Institutional Child Abuse Research Articles

Challenging Institutional Denial: Psychological Discourse, Therapeutic Culture and Public Inquiries

ABSTRACTThe damaging effects of abuse in childhood were repeatedly emphasised in public hearings and in media coverage of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Testimony from earlier Australian inquiries, which documented widespread experiences of child maltreatment, particularly in institutions, also underscored the ongoing and often intergenerational impact of abuse. Taking institutional child abuse inquiries as a case study, this article examines how psychological and therapeutic concepts have been mobilised politically. It argues that therapeutically oriented and psychologically informed cultural narratives of childhood trauma and its ongoing effects have provided a framework for making sense of long-term experiences of adversity and suffering and have enriched attention to “the question of justice” for survivors of historical institutional child abuse.

Remaking collective knowledge: An analysis of the complex and multiple effects of inquiries into historical institutional child abuse

This article provides an overview and critical analysis of inquiries into historical institutional child abuse and examines their multiple functions and complex effects. The article takes a broadly international view but focuses primarily on Australia, the UK and Ireland, jurisdictions in which there have been major national inquiries. Drawing on sociological and other social science literature, it begins by considering the forms, functions, and purposes of inquiries. An overview of emergent concerns with institutional abuse in the 1980s and 1990s is then provided, followed by an examination of the response of many governments since that time in establishing inquiries. Key findings and recommendations are considered. The final sections of the article explore the evaluation of inquiries, both during their operation and in their aftermath. Policy change and legislative reform are discussed but the focus is on aspects often underplayed or overlooked, including an inquiry’s credibility, its role in processes of knowledge production, and the part it plays in producing social and cultural shifts. In the context of growing numbers of inquiries across Western democracies, including the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it is argued that grasping the complexity of the inquiry mechanism, with its inherent tensions and its multiple effects, is crucial to evaluating inquiry outcomes.

Getting evidence into action to tackle institutional child abuse

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is an example of a government response to survivors’ demands to address the harm they suffered. It is also a major response by a national government to improve child safety in the future. Facing up to child abuse is difficult and in other countries similar inquiries have suffered delays and derailing. This commentary uses an evidence-to-action lens to explore why clear evidence of child sexual abuse may be ignored and side-lined. It argues that where evidence challenges the powerful, is surprising and shocking, or undercuts current institutional and policy arrangements, then that evidence is likely to be ignored, undermined or refuted – all factors which are present in the case of historical institutional child sexual abuse.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is the largest royal commission in Australia’s history and one of the largest public inquiries into institutional child abuse internationally. With an investment from the Australian government of half a billion dollars, it examined how institutions with a responsibility for children, both historically and in the present, have responded to allegations of child sexual abuse. Announced in the wake of previous Australian and international inquiries, public scandals and lobbying by survivor groups, its establishment reflected increasing recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by childhood sexual abuse and a strong political commitment to improving child safety and wellbeing in Australia. This article outlines the background, key features and innovations of this landmark public inquiry, focusing in particular on its extensive research program. It considers its international significance and also serves as an introduction to this special edition on the Australian Royal Commission, exploring its implications for better understanding institutional child sexual abuse and its impacts, and for making institutions safer places for children in the future.

The Horrors of Canada's Tort Law System: The Indian Residential School Civil Cases

For 17 years, between 1988 and 2005, victims of the multitude of abuses at Indian Residential Schools tried to obtain justice through Canada's civil court system. They were fought at every stage and with every litigation manoeuvre available to Canada and the churches. Their claims for loss of parental affection, language and culture were not allowed in court. Their claims of genocide were rejected. Their claims of inadequate education, food and health care were rejected. Their claims on inter-generational harms were rejected. Many of their claims were rejected for being filed too late. Many of their claims were rejected on the basis that the employer of their abuser was not vicariously liable for the abuse and in the policy choice between whether the child victim should go without compensation or whether the employer corporate/government/church should be required to pay for the abuse, too often the courts decided it would not be fair to allow the child victim to be compensated. This paper seeks to consolidate in one place all of the Indian Residential School civil court decisions and citations, and provide summaries of those cases. In so doing, this paper also deals with other cases of institutional child abuse during this period. This paper also details the various court decisions in which the Canadian justice is complicit with the Roman Catholic Church in refusing to acknowledge the Roman Catholic Church as a legal entity that can be sued. In the author's view, no one can claim to know how Canada's civil court system really works until they learn how that system dealt with the claims of abused indigenous children.

Narrative dysfunction in The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr

This essay considers the aesthetic and political uses of narrative failure, as staged in contemporary Irish drama. I shall discuss The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr as deliberately dysfunctional interventions in a tradition of storytelling in modern and contemporary Irish drama. I argue in The Walworth Farce, the catachrestic combination of story and drama leads to a wider assault on mimesis and a loss of distinction between the fictive and the actual worlds. In On Raftery’s Hill, in contrast, the clash of modes creates a rupture, through which Carr indicts the abuse of women and children in state institutions in twentieth-century Ireland. I conclude that while Walsh’s play posits a world of generalised dysfunction that limits its political engagement, Carr exposes specific dysfunctions and inequalities in Ireland at the turn of the millennium.

Justice for New Zealandds Stolen Generation: The State's Criminal Responsibility for Historical Institutional Child Abuse

The New Zealand Government has been increasingly pressured to establish an independent public inquiry into the abuse and neglect of children in social welfare residences between the 1950s to the 1990s. This paper seeks to determine a response to historical institutional child abuse in New Zealand that achieves justice for victims. The State should be held criminally responsible for historical institutional child abuse in New Zealand by responding to it in a way that recognises its criminal nature. Although New Zealand’s criminal law does not provide for the criminal prosecution of the State for historical institutional child abuse, and legislating a retrospective offence would be inappropriate, a restorative justice process should be used to recognise the criminal responsibility of the State.

Shining the Spotlight on Child Sexual Abuse

Earlier this year, the film Spotlight won the Academy Award (Oscars) for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Spotlight tells the story of a group of journalists at The Boston Globe who break the story of the clerical abuse of hundreds of children by over 200 Catholic priests in the Boston area in 2002. It was the first major reporting of abuse by Catholic clerics in the US and shocked the nation, indeed the world, with the breadth of abuse and the silencing of victims and their families by the Church and their lawyers. I saw the film in Australia at a local cinema in Newcastle, New South Wales. As a social researcher writing on the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission and the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, I wasn’t surprised that I recognised in the small audience a number of survivors, families and supporters of victims and Catholic community members. I wasn’t surprised that it was a small number; this is a difficult film to watch about a subject most people do not want to think about. The Royal Commission into institutional child abuse was set up in 2013 after years of work by survivors and supporters to uncover abuse across institutions including the Catholic Church. Despite knowing much of the literature in the field and having attended many sessions at the Royal Commission, it came as a shock when the last screen shots listed the number of American cities affected by clerical abuse and cities around the world. The list runs into the hundreds and in Australia includes Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide, Ballarat and Melbourne. People around me gasped as we recognised Newcastle on the list: somehow seeing our small city on the big screen bought home the reality of this crisis. Clerical sexual abuse is not a small issue on the periphery of social maladjustment. It’s a major crisis of institutional abuse of power that has affected millions of people across the globe.

The truth about abuse? A comparative approach to inquiry narratives on historical institutional child abuse

In recent decades, the history of childhood and history of education have gained status as political concerns through the establishment of numerous truth commissions and inquiries into historical institutional child abuse. This article discusses the methodological and ethical dilemmas that arise when writing the history of abused children with the objective of both recognising and redressing the victims as well as offering an account of ‘what really happened’. Comparing how inquiry commissions in Ireland, Sweden and Denmark evaluate and approach victims’ oral testimonies and written records from child welfare agencies, the article explores the acts of balancing between different epistemological approaches to the concept of ‘truth’. The results suggest that while inquiries have to address and convince several audiences simultaneously, empiricist positivist methods of inquiry have dominated the approaches to ‘truth’. However, this approach has not been without ambivalence, and there are examples of constructivist approaches as well.

Kathleen Daly, Redressing institutional abuse of children

Kathleen Daly, <i>Redressing institutional abuse of children</i>

Vicarious Liability and Non-Delegable Duty in Common Law Actions Based on Institutional Child Abuse

This paper provides a review of the current law applicable in NSW to civil actions by victims of child abuse at the hands of those working for institutions such as churches and child care homes, with particular attention to the common law mechanisms by which liability can be sheeted home to the organisations in charge of such institutions.

Conceptualising Responses to Institutional Abuse of Children

Institutional abuse of children was ‘discovered’ in the 1980s, with concept diffusion in the 1990s. I explain why it emerged as a social problem and what factors triggered a response by authorities that ‘something must be done’ to address it. Some have argued that the 1980s was a time of a ‘moral panic’ about child sexual abuse, in particular, that fears of abuse were exaggerated and misdirected. Drawing from 19 major cases in Canada and Australia and those in other countries, I find that a moral panic analysis is not apt in understanding responses to institutional abuse. Although concern with sexual and physical abuse of children was important, additional factors motivated government and church officials to respond; and in some cases, child abuse was secondary to other identified wrongs against children. I identify distinctive types of institutional abuse cases, the ‘core’ and the ‘core-plus’ cases, which moved into the public arena for different reasons and in different ways. Implications are drawn for comparative research and theoretical developments in the area.

Institutional abuse of children in the Austrian Catholic Church: Types of abuse and impact on adult survivors’ current mental health

The aim of this study was to explore the nature and dimensions of institutional child abuse (IA) by the Austrian Catholic Church and to investigate the current mental health of adult survivors. Data were collected in two steps. First, documents of 448 adult survivors of IA (M=55.1 years, 75.7% men) who had disclosed their abuse history to a victim protection commission were collected. Different types of abuse, perpetrator characteristics, and family related risk factors were investigated. Second, a sample of 185 adult survivors completed the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL-C) and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). Participants reported an enormous diversity of acts of violent physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that had occurred in their childhood. The majority of adult survivors (83.3%) experienced emotional abuse. Rates of sexual (68.8%) and physical abuse (68.3%) were almost equally high. The prevalence of PTSD was 48.6% and 84.9% showed clinically relevant symptoms in at least one 1 of 10 symptom dimensions (9 BSI subscales and PTSD). No specific pre-IA influence was found to influence the development of PTSD in later life (e.g. poverty, domestic violence). However, survivors with PTSD reported a significantly higher total number of family related risk factors (d=0.33). We conclude that childhood IA includes a wide spectrum of violent acts, and has a massive negative impact on the current mental health of adult survivors. We address the long-term effects of these traumatic experiences in addition to trauma re-activation in adulthood as both bear great challenges for professionals working with survivors.

Breaking the will: relations between mental mortification in monastic life and the psychological abuse of children in Catholic institutions

This article will go into relations between mental mortification and the timely topic of abuse of children in Catholic institutions. Explorations are based upon qualitative research carried out at the University of Groningen. As unexpected as it may seem, in Dutch monastic life mortification was (still) being practiced during the 1950s and 1960s. Besides physical mortification that was primarily aimed at disciplining the body, members of religious communities also performed mental mortification to discipline their will. In this article the psychological context of mental mortification will be described in order to shed light on the topic of psychological abuse in particular. In the concluding section attention will be paid to parallels between mental mortification practices and experiences brought forward in testimonies of victims. In addition, the ways in which mental mortification may have caused abusive behaviour will be discussed.

An inconvenient truth: barriers to truth recovery in the aftermath of institutional child abuse in Ireland

Contemporary settled democracies, including the USA, England and Wales and Ireland, have witnessed a string of high-profile cases of institutional child abuse in both Church and State settings. Set against the broader literature on transitional justice, this analysis argues that there are significant barriers to truth recovery within the particular context of historical institutional abuse by the clergy in the Republic of Ireland. In the main, it argues that the frameworks of the inquiries and commissions into historical institutional child abuse are not conducive to truth recovery or the search for justice in dealing with the legacy of an abusive past. It is the Church–State relationship which makes the Irish situation noteworthy and unique. The Catholic Church and child care institutions are especially self-protective, secretive and closed by nature, and strongly discourage the drawing of attention to any deficiencies in organisational procedures. The nature of the public inquiry process also means that there is often a rather linear focus on accountability and apportioning blame. Collectively, such difficulties inhibit fuller systemic investigation of the veracity of what actually happened and, in turn, meaningful modification of child care policies. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts on the implications for transitional justice discourses more broadly as well as the residual issues for Ireland and other settled democracies in terms of moving on from the legacy of institutional child abuse.

Abuse of trust: Institutional child abuse in Ireland

Abuse of trust: Institutional child abuse in Ireland

The Darkest Corner: documenting institutional abuse and its consequences at the Abbey Theatre

Documentary theatre, as a theatrical genre, has not maintained a continuous presence in Irish theatre. The Darkest Corner series, produced in 2010 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's National Theatre is, therefore, one of the first examples of Irish theatre using the genre to address political and social issues. Presenting three plays, Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X, Richard Johnson's The Evidence I Shall Give and Mary Raftery's No Escape, the series examines the widespread abuse of children in state institutions. Before analysing the documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Raftery's No Escape, this article will begin with an exploration of documentary theatre in Ireland. It will then examine the material used for the play, the Ryan Report, published following the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, something of great political and social interest to contemporary Ireland and, finally, the play itself.

The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity by Conor Carville (review)

Reviewed by: The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity by Conor Carville Catherine E. Paul (bio) The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity, by Conor Carville. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $90.00. Aiming to understand the implications and limitations of the 1990s’ turn to theory in Irish studies, Conor Carville’s The Ends of Ireland examines critical texts from that period, considering their theoretical frames and then offering alternatives to their approaches. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on the work of a particular critic, addressing how that work frames issues of subjectivity. In each case, Carville chooses an issue central both to the writing of the critic in question and to Irish studies more generally. The first chapter, for instance, considers the commentaries of Luke Gibbons and the centrality of “traumaculture” (23)—where the experience and configuration of trauma become central to a cultural or even national identity—to considerations of Irish identity.1 Carville notes the ways in which a focus on trauma both in popular conversation and in critical studies can establish “parallels between personal histories bedevilled by the secrets and violence of childhood and the history of the nation as a whole” (25). In an Irish context, such personal and national experiences as the famine, the troubles, and institutional and clerical child abuse combine with other narratives of the past to make issues of memory and trauma central to Irish culture. This “’wound culture’” psychologizes relationships between past and present (26),2 and it figures prominently in both state-sponsored and dissenting approaches to Irish commemoration and identification. Additionally, Carville links the proliferation of “traumaculture” to a temporal disruption rooted in nineteenth-century colonial discourses, whereby particular regions of the contemporary Irish nation are imagined to be stuck in the past or are holdovers from another era. Carville challenges Gibbons’s use of such concepts as this “rhetoric of temporal disruption” (36), which is noted when scanning across his various publications. The following chapters similarly challenge the theoretical paradigms and readings of David Lloyd, Seamus Deane, W. J. McCormack, Emer Nolan, and Gerardine Meaney.3 Carville’s closing chapter offers his own model of subjectivity, drawing on these other critics’ work while challenging it in a reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a story Carville calls “the Ur-text of contemporary Irish cultural criticism” (211). Carville’s own approach to questions of Irish identity combines the idea of subalternity, taken from postcolonial studies, with a psychoanalytic approach to subjectivity, suggesting “that the relationship between subjectivity and identity, or between subalternity and strategic essentialism, is a central, problematic and often disavowed aspect of the most productive and provocative work in contemporary Irish cultural criticism” [End Page 714] (11). Specifically, Carville deploys “the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the unconscious and the subject of identification” as a means of analyzing this contemporary criticism of Irish identity (15). Drawing on work by Fredric Jameson, Carville reads the closing story of Dubliners “in terms of a relationship between modernist space and nationalism,” suggesting that “The Dead” can “provide a template for a new understanding of the relations between modernism and nationalism that confirms the utility” of his own proposed model of subjectivity (211, 211-12).4 Challenging Jameson’s proposal, in “Modernism and Imperialism,” that the Dublin of Ulysses presents, as Carville puts it, “a space where the dislocations of imperialist mapping will not hold,” he instead proposes an interpretation of Joyce’s Dublin (albeit in “The Dead”) where the sense of that space is more analogous to the “disruptive spatial affects afflict[ing]” E. M. Forster’s Howards End (212).5 Comparing, for instance, a description of Gabriel Conroy with a moment in Howards End exemplifying modernist style, Carville notes in Joyce’s story “an oscillation … between the real and the unreal” and an inability of the various descriptive details “to add up to a quantifiable whole” (215). Carville thus asserts that, in this story, as in those works by Forster and Joseph Conrad that Jameson describes, there is “a disruption of the external world [that] has its direct counterpart in the way that consciousness represents space” (216).6 Further...

Separated Children in Ireland: Responding to 'Terrible Wrongs'

The treatment and care of separated children in Ireland has been the subject of continuing controversy, attracting criticism from international and European human rights bodies. This criticism has pointed to continuing gaps in protection and inequities in the standards of care provided. The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse 2009 (the Ryan Report), documented the ‘terrible wrongs’ inflicted on children in residential institutions in Ireland and a history of neglect, abuse and failure on the part of the State. While the Ryan Report was specifically concerned with the historical abuse of children in residential institutions run by religious orders, the Government, in its response, took the opportunity to address a contemporary risk of abuse – this time, of children who are strangers to the State. The Ryan Report: Implementation Plan committed the State to ensuring greater equity of care in the treatment of separated children. The inclusion of separated children in the Government’s Implementation Plan followed a sustained campaign of advocacy through the Action for Separated Children in Ireland coalition, a coalition of NGOs which succeeded in placing the rights and interests of separated children firmly on the agenda of children’s rights advocates. Despite this success, however, significant gaps in protection remain. These gaps in protection are not unique to Ireland. As Bhabha notes, the limited protections provided to separated children highlights the difficulties faced by children’s rights advocates worldwide, in ensuring that migrant children are recognized, first and foremost, as children in need of and with rights to protection. These difficulties are evident in recent debates in Ireland on proposals for a constitutional amendment on the rights of the child. The proposed amendment mandates the State to ‘cherish all children of the State equally,’ and is intended to strengthen the constitutional framework to protect children’s rights and to remedy the failings that contributed to decades of neglect of vulnerable children. Whether the proposed amendment will support expanded protections for separated children remains to be seen. All too often, appeals to the best interests of the child in such disputes are trumped by the State’s concern to limit and control immigration. Limited attention is given to the harms endured by migrant children. For separated children, the risks faced are great. There has been a gradual recognition of those risks, but, as yet, only limited legislative and policy commitment to ensuring that effective safeguards are in place against such risks. The Immigration Residence and Protection Bill 2010 proposed a comprehensive legal framework for migration and protection in Ireland. It did not include, however, any explicit recognition of children’s best interests in matters relating to protection and immigration and it left unanswered the concerns that have arisen relating to age assessment procedures, guardianship and best interests determinations for separated children. This paper examines the continuing gaps in protection faced by separated children in Ireland, reflecting broader failings in migration law and policy, and in the recognition of positive obligations to protect some of the most vulnerable children in the care of the State.

CT identification of abdominal injuries in abused pre-school-age children

Although the abdominopelvic CT findings of abdominal trauma in children have been described, little has been written about the subset of children who are victims of abuse. Our purpose is to describe abdominopelvic injuries in abused pre-school-age children as identified on CT. An IRB-approved retrospective review of our institutional child abuse registry was performed. Searching a 14-year period, we identified 84 children ≤ 5 years of age with medically diagnosed abuse who underwent CT. We reviewed imaging studies, operative reports, autopsy findings and patient outcomes. Consensus review of the CT examinations was performed by CAQ-certified pediatric radiologists, and findings were categorized as normal or by injury types (solid organ versus bowel). The injuries were analyzed in light of existing literature on pediatric accidental and non-accidental injuries. Of the 84 children, 35 (41.7%) had abdominal injuries. Abdominal injuries included liver (15), bowel (13), mesentery (4), spleen (6), kidneys (7), pancreas (4) and adrenal glands (3). Of these children, 26% (9/35) required surgical intervention for bowel, mesenteric and pancreatic injuries. Another 9/35 children died, not as a result of abdominal injuries but as a direct result of inflicted intracranial injuries. Our data indicate that abdominal injuries in abused children present in a pattern similar to that of children with accidental abdominal trauma, underscoring the need for vigilance and correlative historical and clinical data to identify victims of abuse. Mortality in abused children with intra-abdominal injury was frequently related to concomitant head injury.