Abuse in care

We need to tackle potential bias in a national redress scheme

by Professor Kathleen Daly

There are (or have been) 36 major government schemes for institutional abuse of children in 13 countries (and one independent polity). But the proposed national scheme in Australia is more complex, bigger, and includes more sites of abuse than any other.

For complexity, it has different claimant groups, diverse offending organisations, federal-state governance, shared costs of government and non-government organisations, and will need to account for previous payments survivors received for abuse.

For scope, the royal commission estimates the number of individual Australian institutions where sexual abuse of children occurred is 4,000. The numbers for the Canada and Ireland pale in significance, at about 140 residential schools and 144 industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, special schools, and hospitals, respectively.

But the elephant in the room — a profound problem few have recognised — is that Australia’s proposed scheme has two different claimant groups: those who were abused in care, and those who were abused in non-care settings.

No other government scheme has included children who were abused both in care and not in care.

Virtually all government schemes have focused only on children who were placed in institutional or out-of-home care, including foster care. They lived in “closed” settings — such as residential facilities, homes, training schools, or detention centres — on a long-term basis, without a parent to care for them. This group is called “care-leavers”.

A second group — “non-care-leavers” — were abused in “open” settings such as schools, church parishes, clubs, and sports associations, often by clergy and members of religious orders, or lay staff in religious organisations.

Compared to care-leavers, non-care-leavers had one or more parents caring for them. Fewer schemes globally include non-care-leavers; almost all that do are faith-based.

Australia’s proposed redress scheme is also unusual in focusing on sexual abuse alone: just 18% of government schemes for care-leavers do.

What’s remembered is living in “constant fear of sexual abuse, [suffering] deprivation of food and schooling, forced labour, and medical neglect”, in addition to physical and sexual abuse.

There is little doubt that what motivated Julia Gillard to establish the commission was clergy sexual abuse of children and cover-ups by the police and church authorities. Media attention then and now is fixed on this phenomenon, and often overlooks other victims and contexts of institutional child abuse.

Calling attention to group differences between care leavers and non-care-leavers does not suggest one group suffered more than the other. That is, and would be, wrong.

Rather, we should pay attention to group differences that matter for justice, with reference to the monetary payment. These are experiences of abuse and the social status of child victims.

Care-leavers lived in settings in which sexual abuse was both public and private, both direct and more diffuse in a sexualised and violent environment — one in which sexual abuse occurred in all spheres of living, working and sleeping. As children, care-leavers were considered and treated as low-status, as morally and socially inferior to other children.

Unless corrective action is taken, these differences may disadvantage care-leavers in assessing the monetary payment compared to non-care-leavers.

The royal commission’s proposed matrix for deciding monetary payments recognises group differences (in the experiences of abuse, but not social status of child victims) by including a 20% factor for “additional elements” if a child was in care or a closed institution.

However, it can go further by giving explicit recognition to group differences in the context-dependent nature of sexual abuse, and in children’s social status. Otherwise, care-leavers will appear not to “measure up” to the presumed standard of non care leavers. This will occur in two ways.

These averages, the report says, were “inconsistent with private session information”, which suggested “a higher severity of abuse in residential settings” compared to others.

Those in charge of the redress scheme’s implementation must consider:

There must be continual review and reflection on the influences and biases that a child victim’s social status has in determining abuse severity and impact.

Unless this occurs, the bodies and lives of higher-status children will matter more to redress scheme decision-makers. Their abuse will be seen as more serious, and the impact of abuse will be seen as more dramatic.

This will not result from intentional bias, but will take a more subtle — perhaps subconscious — form. It stems from two disparate survivor groups seeking justice in one redress scheme.

Kathleen Daly is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University. She writes on gender, race, crime, and criminal justice; and on restorative, Indigenous, and transitional justice. Her recent research is on conventional and innovative justice responses to sexual and violent victimisation in different contexts of violence; and on redress, restoration, and reparation. Her book, Redressing Institutional Abuse of Children, analyses 19 major Australian and Canadian cases of historical institutional abuse.

In addition to continuing her research on redress for historical institutional abuse, she is involved in other projects. These are state-based financial assistance schemes for victims, Indigenous partner violence and pathways to desistance, and applying the construct of victims’ justice interests to different contexts of violent victimisation and justice.

She is editor or author of 6 books and 90 journal articles or book chapters. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2007 and the American Society of Criminology in 2014, and was past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (2005–09).

Related posts:

Solitude is a funny thing to write about. I don’t think there is much virtue in describing the state itself, because one has to endure it themselves in order to fully understand it. This is probably…

When we first learn to code, it's hard to think past the initial requirements of the story we are working on. You already have lots on your plate with design, unit tests, edge cases, etc. Let alone…

As she walked through the crowded streets of the city, Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her. She had always been a bit paranoid, but this felt different, almost like a…