Abstract
The ongoing crises of child sexual abuse by Christian institutions leaders across the Anglophone world continue to attract public attention and public inquiries. The pervasiveness of this issue lends credence to the argument that the prevailing ethos functioning within some Christian Institutions is one which exercises influence to repeatedly mismanage allegations of child sexual abuse by Church leaders. This work draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 15 Personnel in Christian Institutions (PICIs) in Australia who were identified as being pro-active in their approach to addressing child sexual abuse by PICIs. From these data, themes of power and forgiveness are explored through a Foucaultian conceptualising of pastoral power and ‘truth’ construction. Forgiveness is viewed as a discourse which can have the power effect of either silencing or empowering victim/survivors. The study concludes that individual PICIs’ understandings of the role of power in their praxis influences outcomes from the deployment of forgiveness.
Highlights
Despite significant study over the last several decades, there continues to be room for analyses of the crises of child sexual abuse by Personnel functioning at a number of levels within Christian institutions
The primary data for this piece comes from a study where 15 Personnel in Church Institutions (PICIs) who were identified as having a pro-active intent in their experiences of managing abuse by other PICIs were interviewed
Dallavale (1996: 1) identified power as the central issue to be confronted in the management of abuse by PICIs: Studies of the problem of clergy sexual abuse tell us that such abuse is primarily about power and trust, not sexuality
Summary
Despite significant study over the last several decades, there continues to be room for analyses of the crises of child sexual abuse by Personnel functioning at a number of levels within Christian institutions. This includes increasing understanding of forms of institutional management of criminal behaviour and the ways in which ‘employees’ and employers may be criminalised. There is significant contention around the legal liability of individuals such as a Pope for allegedly mismanaging and engaging in cover-ups of reports of child abuse by Church leaders (Robertson 2010). Of central concern is how individuals, as PICIs, understand the utility of discourses of forgiveness in the management of abuse by PICIs
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