Redressing or Excusing the Past? The Evaluation of Sexual Child Abuse in the Swedish Redress Scheme for Historical Abuse in Out-of-Home Care

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter addresses how adult victims of historical institutional child abuse have been treated in the Swedish state’s financial redress scheme. It demonstrates how the experiences of child abuse in welfare institutions materialize in new experiences of the welfare state when the state decides to acknowledge and offer redress to its historically abused citizens. It is shown how the Swedish state’s redress scheme shifted away from an explicit aim to acknowledge the victims’ unjustifiable suffering to the limited ways in which the state could be considered responsible for past harms. As a case, the chapter scrutinizes which details were pivotal for why victims of child sexual abuse in out-of-home care did not receive the financial redress as adjudicated by a temporary redress board. The chapter highlights how it proved difficult to combine an acknowledgement of the victims’ experiences of abuse with an assessment of the responsibility of the state. Furthermore, it demonstrates how contemporary tort law came to influence the assessment of the historical redress claims and set the standards for who received financial redress and who did not. This resulted in renewed experiences of the lived welfare institution caused by a “non-apology” from the welfare state.