Conceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries: From Damage Control to Foregrounding Survivor Testimony

Abstract

Testimony before inquiries into out-of-home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn't we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they serve, how they are organised and how they gather evidence. Using as a case study, a survey of historical abuse inquiries in Australia, this article explores the shift to victim and survivor testimony and in so doing offers a new way of conceptualising and categorising historical child abuse inquiries. It focuses less on how inquiries are constituted or governed, and instead advances an historically contextualised approach that foregrounds the issue of who speaks and who is heard.

Investigating Historical-Structural Injustices

“…22 Moreover, Swain, Wright, and Sköld note a common issue for public inquiries across these types is that they cannot implement their own proposals but instead merely make recommendations to government. 23 As a result, implementing inquiry recommendations is both a structural limitation on an inquiry's power and another opportunity for episodic and interactive use of power between victim-survivors and government and officials responsible for implementation. Without effective implementation of recommendations, it may be that the 'desire for truth is not matched by the willingness to live with its consequences in contemporary societies'.…”

Bearing Witness as a Process for Responding to Trauma Survivors: A Review

“…By the mid-2010s, following growing pressure to deal with large volumes of complaints concerning the historical abuse of children in institutions, governments saw approximately 20 inquiries into institutional child abuse around the world (Swain et al, 2018). These inquiries were established following advocacy by survivors and broke new ground by enabling survivors to tell their stories of abuse as children and its lasting effects.…”

Lessons from Transitional Justice? Toward a New Framing of a Victim-Centered Approach in the Case of Historical Institutional Abuse

“…Victims 2 of historical institutional child abuse have several routes in pursuit of justice, through criminal prosecution, civil litigation, public inquiries and redress schemes. A common response to HIA, certainly in the European context, has been to launch an inquiry investigating the past, with most of these inquiries built around interviews, oral history or narrative testimony most typically leading to apology, compensation and redress (Daly, 2014;Sköld, 2016;Swain et al, 2018).…”

“…and scope of inquiries (Law Commission of Canada, 2000;Skold & Swain, 2015;; issues of justice for victims (Daly, 2014;Gallen & Gleeson, 2018); procedural and restorative justice (McAlinden & Naylor, 2016), and whether victims themselves have benefitted from the processes (Golding, 2018;Lundy, 2020;Lundy & Mahoney, 2018;Swain et al, 2018;). Throughout this scholarship limited reference is made to transitional justice (TJ).…”