Institutional Abuse Research Articles

Advanced thinking on Trauma: Victims of Crime in the Mental Health Context.

This article addresses often-overlooked forms of client-centered criminal victimization, focusing on the victim's experience of lost power and liberty and the enduring consequences of these traumas. It examines how perpetrators rationalize inflicting psychological, emotional, physical, and sometimes sexual harm, which leaves victims with severe, debilitating symptoms. For many, life after victimization feels intangible and unfamiliar. Effectively supporting victims requires a deep understanding of the roots of their suffering, including the collective cognitive dissonance and victim-blaming that can obstruct trauma-informed recovery. The analysis includes under-researched categories of crime victims, such as those affected by coercive control, gaslighting, stalking, institutional abuse, gang violence, crimes against whistleblowers, and healthcare safety violations. This content highlights the need for psychologists, clinicians, and multidisciplinary teams to understand the unique psychological impacts linked to victimization, including Acute Stress Disorder, PTSD, Complex PTSD, dissociative disorders, and other associated conditions like anxiety, OCD, substance use disorders, and prolonged grief.

The victims' shoes trope and emerging solidarity in political protest

AbstractBy providing an overview of the rich and surprising ways in which the victims' shoes trope becomes utilised in political protests as the focus of interaction ritual chains, this article elaborates on the three distinct ways through which moral communities of solidarity position themselves. Firstly, moral communities are often formed around aspects of large‐scale atrocities such as commemoration, victimhood and past injustices that, I argue, strengthen nationalist sentiments. The second type of moral communities of solidarity are those that demand ‘rights’ and claim ‘duties’ for promoting particular sectoral agendas. In the third type, the shoes serve to build solidarities that are future‐oriented and aim at promoting universal human rights. By using Goffman's Frame Theory and Collins' Interaction Ritual Chain Theory, this article analyses protests from around the world in which the victims' shoes trope has been utilised to tackle a wide range of subjects—gun and domestic violence, unemployment, Covid‐19 policies, institutional abuse, road safety, commemorations, antiwar and climate protests and more.

Male Survivors of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse: A Review

Male child sexual abuse is over-represented in institutional settings. This realization has increasingly come into public focus in recent decades initially through lived experience, often with male survivors’ stories told in the media and subsequently through court cases and government inquiries. Beginning at the turn of the century with the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (1999–2009), numerous national and state inquiries into institutional child abuse followed around the world. This scoping review asks the question: What is known from the research about the institutional child sexual abuse of males? Conducted in 2023 five databases were used (APA PsycINFO, CINAL, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science) producing 973 studies for screening. Applying the Arksey and O’Malley framework resulted in 29 studies meeting the inclusion criteria, which were analyzed. Of the 29 studies, 27 could be categorized into 3 broad areas of focus: survivor experience, impact, and disclosure. Two further studies considered: turning points and meaning making. The findings are discussed under the following headings: disclosure, impacts (emotional, mental health, alcohol, and other impacts), and what is helpful to victim/survivors. Implications for practice, policy, and research are examined along with limitations of the current research.

Time as a Category in Survivors' Reports About Child Sexual Abuse: An Explorative Approach to Lifetime Abuse.

Since the 1990s, cases of serious violence and abuse, particularly sexual abuse in educational and social institutions of the Catholic Church, have been reported in numerous countries, including Ireland, the United States, and Australia. In many countries, commissions have been set up to investigate the widespread cases of abuse that could not be prosecuted under criminal law. The testimonies of survivors and other witnesses are used by the commissions of inquiry in their work. Since 2016 the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in Germany has collected more than 2,500 reports from survivors of child sexual abuse. Forty-four testimonies were analyzed in a study seeking to understand more about lifetime abuse. In an explorative analysis, aspects of time as a key category in the reports were identified using the structured content analysis method. The results highlight the importance of time in the reports and during all phases of the survivors' lives. Overall, four themes are relevant: (a) the identification of turning points, (b) time to make sense of what happened, (c) the practice of waiting, and (d) time-bound experiences of testifying.

Institutional Child Abuse: The Role of Disclosure, Risk, and Protective Factors in Understanding Trauma Responses

ABSTRACT The research examined impacts and recovery from institutional child abuse. There were three linked studies; a survey of 10 institutional abuse victims, a Rapid Evidence Assessment of 26 UK-based institutional child abuse case reviews, and a quantitative study of 384 adults reporting either institutional child abuse (n = 93), at home abuse (n = 191) or no abuse (n = 100). Collectively there was evidence for a focus on negative impacts and disclosure. There was an indirect effect of institutional abuse on PTSD symptoms mediated by personality dysfunction but not strength factors or resilience. The research highlighted the importance of disclosure and integrates findings into a preliminary conceptual model, the Integrated Model of Institutional Child Abuse impacts (IMICA).

Justice for institutional child abuse survivors: Comparing views from survivor and non-survivor led advocacy groups

BackgroundHow victims and survivors of non-recent institutional child abuse – and the advocacy groups that support them – conceptualise justice has become a central concern for policy makers designing redress schemes. ObjectivesThis study aimed to explore articulations of justice by two types of advocacy organisations in Australia – survivor and non-survivor led groups – by examining transcripts from public hearings of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Participants and SettingHearings held in 2015 for Case Study 25: Redress and Civil Litigation were analysed. The analysis focuses on five survivor led groups and 13 non-survivor led groups. MethodsUsing a framework adapted from Daly (2014, 2017), qualitative content and thematic analysis was used to analyse transcript data to identify “survival needs” and “justice interests”. ResultsFor survivor led groups, validation was the most frequently coded justice interest, while for the non-survivor led groups, the category of survival needs was the most frequently recorded element. ConclusionsAdvocacy groups contribute highly valuable insights and perspectives to redress consultation and design processes. A key justice interest emphasised by survivor led groups was the need for public acknowledgement of how offending institutions wield power, both in the abuse of children and in the subsequent strategies employed to ensure survival of the institution and avoid justice processes. For non-survivor led groups, communicating their professional expertise about what victims and survivors need from a redress scheme was paramount.

Exploring community attitudes towards people labelled as institutional child sex offenders

The sexual abuse of children perpetrated by persons who gain access to the child through their roles within child serving institutions, referred to here as institutional child sexual abuse, appears underexplored within the research community despite gaining considerable attention in the media. This study is a preliminary exploration of the stigmatization of individuals labelled as institutional child sexual offenders (ICSO). We recruited 347 community-based participants for an online survey regarding their desired social distance from, and attitudes towards, people labelled as ICSO as compared to those labelled as sexual offenders (SO). We utilized the CATSO, an 18-item attitudinal scale that measures attitudes towards people labelled as sex offenders, and the Bogardus social distance scale which measures the desired level of distance from outgroups. ICSO condition scores were higher than SO scores on the CATSO and lower than SO scores on the Bogardus. Scores for both scales indicate more negative attitudes and increased social desistance towards people labelled as ICSO than towards those labelled as SO. These preliminary findings support the identification of people labelled as ICSO as unique SO subgroup.

Local Australian memory activism and the fast and slow violence of institutional abuse

ABSTRACT This article investigates unofficial memory projects that have arisen in Australia in response to the institutional abuse of children. While the role of activists in pushing for the enactment of state responses is beginning to be understood, activist demands for recognition have taken a multitude of forms beyond this. Unofficial memory projects are indicative of this, exemplified by a diverse range of publicly situated cultural forms that re-present abuse to wider audiences. Focusing on two examples that have arisen in Australia in recent years – the grassroots phenomenon known as Loud Fence that grew out of the Victorian town of Ballarat, and the Australian Orphanage Museum that was established by Care leavers in 2023 – I examine these as examples of memory activism which generate counter-archives of institutional violence against children. Loud Fence does so upon institutional fences at the level of the streetscape, while the AOM does so by curating a museum space that honours the experiences of childhood ‘Care’. Seeking to decentre the state from this analysis, I demonstrate how such examples enliven the fast and slow violence of child abuse and neglect, and the role of non-state actors when it comes to the recalibration of collective memory.

A Qualitative Exploration of the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Parents’ Experiences of Parental Alienation in the United Kingdom

In the aftermath of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has been highlighted how measures necessary to fight the disease inadvertently exacerbated family violence and placed strain on the judicial system. Across the four countries within the United Kingdom, delays were, and still are, particularly prevalent in family law proceedings, partly due to new breaches in child arrangement orders associated with the pandemic lockdown. The present study therefore examined the experiences of nonresident parents (NRPs) who self-identified as targets of behaviors representative of parental alienation (PA) during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. Using an online survey, 76 nonresidential parents’ responses (92% male;Mage= 45.1 years of age; standard deviation = 7.9) were thematically analyzed. Several themes emerged, including (a) experiences of PA (i.e., risks for children and risks for parents), (b) intimate partner violence (i.e., emotional abuse, physical abuse, and financial abuse), and (c) institutional abuse (i.e., COVID-19, family law, and safeguarding). Specifically, parents detailed several alienating behaviors such as belittling, manipulation, and coercive control, as well as novel forms of coercive controlling patterns, which illustrated how the COVID-19 lockdowns created new opportunities for alienating parents to manipulate the NRP–child relationship. The implications of the results are discussed, including recommendations on improving safeguarding protocols for children with contact orders in place and adopting policy measures to support NRPs. These are also discussed in the context of reforming the justice system utilizing COVID-associated “lessons.”

Evaluating Harms from Institutional Abuse in Childhood: Leveraging a Trauma-Informed Approach to Assessment and Formulation

Evaluating Harms from Institutional Abuse in Childhood: Leveraging a Trauma-Informed Approach to Assessment and Formulation

Amplifying victim–survivor voices: media power, collective action, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish identity in the Leifer case

This article underscores the transformative impact of victim–survivor voices in reshaping public discourse on child sexual abuse (CSA). The research project took as the backbone for analysis the Malka Leifer case that spanned 15 years and is linked to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse's report of Case Study 22, which examined responses in ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools to child sexual abuse. Adopting a mixed methods research approach, this study combines qualitative media analysis of 102 news articles and 8 in-depth focus groups to investigate the impact of media outlets in amplifying victim voice and influencing public discourse, and how this impacts the subjects of mediatised public crises. Drawing on the theorising of Couldry and Cottle, the article considers the capacity and limitations of survivor-advocates to leverage media power in the contemporary media system. By exploring the ‘Privileging Victim Voice’ frame, this paper sheds light on how victim–survivor advocates utilised mainstream, local religious, and social media to solidify their central place in the narrative and its reportage. The media analysis served as the foundation for a ‘peer conversation’ style of focus groups with Jewish community members to investigate local impacts of the case's media reportage. The focus group methodology sought to represent this diverse community as wholly as possible. Findings reveal the significant power of journalists’ framing and sourcing practices, and how Jewish institutional child sexual abuse is framed by media outlets within the Australian media landscape. Further, it showcases the broader implications of public inquiries, such as Australia's Royal Commission, in empowering victim–survivors and centreing their narratives in media reportage.

‘Liberty to bend a piece of wire into a space sculpture’: Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters, and the rhetoric around rights and refugees

PEN International's 1948 charter and its accession to NGO status made it one of the most globally recognisable institutions promoting and securing freedom of expression for writers and artists as a fundamental human right. PEN's transition from dinner club to NGO involved a post-war reckoning with how to respond to institutional abuses of power and how to secure rights for those who had lost the traditional protections of the state. George Orwell and Stefan Themerson, writing on the 1944 PEN conference, offer insight into the political challenges PEN faced after the Second World War regarding state power and the rights of refugees.

Say Nope to the Pope: performance and resistance in the creative interventions during the 2018 papal visit to Ireland

ABSTRACT In September 1979, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, made a historic pastoral visit to Ireland where he celebrated an open-air mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to an estimated 1,250,000 people, a third of the country’s population. In August 2018, Pope Francis returned to Ireland, though the second papal visit was met with a series of protests and a lower-than-expected turn-out at the public mass in Phoenix Park. In the intervening years Ireland underwent broad social changes and the credibility of the Catholic Church, once the bedrock of morality in Ireland, was eroded by scandals revealing the depths of clerical sex abuse and abuse in Catholic-run institutions. This article considers the creative protests and interventionist actions that marked the 2018 Papal visit, using Judith Butler’s Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) to think through these public actions. Focusing specifically on Say Nope to the Pope and the associated events of Stand 4 Truth, it explores these public performances of protest grounded in solidarity and resistance.

Finding Her Voice Through Scriptotherapy: Marina Nemat’s Journey of Reclaiming Subjectivity after Trauma

Scriptotherapy, a form of writing therapy proposed by Suzette Henke, is gaining recognition in literary research but remains underrepresented in studies of Iranian diasporic literature, which often focus on identity crisis and Orientalist discourse. This paper explores the application of scriptotherapy in Marina Nemat’s memoirs, Prisoner of Tehran (2007) and After Tehran (2010), revealing the significant role of therapeutic writing in reclaiming subjectivity fragmented by trauma. As a teenager advocating for legislative reformation in 1980s Iran, Nemat faced legal consequences and two years of imprisonment, leaving enduring psychological wounds. Years after her release, disturbing memories and enduring silence compelled Nemat to utilize writing for catharsis. Through writing, Nemat confronts and transcends her haunting past, embarking on a transformative journey of healing and reclaiming her voice within an intersubjective realm. This paper emphasizes the importance of an audience as witnesses to trauma and discusses obstacles faced by women who bear witness, particularly when their testimonies involve institutional abuse and patriarchal constraints. This analysis demonstrates scriptotherapy’s transformative potential, empowering trauma survivors like Nemat to heal from the wounds of their traumatic pasts, ultimately enabling them to regain a profound sense of subjectivity, despite doubts about the authenticity of their narratives.

Redress, memorials and activism: can heritage be activism?

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is Ireland. Activism has been crucial in exposing historical institutional abuse in different institutions, organisations and contexts. Inquiries set up to investigate abuse have recommended memorials as an element of redress. This article explores what types of memorialisation survivors regard as appropriate, and why. Two responses are considered: (1) state and (2) ‘bottom-up’ unofficial. The article highlights that survivors are rarely active participants in co-creating and implementing state responses. The concept of ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (AHD) is used to shed light on whose knowledge is prioritised, who are deemed the experts and who decides what heritage is. The article contributes to this theorisation by proposing a new concept, ‘activist heritage’, and examines its potential to create spaces and unlock transformative dynamics that empower survivors. Then, using Justice for Magdalene Research’s (JFMR) virtual memorial museum as a case study of ‘activist heritage’, the article shows that in the absence of state or national forms of recognition, JFMR provides a corrective to AHD. It acts as a counter-narrative in the struggle over memory to state and church ‘forgetting’, ignoring and minimising institutional abuse. The role, benefits and outcomes for survivors of such ‘bottom-up’ memorialisation is assessed.

Stereotypes and unconscious bias in institutional child sexual abuse: Barriers to identification, reporting and prevention

AbstractChild sexual abuse within institutional settings has been a major concern for governments around the world for many years. Consequently, prevention policies have been developed, and institutional child abuse laws have been strengthened in many jurisdictions. Legislation is important to prevent reoffending, however, the majority of childhood sexual abuse remains unreported and undetected. While awareness of the failings of institutions to properly identify and respond to child abuse has grown in recent years, barriers to reporting institutional abuse remain understudied, impacting the ability to prevent abuse. One possible reason that prevents workers from identifying and reporting child sexual abuse is that their judgements are vulnerable to stereotypes and unconscious biases about who perpetrates and is victimised by sexual crimes and what constitutes warning signs of sexually abusive behaviours. Research in psychology provides key insights into human reasoning processes that can lead to bias, so workers fail to identify, respond and prevent grooming and child abuse in an organisational context. This paper reviews what is known about the development and maintenance of stereotypes and unconscious bias, their role in institutional sexual abuse, and concludes with a discussion of measures that can be taken to mitigate unconscious bias to prevent child abuse.

Whose pain? Whose shame? Integrating heritage and histories in Ballarat, Australia

ABSTRACT For generations a burden of misplaced shame has sat with victim-survivors of children’s institutionalisation. Experiences and memories of family separation, cultural obliteration, mistreatment, hunger, unpaid labour, curtailed educational and professional opportunities, and abuse had come to silently define and destroy the lifelong living experience of childhood incarceration. Meanwhile, institutions and the communities they are part of have been able to effectively ignore the legacies of their own trespasses, through ‘top-down’, celebratory approaches to history and heritage. In recent decades, renewed emphasis on survivor voices and agency has culminated in a range of Commonwealth and state-based reports, Inquiries and Commissions, driven by abundant survivor testimonies and truth-telling. The sense of shame and guilt over these parts of our collective histories has now re-centred on the perpetrators and enablers of abuse and mistreatment. Using interpretive heritage and historical lens this article outlines a theoretical conception of ‘integrated’ approaches to history and heritage, using real-life examples from contemporary urban development and institutional heritage in the regional Australian city of Ballarat. The authors examine changing contemporary representations of institutional Care, neglect and abuse, arguing that shifting cultural and social power is reflected in the urban landscape and cultural fabric of the associated institutions.

How does the media represent institutional child sexual abuse within Jewish communities? A case study of the Malka Leifer court case

AbstractConcerns about institutional child sexual abuse within Jewish communities have been documented in two recent national enquiries into child sexual abuse, in Australia, and England and Wales. Yet to date, there has been little analysis of how media reporting informs public awareness of these concerns, and potential programme and policy responses. This paper examines media reports of the high‐profile case of ultra‐orthodox Jewish school principal Malka Leifer who was found to have sexually abused several girls in her school in Melbourne, Australia. It draws on five Australian media publications (two specifically Jewish and three mainstream newspapers), from the initial committal hearing in September 2021 until the completion of her trial and conviction in July 2023. Our findings highlight the importance of child safety processes as being aligned with the specific religious and cultural context of faith‐based communities in order to be effective in preventing institutional child sexual abuse.

A union's and university's responses to violence against a woman professor: Neoliberal restructuring, hypermasculinity, male privilege and hegemonic inequality

AbstractAlthough Eastern Canadian liberal arts universities are portrayed as progressive work environments that cultivate inclusivity and diversity, the corporatisation of these public spaces has transformed them from institutions that once encouraged pluralism and acceptance among all social groups to spaces that unevenly distribute privileges among faculty and students based on ascribed characteristics, social class, and adherence to cisnormative and heteronormative expectations. Under neoliberal reforms, universities and unions adopt their own policies and procedures that legitimate institutional power abuse over marginalised women Contract Limited Term (CLT) assistant professors. Using material evidence from complaints filed with a province's Human Rights Commission and Labour Board, this critical autoethnographic case study explores the institutionalised responses to a disenfranchised woman CLT's discrimination and harassment by a student, departmental chair, faculty and university staff. A theory of genocidal mobbing is developed to conceptualise the organisational processes and practices that maintain the status quo of white heteropatriarchy and disentitle women CLTs to safety, equality and fair representation by their unions. Genocidal mobbing is efficient, because misogynistic administrators only require weaponising one disgruntled student, and effective, because administrators utilise the most fatal and insidious of gendered narcissistic abuse: gaslighting. The current neoliberal climate within academia puts marginalised women faculty at increased risk of genocidal mobbing from those with institutional power and from students with ethnic/racial and/or economic privilege. This article illuminates the union's culpability in the genocidal mobbing of women CLTs disenfranchised by multiple marginalised intersectional identities. Implications for future research and on policy are presented.

Relational pedagogy in social care education: a model for relational justice

ABSTRACT Driven by a statutory obligation to protect the public, within the context of historical failings and institutional abuse, a process of professional regulation is transforming the profession of Social Care Work [SCW] in Ireland. Statutory registration requires Social Care Workers [SCWs] to demonstrate threshold-level proficiency standards, a challenge that has enlivened debates about theory, pedagogy, and practice. Although proficiency requirements are primarily instrumental and technical, focussing on case and risk-management, social justice is now central to the definition of SCW. However, there has been very little debate about what this entails for theory and practice and critical perspectives are marginal. In response, the value-based model of Relational Pedagogy, based on an ethic of care and relational justice , is proposed as a counterweight to the proficiency perspective by nurturing four inter-related sets of practices within social care education: (i) caring practices; (ii) critical practices; (iii); creative practices, and (iv) emancipatory practices.