of “dark pedagogy” to analyze the striking similarities in the methods and justification of treatment of children, in the experiences that survivors describe, and in the nature of commemoration. This concept can help us see how the extremes of violence and the techniques of control in “care” facilities that were common across the profiled cases are immersed in similar norms governing the social roles of children and adults. My core argument is that institutional child abuse—because of its systemic nature, its embeddedness in the modernist project, and the resulting stigmas—has lead to similar challenges and practices in confronting and memorializing these histories.