Governing Child Abuse Voices and Victimisation

The Use of Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in Christian Institutions

Jodi Death

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138677456
• eBook ISBN: 9781317195399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Child sexual abuse by clergy within the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as a social and political discourse over the last three decades. The analysis here specifically focuses on the establishment, conduct, and outcomes of the extensive public inquiries of Australia, although inquiries in other jurisdictions are also discussed. Unlike criminal or civil processes, although they may be inquisitory in nature, public inquiries emerge from a specifically political context and are a tool of governance embedded in a larger context of governmentality. Understanding the broader political and cultural contexts of public inquiries is important, then, in understanding their value and effectiveness as justice processes – especially for victims of CSA by clergy. What is interesting about public inquiry is that it situates victims of CSA by clergy outside of criminal and civil justice processes and recognises a different politicised relationship between victims as citizens, the state, and Catholic institutions where abuse has occurred.

At the cutting edge of disciplinary and methodological understandings of the interconnections between the church, state and families, his book explores the dynamics of the emergence and politicisation of victims of CSA by clergy, their expressions of resistance and the legitimisation of their voice in public and political spheres.

Chapter 1

Victims of CSA as politicised subjects

If it were not for the courage, tenacity and persistence of survivors, this inquiry would not be happening. To both state and federal governments past I say this: you share the company of other governments around the world who have also failed their children, and therein lies the greatest shame. – Evidence of Ms C Wilding, Victorian Inquiry.

(Family and Community Development Committee, 2013)

We live in large, highly organized systems with state monopoly on reactions to violence.

(Christie, 2010: 116)

This chapter introduces a wider cultural and political context that has enabled the emergence of victims of child sexual abuse (CSA) by clergy as political agents and the ‘discovery’ of CSA in institutional settings (Daly, 2014). The focus of this chapter is on establishing the historical and theoretical frameworks within which victims of CSA can be understood to have become recognisable as subjects by engaging in constructing discourses of resistance within networks of power (Stringer, 2014). This chapter argues that victimisation continues to be a discursively constructed and contested category and explores the significance of recognising voices of victims of CSA by clergy whose victimisation and subject position is legitimised through public inquiry (Bray, 2009; Bumiller, 2008; Pratt, 2005).

Victimisation as a contested category

Victimisation is a contested category that has changed in meaning, as well as political and social utility, most significantly in the last century. With the advent of the United Nations after the Second World War, victims of social, political, and interpersonal ‘violence’ took on a much broader context. Concepts of victimisation and state responsibility expanded at this time, with recognition of state harms becoming a core component of human rights discourses (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2012; Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Braithwaite, 2010). The recognition of state harms broadened an understanding of an individual perpetrator to a more thorough understanding of systemic and institutional abuses that did not rely on a sole perpetrator, but rather, individuals acting within institutional, social, and political situations to render harms to particular categories of people on a broad scale (Shalhoub- Kevorkian and Braithwaite, 2010; Walklate, 2009). With this, victims of harms, rather than specifically of ‘crimes’, have emerged in international forums in new ways that have expanded categories of victimisation. As Butler (2005) points out, the recognition of ‘victims’ remains a political process that is fraught with the limitations of social, cultural, political, and individual perspectives.

Victimologists of the late twentieth century furthered work that critiqued the state as a perpetrator of harms and the conflicted role of the state in addressing these harms. Much of this work was done in the context of transitional states where major human rights violations had occurred and systems of governance were in flux or transition (Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Rothe and Kauzlarich, 2014; Wolhuter et al., 2009). Key examples include South Africa, where policies of Apartheid resulted in major fractures to the rule of law and the social contract, an ongoing state-sanctioned violation of human rights, large- scale violence, structural poverty, and social alienation according to race (Rothe and Kauzlarich, 2014). In such transitional states, the difficulty of the state addressing its role as perpetrator whilst also holding responsibility for addressing healing, accountability, and truth- telling has been clearly highlighted and widely discussed. This, in turn, underlines the need to understand and address the relationship between the state and victims of harm that has been politically motivated, sanctioned, and enacted (Rothe and Kauzlarich, 2014). The role of the state as ‘perpetrator’ in failed child protection systems is a complex matter, as it is often systemic shortcomings that have resulted in these failures.

Within critiques produced by feminisms, the role of culture and politics in creating systems that sustain abuse has always been central to both understanding and addressing abuse. With the rise of second wave feminisms, victims of interpersonal violence, particularly child sexual abuse, adult sexual violence, and domestic violence, became increasingly central to feminisms’ claims regarding the systemic nature of patriarchy and abuse against women and children (Alcalde, 2013; Bray, 2009; Chesney-Lind, 2006; Grewal, 2012). This is not to say that victimisation has not been a contested category within feminisms, but that the innately political nature of feminist work offers much in understanding the emergence of victims of CSA by clergy as political subjects (Stringer, 2014). Much of the consciousness raising, and policy outcomes, regarding the nature of violence against women and children and the marginalisation and abuse of victims in criminal justice processes has been achieved because of feminist activism, lobbying, and engagement with systems of governance (Hopkins and Koss, 2005; Stringer, 2014; van Wormer, 2009; Walklate, 2009). Beyond the critical work of feminisms, there have been changing social and political constructions of victims of crime, especially the child victim, and the child victim in need of state provided care and protection.

The rise in neoliberal ideology, which Harvey (2005) argues has become ‘common sense’ in everyday governmentality, has had a major impact on the construction of victims and victimisation (Foucault, 1994). Neoliberal policy has been particularly marked by individualisation of responsibility, the pathologisation of victimisation as something that no longer happens to a subject but is within a subject, the pathologising of individual perpetrators, minimal acknowledgement of systemic understanding of victimisation, and the contraction of welfare and service provisions to vulnerable individuals and communities (Coulter, 2009; Newman, 2014; Pollack and Rossiter, 2010; Stringer, 2014). In the UK, Australia, and the USA, the 1980s saw this political reframing of crime victims and also the withdrawal of services.

Post Global Financial Crisis, the western world saw a new wave of economic rationalism and ‘austerity measures’ in public funding (Griffin, 2015; Newman, 2014). This resulted in not only restricted access to services, but also restricted access to constructions of victimisation. As austerity measures took hold, victims of interpersonal violence, especially gendered violence, were subject to increasing victim- blaming discourses. The Global North has been particularly subjected to critiques that address this shift against certain victims of crime (Bumiller, 2008; Newman, 2014). The restriction of service under a budget- saving rhetoric has also been a significant issue in Australia. The merging of economic rationalist ideals and victims’ services saw state and federal governments push for the generalisation of women’s refuges to ‘homelessness’ services and large- scale cuts to service funding overall (Wangmann, 2015; Waters, 2015a, b).

Consistently with a much broader worldwide shift towards neoliberal models of service delivery, this was accompanied by a push for services to ‘justify’ spending by service outputs and restrict access to clients who did not comply with strict standards (Coulter, 2009; Griffin, 2015; Stringer, 2014). Alongside this, at the state and federal level, were public inquiries into issues of gendered violence and child abuse. This included the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations, The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–current), Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration Inquiry into Domestic Violence in Australia (2014–2015), Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration Inquiry into Domestic Violence and Gendered Inequality in Australia (2014–lapsed), and the Royal Commission on Family Violence (2015–2015). So, whilst attempting to demonstrate a serious commitment to understanding and to addressing gendered violence through public inquiry, there is a simultaneous winding back of funding and availability of services to victims.

Victims of child abuse are in a particularly difficult position, as they are represented for their vulnerability as children, and chastised for their failure to manage the consequences of their abuse as adults. Many victims of child sexual abuse suffer adverse consequences such as substance abuse and addiction, poor educational outcomes, teenage pregnancy, poor and unstable employment opportunities, as well as poor and unstable relationships (Bode and Goldman, 2012; Chan, 2011; Fitzpatrick et al., 2010). This leaves them especially vulnerable to shifting policy platforms that impact on their social recognition and access to services as victims and marginalised citizens. CSA has a history of being discovered and rediscovered, and along with it, so do victims and the consequences in their lives.

Feminist theorists, criminologists, victimologists, and activists continue to point out that processes of recognising CSA and victimisation have not been straightforward. Rather, ways in which CSA has been defined socially and in legislation have varied across history, along with constructions of childhood and adolescence (Angelides, 2004; Egan and Hawkes, 2009; Woodiwiss, 2014). Whilst early concerns about CSA may have centred on ‘incest taboos’, the recognition of CSA, both within and external to the family, was difficult to establish as a significant political and social issue (Borneman, 2012; Whittier, 2009). Historically, legislation has been a poor measure of the realities of CSA as it has been applied differently across divides of race, gender, and class. As Smaal (2013) argues, in colonial Australia determining charges of statutory rape had less to do with the actual age of the victim, the use of force, or coercion, and more to do with whether they were Aboriginal and physically developed. Those girls who were observed to have physically reached puberty and were of a class or ethnicity whereby they were not expected to be ‘respectable’ and ‘naive’ were far more vulnerable to sexual assault and far less likely to be protected by systems of justice, care, or protection (Smaal, 2013).

The discovery and rediscovery of CSA across time says a great deal about constructions of childhood and who has access to defining such terms (Smart, 1999, 2000). That CSA should be not an issue for families, but a political and social issue, was very much at the core of feminist activism of the 1970s and onwards (Whittier, 2009). It remains true that most CSA is perpetrated by males against female children, and the work of early feminists did much to shape this now common perspective in the public view, whilst establishing CSA as an issue rooted in patriarchal abuse of women and children (Angelides, 2004; Doan, 2005; Smart, 1999). As much of the early literature discussed children either as genderless or specifically as female, it was not until much later that awareness of sexual abuse against male children really began to be established as an issue worthy of social and political attention (Davies and Rogers, 2006). Arguably, CSA by clergy, because of the predominance of male victims, has become an iconic representation of male victims of CSA, whereby their presence is now well established in social imagination (Cole, 2011; Isely et al., 2008). This is not because patriarchy is any less meaningful in understanding the abuse of boys. Indeed, particularly in the case of CSA by clergy, patriarchy remains a key point of analysis and explanation of offending behaviour and of why the Church has chosen to and been able to engage in the cover- up of abuse and mismanagement of offenders (Cohen, 2014). This analysis is best understood when embedded within a broader historical context of gendered violence, victimisation, victim and perpetrator relationships, and the ways in which the state has addressed victimisation.

Victims, perpetrators, and state responses

In reframing crime victimisation, relationships between victims and perpetrators have also shifted in public and academic discourses. Early victimology of the 1940s and 1950s conflated victimisation and perpetration by arguing for ways in which victims were complicit or active in their own victimisation (Elias, 1986; Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Wolhuter et al., 2009). From the 1970s, critical victimology has sought to draw stronger distinctions between perpetrator and victim and resist the victim blaming inherent in early victimology. Politicisation of victims and their rights grew stronger from the 1970s as victims’ groups, and feminisms, became more organised around lobbying policy makers to recognise the needs and voices of victims. This has progressed from early compensation schemes for victims of crime, through charters of victim’s rights, to more active participation in criminal justice through victim impact statements (Miers, 2014). These decades also saw a closer alliance between conservative governments and victims’ groups, although Bumiller (2008) argues this is more of a co-opting of victims’ rights than an alliance as such.

Conservative foci on law and order rhetoric easily co- opted victim’s rights as part of a growing discourse to justify harsher punishment for perpetrators, increased police powers, and sex offender registries that are available to communities (Bumiller, 2008; Wolhuter et al., 2009). Such policies have been argued to enhance victims’ empowerment and consolidate their needs within the criminal justice systems. These policies also served to construct idealised victims that aided ideologies of punishment that the state had long held and enacted (Simon, 2007). That harsher punishment meets the needs of victims and communities continues as commonly accepted discourse that individualises perpetrators, affirms individual responsibility, and minimises the ways in which social and systemic issues such as poverty, child abuse, access to education, gender, race, and class play central roles in the lives of both victims and perpetrators (Elias, 1986; Walklate, 2007). In instances of gendered violence, such as family violence, domestic violence, and child abuse in all its forms, focusing on harsher punishment also ignores the reality that many perpetrators are also the husbands, fathers, carers, brothers, and uncles of victims. These relationships are often ones of dependency and lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Citation
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Prelude
• 1 Victims of CSA as politicised subjects
• 2 Recognising the ‘I’ in justice: political subjects, public inquiry, and CSA
• 3 Media, power, and the significance of voice
• 4 Public inquiry as good governance: the case of the Christian Brothers of Western Australia
• 5 Moderating responsibility: responses of the RCC to public inquiry
• 6 Public inquiry and discursive spaces: future directions
• Index