Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in 'Care'

International Perspectives

J. Sköld, S. Swain, J. Sköld, S. Swain, J. Sköld, S. Swain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137457554
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book positions inquiries into the historical abuse of children in care within the context of transitional justice. It examines investigation, apology and redress processes across a range of Western nations to trace the growth of the movement, national particularities and the impact of the work on professionals involved.

Part I

Transitional Justice and the Legacy of Child Welfare

1

Apology Politics: Transnational Features

Johanna Sköld

Introduction

In September 2013, when the Finnish government appointed a commission to examine the abuse and neglect of children in out-of-home care from 1937 to 1983, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health website noted similar studies in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada (Social-och hälsovårdsministeriet, 2014). Germany, Austria and Åland have also conducted investigations, while in Switzerland, the minister for justice apologized for the separation of poor or illegitimate children from their parents, although no inquiry had been carried out (Thomasson, 2013). Such transitional justice processes have much in common, despite their origin in different child welfare contexts. This chapter argues that national processes of transitional justice are linked in a global movement, allowing us to speak of an international, albeit distinctly Western, phenomenon. The Finnish reference to inquiries carried out in other countries illustrates the transnational features of this phenomenon, while pointing to the significance of international comparison in establishing such processes.

Transitional justice as political practice

Transitional justice has been identified as a political trend of our time where regret, apologies and redress reinforce political legitimacy (Barkan, 2000; Olick, 2007; Torpey, 2006; Winter, 2014; see also Chapter 5), but explanations differ as to why the modernist project is now characterized by taking responsibility for the past. John Torpey (2006) argues that the collapse of major utopian ideologies such as socialism has led progressive politicians to see the past rather than the future as a locus for social change. Others suggest that a shift from socialism and its focus on how resources are distributed to an increased emphasis on liberalism and individual rights has created the basis for recognition and redress for individuals and groups whose oppression had previously been unseen (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). With the end of the Cold War, these ideas found a new and expanding audience. The historian Elazar Barkan (2000) argues that the greater self-reflexivity within democratic nations since the 1990s is the result of a moral reorientation towards combating human rights violations.

The nation state’s altered role is highlighted by historical sociologist Jeffrey K. Olick (2007, pp. 121–22). Previously, the nation state was constructed and legitimized by a collective narrative of a heroic past, but now other memory-bearing units are creating collective memories, often in competition with each other. Contemporary politicians must navigate such diverse group identities, positions and issues. The politics of regret, Olick suggests, have become a way of creating political legitimacy within nation states characterized by diversity and multiple identities. By expressing regret for abuses and oppression, politicians can take responsibility for different groups, thus legitimizing their position as political authorities in established democracies (Olick, 2007, pp. 188–92; Winter, 2014). If we look beyond the nation state to a globally competitive world where a majority of nations have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, can transitional justice and a politics of apology function as a way to earn legitimacy within the global community as a modern democracy safeguarding children’s rights? This, in turn, raises questions about how important international comparisons have been for the development of children’s rights, and, consequently, for transitional justice towards victims of historical child abuse.

The Finnish historian Pauli Kettunen (2006) has shown that international comparison played a crucial role in the production and transfer of knowledge especially in the formation of Scandinavian welfare states. Comparisons with the rest of the world constantly affect national politics. Hence, it is worth paying attention to how processes of transitional justice in one national context learn from similar processes abroad. This is not to imply that the inquiry commissions in all countries have followed the same pattern; but commissions have responded reflexively to events in other jurisdictions. Kettunen investigates how the Nordic welfare states were constituted in the first half of the 20th century by learning from and avoiding the mistakes of more advanced economies. Others have shown that children’s rights were established through an intensive international exchange of ideas and knowledge. In the Nordic countries, field trips, international conferences and detailed international comparisons of legal texts, for example, were central to the creation of a modernized child welfare system and ultimately the identification of children’s rights (Andresen et al., 2011). Child welfare in many countries also has a transnational history through the religious and philanthropic organizations that provided key services. Irish Catholic religious orders operated across the world, and their ideas, as well as those of other denominations, spread globally (Pilgrim, 2012; Swain and Hillel, 2010; Yeates, 2011).

By reviewing commissions and their reports, this chapter investigates whether the political focus on child abuse in out-of-home care is a new form of comparative political practice within the field of children’s rights. The reports gather painful and traumatic stories, which existed before the commissions were appointed, but are transformed through the hearings from individual to national traumas. But are these national traumas only created from within – by the citizens’ stories of abuse and oppression – or have comparisons with other countries helped to create the political pressure required to appoint a commission and start a process of redress? By using the commissions’ reports it is possible to identify when and how references to processes in other countries are made and to analyse the significance such references are given.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a model

Although domestic conflict led to the appointment in the 1990s of the first national commissions to address abuse in out-of-home care, contemporary truth commissions investigating human rights issues in other countries were a source of inspiration. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (1995–2002) was particularly relevant to the inquiries initiated in Australia, Canada and Ireland in the 1990s. Based upon lessons from previous truth commissions in Latin America, it heard both victims’ and perpetrators’ testimonies, paving the way for the transition from 45 years of apartheid to democracy (Hayner, 2011; Shea, 2000).

In Australia, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) investigation (1995–1997) was the culmination of many decades of Indigenous activism. The impetus came from an earlier commission, which identified high rates of child removal among Aborigines who died in prisons or police custody (RCADC, 1991). The HREOC report Bringing Them Home was based on the testimony of 535 people removed from their families as children. It framed these experiences in a colonial and racist context similar to that being investigated by the TRC (Attwood, 2005, p. 51). The HREOC inquiry had been established by a Labor government which, historian Bain Attwood argues, was seeking a way to differentiate its politics from those of the liberals and conservatives after the Cold War. By looking to history and distancing themselves from the colonial and racist practices that characterized the nation and its relationship with Indigenous peoples, it sought to create a new national identity for Australia. This idea proved to be incompatible with liberal and conservative politics, leading to an ongoing conflict about Australian history and national identity (Attwood, 2005, pp. 26–29).

The Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was established in 1991 after the violent confrontation that occurred in response to plans to build a golf course on a traditional sacred burial ground of the Mohawk Nation. The RCAP had a mandate to examine the relationship between the Indigenous peoples, the Canadian government and Canadian society from a historical perspective. The abuse of children was not on the original agenda, but evidence before the commission documented abuse in residential institutions, leading the RCAP to identify Indian residential schools as the worst form of oppression and to recommend an investigation (Llewellyn, 2002, pp. 258–60; RCAP, 1996).

During the 1990s Canada also acknowledged that abuse had occurred in a number of other state institutions for children: at orphanages, schools for the deaf and blind, and long-term mental health care facilities (see Chapter 11). The Law Commission of Canada (LCC) was charged with investigating ways of addressing such harm. Its 2000 report Restoring Dignity highlighted that a thorough investigation of the residential schools by a truth commission modelled on the TRC would be one approach to redress. Australian efforts to come to terms with the forced removals of Aboriginal children were also mentioned, but no explicit links were made (LCC, 2000, pp. 267–81). In parallel, numbers of civil litigations grew, which led to the largest class action settlement in Canadian history in 2007: the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) was finally appointed in 2008, charged with revealing the ‘complex truth’ about the history of the schools and their legacy, and guiding the restoration and reconciliation process. Its final report is expected in 2014–2015 (TRCC, 2012, pp. 1–2).

Political scientist Matt James has argued that the TRCC’s work has been permeated by the same victim-centred approach, interpersonal understanding and forgiveness as the South African TRC. Unlike the RCAP, where political reconciliation was the focus, the victim-centred model provides a space in which victims can access redress and healing by telling the truth about the past. This approach, however, is not without its problems as it emphasizes the individual victims’ reconciliation with their abusers and/or what happened in the past rather than challenging the structural causes of violence and oppression on a societal level (James, 2012).

Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which ran from 1999 to 2009, was also inspired by the South African TRC (Boland, 2004, pp. 34–37; Brennan, 2007, p. 249), even though its establishment pre-dated the publication of the TRC’s final reports. The CICA has been criticized for failing to fully understand and challenge the social aspects of the abuse in the institutions. Carol Brennan (see Chapter 4) argues that the commission’s main function was to provide victims with the opportunity to tell their story for therapeutic purposes – sharing the assumption of the victim-centred model that narration in itself would lead to redress. Inspired by the Australian Forde Inquiry (1999) concerning child abuse in Queensland and the Welsh Waterhouse Report (2000), the public naming and shaming of individual offenders was banned during the process (Brennan, 2007, pp. 249, 261). In the final report the Catholic Church emerged as the main perpetrator, but several researchers have argued that this is a simplification of history. The historian Eoin O’Sullivan (2015) believes that a deeper understanding of the roles played by the state, the families and Irish society is required, as the institutions were used to deal with people who brought shame and dishonour upon their family or as a way to solve problems of poverty. When the Irish Free State gained independence from Great Britain in 1921, it continued the tradition of entrusting the costly child welfare to Catholic congregations but failed to comply with regulations regarding supervision and control. Within the community, children in institutions were regarded as moral dirt and placed at the bottom of the social ladder (Ferguson, 2007; Garrett, 2013; McLoone-Richards, 2012; O’Sullivan, 2015).

National and global chains of inquiry

Following the appointment of these early commissions, historical cases of abuse were on the political agenda in many countries, with more abuse victims demanding that their stories be acknowledged. This became particularly apparent in Australia, where the Bringing Them Home report was followed by several inquiries into the forced removal and subsequent abuse of other groups of children. This pattern is also apparent in other countries where philanthropic organizations and religious communities, especially the Catholic Church, have played key roles in removing and accommodating children, with the state responsible for supervision and funding.

In countries where Catholic influence has been strong in child welfare, the increased attention surrounding allegations of sexual abuse within the Church provided a starting point for inquiries. Child welfare in these countries was part of a global Catholic system, with residential models exported across the globe. Irish Catholic religious orders have migrated to many countries, with the Christian Brothers running schools and institutions in 26 countries and the Sisters of Mercy similarly widespread (Pilgrim, 2012, p. 407; Yeates, 2011, p. 83). Although Protestant evangelical movements also conducted extensive international ‘child rescue’ operations (Swain and Hillel, 2010), the Catholic Church as a universal organization was unique in the way in which it extended its territorial and moral sphere through transnational migration of care workers (Yeates, 2011).

In Australia, the Forde Inquiry (named after the commissioner, Leneen Forde) published its review of abuse in Queensland institutions in 1999, two years after the Bringing Them Home report. Although limited to only one state, it was one of the first commissions to present an overall picture of how abuse over a long time period (1911–1998) had affected both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in institutions that were state-funded but run by religious organizations. The breadth of its analysis meant that the Forde report has been referred to in many subsequent investigations (Brennan, 2007, p. 259; Coldrey, 2000).

Former child migrants – children who were sent from the UK to the British Empire’s colonies from 1920 to 1967 – were included within the scope of the Forde Inquiry. They had established their own support group in 1982 and, working in conjunction with the international charitable organization the Child Migrants Trust, established in 1987, lobbied to receive redress and assistance to reunite with families. Subsequent inquiries in both Britain (1997–1998) and Australia (2000–2001) led to increased co-operation between the two nations in offering reunion and redress. The Australian child migration inquiry caught the attention of groups representing people who grew up in the same institutions as the child migrants but were born in Australia. They approached the committee demanding their own inquiry, illustrating how comparison can be a powerful force in lobbying for recognition and redress. When the report on child migrants, Lost Innocents, was published in 2001, it included a recommendation that the senate should appoint a further inquiry to examine abuse in institutions in Australia (Senate Community Affairs References Committee (SCARC) 2001). The 2004 report of this third inquiry, published as Forgotten Australians, begins with a quote from Nelson Mandela. It built explicitly on the genealogy of the preceding Australian inquiries with its title referring to the way this group had been forgotten in the decades-long discussion on the abuse of children in out-of-home care (SCARC, 2004, p. 3).

The chain of inquiries in Australia had seen the focus shifting from crimes against Indigenous people’s human rights to the abuse of children in out-of-home care (Cuthbert and Quartly, 2013). In addition to the colonial assumptions that underwrote child migration policies, the reports also highlighted the export of Irish child welfare practices through the Catholic religious orders. The abuse that occurred in Australian institutions was explained, in part, in terms of the poverty-stricken and harsh Irish environments, which served as a reference for both the design of the institutions and the life experiences of the staff (Forde, 1999, p. 92; SCARC, 2004, p. 38).

The commissions in Ireland and Australia worked partially in parallel. Their reports make few references to commissions in other countries, but the lack of direct references does not mean that such inquiries have been without consequence. The Irish CICA drew some of its methodology from the Forde report. Conversely, the CICA’s way of working in private sessions rather than public hearings has been reflected in a recently appointed Australian Royal Commission examining institutional responses to child sexual abuse (RCIRCSA, 2013, p. 2). In addition to the domestic genealogy of inquiries, Forgotten Australians mentions that inquiries in Canada and Ireland and legal processes against the Catholic Church in the USA have helped to give care-leavers an opportunity to come forward and tell their stories (SCARC, 2004, p. 127; see also Daly, 2014, p. 11). International allegations about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church were also a key reason for the appointment of both the Samson and Deetman commissions in the Netherlands (see Chapter 8; Deetman, 2011a, para 1.1.1).

By early 2014, these inquiries culminated in the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) publishing a critical report encouraging the Vatican to remove all suspected perpetrators from their posts and to open its archives in order to bring both the perpetrators and those who concealed their crimes to justice. It also asked for the Vatican-appointed commission, which was developing child protection measures, to review the tens of thousands of cases of sexual abuse that have emerged worldwide (CRC, 2014, pp. 9–10).

The impact of neighbouring countries on the ‘discovery’ of sexual abuse

Stories of abuse have also received media attention which has prompted inquiries in secular welfare states. Increased awareness of sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s is an important factor in understanding why inquiries have been appointed, regardless of the context in which the abuse occurred. Social workers had long known that children in foster homes or institutions were at risk of sexual abuse (see Chapter 6; Daly, 2014, pp. 86–89). For a long time, however, there was no language beyond euphemism to describe sexual assault. Linguistic practice influenced what it was possible to see and discuss. There was a particular silence around boys (Jackson, 2000, p. 100). When feminists began to theorize in the 1970s about sexual abuse within the family it was understood in the context of a patriarchal social system, in which men sexually exploit women and girls. The abuse of boys was not part of the analysis (Smaal, 2013, pp. 703–04). In the 1980s, interest was focused on extrafamilial abuse, which, by the 1990s, was later embodied in the figure of the paedophiles, with boys the major victims. It was also in the 1990s, when various forms of organized abuse became a concern both in the media and in research, that the first inquiries into sexual abuse in child welfare institutions were established (see Chapter 6; Corby et al., 2001, pp. 46–47).

One of the earliest was the North Wales Tribunal of Inquiry into Child Abuse, appointed in Great Britain in 1996. The tribunal published its findings in the 2000 report named after the tribunal’s chairman, Sir Ronald Waterhouse, a retired High Court judge. For a decade (1986–1996), the police and other locally appointed inquiries had examined allegations of sexual abuse made against staff and managers at several institutions in two counties in Wales. Several men who had worked at the institutions were sentenced to long prison terms. But speculation in the media claimed that both the police and the social services committee were engaged in a cover-up. Several of the inquiries’ reports were kept confidential because of the risk of defamation, and many of the accused were not prosecuted. It was also rumoured that a pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Transitional Justice and the Legacy of Child Welfare
• Part II: National Particularities
• Part III: Challenges for Professionals
• Bibliography
• Index