Historical Child sexual abuse

The investigation of Non-recent child abuse is possibly unique in that it not only involves the investigation of an offence but that there are real time safeguarding and risk of harm issue to be considered.

Current UK Police procedures are developed within individual geographically based forces meaning that there is little coherence in approach and a large number of organisational interfaces.

Recognising the Safety critical nature of the investigation leads me to conclude that the roll of investigating Non-recent child abuse should be the responsibility of a national organisation thereby maximising the ability to ensure best practice and minimise the number of organisational interfaces.

This essay bears witness to the everyday and hidden nature of incest and offers some understanding of how and why the issue has been airbrushed out of the public discourse throughout its history. Incest is defined as any sexual activity that occurs between people who are related by blood or some other familiar connection as through marriage. Societal sensitivities and ambivalence about the extent of incest and its widespread effects under the weight of the incest taboo have encouraged its ‘privatisation’, whereby incest remains hidden in the ‘patriarchal’ home. In addition, more emphasis is placed on contemporary considerations of institutional sexual abuse, that which is perpetrated within the public sphere by so-called paedophiles or sex offenders. Today’s preference to focus on institutional sexual abuse rather than on such abuse in the home is fed by the mistaken view that ‘ordinary’ people do not commit incest. Every forward movement in unearthing the ubiquity and severity of incest – as through the recurring waves of feminism and Royal Commissions – has been met with neoliberal-type counter arguments in the form of the false memory movement and the psychologising of incest, whereby incest is considered an issue only for traumatised individuals and must be dealt with by helping professionals outside of the public purview. The author uses her own testimony as witness to her father’s sexual abuse of an older sister in childhood to tease out the hidden nature of this malignancy and expose governmental and societal reluctance – under the weight of patriarchal pressure – to promote a deeper discussion of incest within the public discourse.

in Special Issue on Towards Transitional Justice (eds K O’Donnell, M O’Rourke and J. M. Smith)  55:1-2 (forthcoming Spring-Summer, 2020).


The history of the Irish State is littered with shamed bodies. For decades the State collaborated with religious orders in incarcerating children and single women, shamed by their poverty, race, disability, or association with sexual transgression (Fischer Gender, Nation; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell; Smith; Buckley). Shaming practices such as head shaving, using numbers to identify children, or flogging were used to punish and control (Arnold; Coleman 121; Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse [CICA] vol. 1, ch. 8). Women and children in industrial or reformatory schools, psychiatric hospitals, County Homes, and Magdalene Laundries were burdened with a stigmatized identity that meant total exclusion from society (O’Donnell and O’Sullivan 257). As they have begun to speak publicly about their experiences, victim-survivors have forced the State and Irish society to acknowledge this history. Their testimony to experiences of neglect, beatings, forced labor, sexual assault, and imprisonment are an indictment of the sovereign State’s claim to protect its most vulnerable and to detect and punish crime within its territory. In response, the State offers an architecture of apology, investigation, and redress. Scholars have traced patterns of violation of domestic and international norms at the core of this framework (Gallen and Gleeson; O’Rourke, “The Justice for Magdalenes Campaign”; Ring, “The Victim of Historical Abuse”).
These legal responses can usefully be analyzed in terms of the key objectives of transitional justice (truth telling; accountability; redress and reparations, and guarantees of non- recurrence). However transitional justice and its processes are themselves contingent and capable of oppression. Suppressed and marginalized knowledges may be omitted or excluded in the name of transitional justice (Mamdani; van Marle; Koggel). This article contributes to the literature exploring epistemic injustice in transitional justice processes by scrutinizing the Irish State’s legal responses to historical institutional abuse.2 In particular, we develop a theory of State shame that describes and explains the ways the Irish State perpetuates epistemic injustices against people who suffered abuse in State institutions. We unpack the relationship between the State’s performance of shame in these legal responses and its need to preserve its sovereignty—its professed singular competence to determine how painful national events are understood and resolved (Dean). We argue that the State uses discourses of its own shame to legitimate legal responses that prioritize its sovereignty over the demands of true shame. We show how this produces significant epistemic injustices in the present against people who suffered institutional abuse as in the past.

Depuis le milieu des années 2010, les catholiques français peuvent avoir le sentiment que les agressions sexuelles cléricales sont devenues une des questions centrales, voire le sujet fondamental, dans la vie de leur Église. Une approche historique entrelaçant l’histoire de la société française et l’histoire du catholicisme français permettra de comprendre comment cette focalisation a pu se produire

This paper acknowledges that a great deal has been achieved in addressing child abuse in institutions, but there is much more to be done. A host of national inquiries across the western world have listened to the testimony of victims and survivors and the cat is well and truly out of the bag. Yet, it is argued that the almost exclusive emphasis on sexual abuse (which we have known about for many years but have done little but wring our hands) has deflected attention away from the many other forms of criminal abuse and neglect of children taken into ‘care’. Despite its focus on sexual abuse, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse provides a useful framework and methodology for much-needed research.
However, a critical question is why, with so many inquiries and so much research, so little has changed in the treatment of children in institutions.  The author proposes a fresh approach to such research involving an alliance between historians and others with survivors who are capable of bringing a different perspective to the task. An emerging literature of this type already suggests that these more reflexive narratives can successfully combine research skills, analytical powers and lived experience.

Prohibition applications relating to historic child abuse charges are a litmus test of the courts’ commitment to upholding fairness to the accused. This article argues that the prohibition case law reveals two trends: one in which fairness is being marginalised; and another in which it is given a contextualised meaning. The article argues that the latter approach represents an attempt to re-imagine fairness to the accused in prohibition applications. Analysing fairness in context is shown to be a continuation of a tradition in Irish constitutional jurisprudence of understanding fairness to the accused as both fundamental and evolving.

This chapter explores the role of law in determining the contours of contested pasts.  It takes as a case study the jurisprudence developed by the Irish Superior Courts regarding applications to halt the trial of offences of historical child sexual abuse.  The chapter argues that the concepts of ‘delay’ and ‘dominion’ that characterise this jurisprudence represent law’s attempt to create a linear notion of time. Linear time narrowed the limits of what could be deemed a ‘legitimate’ experience, and thus narrowed the limits of history. The chapter goes on to argue that the temporal ordering imposed in the delay cases may alternatively be understood in terms of the Bergsonian notion of duration (durée). Thinking law’s time through duration opens up the possibility of understanding connections, adaptations and change as being part of law’s ontology.  In particular, seeing the tropes of ‘delay’ and ‘dominion’ as in keeping with law’s time as duration exposes the roots of these concepts in the past of law; in myths about sexual violence victims.  Therefore, understanding law’s time as duration allows an understanding of the complex nonlinear relationship law has with its own past, as well as the unpredictability of future legal responses to historical violence.

This paper looks at how well some of the perceived characteristics of people who self-harm, Age and Gender, fit with the reality of Self Harm in the community. For most non experts, and undoubtedly a few experts as well, the perception of people who self=harm is one of almost exclusively young, teenage, and predominately female. This is not surprising as the language, images and targeting of both press reports, Support and information organisations web sites as well as academic papers reinforce that perception. While it is obviously difficult to fully and accurately understand the demographic makeup of the people who shelf-harm, it is often a secret activity, we can, I suggest, get a first level approximation of the issue from those presenting to hospital emergency departments. Statistics from the south west of England do not support the stereotype that it is teens and young people – 15-29 that are the majority group. In fact the 30-44 age range present at hospital in almost identical numbers with the 45 – 74 age group reaching 50% of the numbers of the younger groups. The same statistics also show only a excess of females presenting in the 15-29 age group but with the gap narrowing in the older age groups I think form this it if fair to say that self-harm impacts both genders and all ages, and while young females do seem to have a higher prevalence of self-harm the statistics do show that the perception of self-harm as a predominantly young female issues is far from the truth.

This book looks at women's engagement with contemporary understandings of childhood sexual abuse. It explores the role women play in constructing their own sexual abuse narratives based on what they define as continuous, recovered, or false memories. Drawing on debates around the recovered memory wars and sociological and feminist literature, the book examines the place of one's childhood in adult life. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into women's relationship with a growing therapeutic / self-help culture.

Based on new empirical data generated from in-depth interviews with adult women this book explores the concepts of identity, biography, and well-being. It will be of interest to students and academics in Sociology, Psychology, Social Work and Gender Studies, as well as those working in the field of sexual abuse.

In recent years, Ireland has been rocked by revelations of historical child sexual abuse. This has led to a variety of state responses but one question remains particularly difficult to answer: why did the sexual abuse of children go unrecognized as a societal problem for so long? This article seeks answers by scrutinizing cases in which defendants sought to have their trial prohibited because of the delayed reporting. It explores the legal test used in the period 1999–2006, which focussed on the abuser’s ‘dominion’ over the victim. The use of the notion of dominion elicited valuable information about the reasons for the delay and how children were silenced. Uncovering these stories is essential to understanding the dynamics of child sexual abuse. However, a critical reading of the delay cases that draws on feminist critiques of battered woman’s syndrome and rape trauma syndrome reveals law’s power to impose hegemonic discourses onto victims and to produce new histories. Under the dominion paradigm, the courts distorted victims’ accounts of their experiences and sidelined stories that pointed towards a culture of indifference to abuse. Thus, law is shown to occupy a paradoxical position in relation to Ireland’s history of child sexual abuse.

The need for specific support for adult survivors of historic / Non recent childhood abuse is neither well understood or provided for. The belief within the groups that commission both physical and mental health services is that the existing generic services are adequate. Needs and Provision.

A three year old boy, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1892, lived the final months of his life in an abusive foster home. His death barely made a ripple in the press, and the system proved unable or unwilling to deal with much of the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators of abuse. This article argues that cases like this one are more than just historical curiosities. They expose abuse which so often lay hidden from the public gaze, and reveal important information about how and why it was allowed to occur. Such cases demand the historian’s attention, not because they are scandalous stories, but because they are sites of historical injustice. They also provide opportunities to understand why systems intended to protect children can fail them so badly, a question which remains pertinent today.

Prohibition applications relating to historic child abuse charges are a litmus test of the courts’ commitment to upholding fairness to the accused. This article argues that the prohibition case law reveals two trends: one in which fairness is being marginalised; and another in which it is given a contextualised meaning. The article argues that the latter approach represents an attempt to re-imagine fairness to the accused in prohibition applications. Analysing fairness in context is shown to be a continuation of a tradition in Irish constitutional jurisprudence of understanding fairness to the accused as both fundamental and evolving.

A three year old boy, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1892, lived the final months of his life in an abusive foster home. His death barely made a ripple in the press, and the system proved unable or unwilling to deal with much of the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators of abuse. This article argues that cases like this one are more than just historical curiosities. They expose abuse which so often lay hidden from the public gaze, and reveal important information about how and why it was allowed to occur. Such cases demand the historian’s attention, not because they are scandalous stories, but because they are sites of historical injustice. They also provide opportunities to understand why systems intended to protect children can fail them so badly, a question which remains pertinent today.