A commission of inquiry into allegations of historical sexual abuse in day and boarding schools has been established by the Government with a time frame to report within five years.
The commission will begin its work in October and the cost is likely to “run into tens of millions of euro”, Minister for Education Helen McEntee said last month as the inquiry was announced.
[ What will Ireland’s costly five-year schools abuse inquiry achieve? ]
She also said the Government would “pursue all levers available” to compel religious organisations to pay redress to victims of historical sex abuse in schools.
While survivors of day and boarding schools are not a homogeneous group, and their justice interests reflect this, some themes continually emerge in research and practice: the desire for acknowledgment, validation, vindication, truth, exercise of voice, meaningful participation, access to records, reparation/redress and non-recurrence.
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An in-depth international study, Transforming Justice Responses to Non-Recent Institutional Abuses, published in book form earlier this year, found fear and the breakdown of trust operated as significant barriers to effective engagement by church and state. This has resulted in an accountability gap for survivors and reputational damage for church and state institutions.
The reluctance of those in the church to admit responsibility for abuses can be related to fear, including of viability beyond the financial costs of settling civil cases or contributing to state or other redress schemes.
Benevolent intentions on the part of state participants can also be superseded by concerns with legal and financial liability. Senior politicians on both sides of the Border emphasised budgetary concerns at the forefront of political decision-making, including the fear of state exposure to a wide range of claims.
Survivors also face significant barriers to justice from adversarial legal frameworks that include delays, statutes of limitations, data protection, exclusionary redress schemes, inequality of arms and the costs of legal proceedings.
Law and legal culture become a hostile site for all sides, causing secondary harm for victim/survivors. New approaches must therefore be found.
Some modifications to the Government’s terms of reference for the new commission and the commission’s approach could help in this regard.
The sampling methodology should be replaced by a modularised approach, focusing on individual institutions and settings, producing modularised, interim investigatory reports at regular intervals.
These could be delivered within months of the commission commencing its work and not waiting for five [or more] years. This approach was adopted to good effect by Australia’s Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse and by the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales.
The sampling methodologies used by the commissions of investigation into the Archdiocese of Dublin and into the mother and baby homes in Ireland were not fit for purpose.
Provision for a survivor engagement programme by the commission – through which survivors can share the impact of their experiences – is not adequate in giving voice to the testimonies of survivors who have much more to say about the abuses they suffered than about its impact on them.
If we want to learn from the mistakes of the past, the commissioners need to survivors with lived experience on their teams
A summary report given to the chairperson is not sufficient for this core part of the inquiry. A suitable methodology must be developed to enable survivor testimonies to be fully represented as cumulative evidence in the final report of the commission.
It is laudable that the commission strives to be as survivor-centred as possible. It would be worth therefore publicising the training that all members of the commission will receive in trauma-informed and victim-centred approaches before they begin their work.
More importantly, if the commission wants to give true effect to being as survivor-centred as possible in more than a paternalistic manner, a mechanism must be found to enable survivors to be represented as co-participants in the inquiry process.
If we want to learn from research and from the mistakes of the past, the commissioners need to have survivors with lived experience on their teams, appointments for which must be made by open competition.
Research by Diane Vaughan at Columbia University demonstrated the composition of commissions is hugely important to their findings and outcome.
It is essential the commission holds public hearings and round tables on specific topics (televised where possible), as well as private sessions, in the interest of transparency and accountability.
A problem with previous commissions of investigation was that they were accountable to no one, not even the Dáil.
There is a discernible appetite for doing justice differently among survivors and church and state participants. The challenge is how to get the various interests working together to get to the truth, including the policy wrongs, abuses and failures of the past, in the interest of justice, healing and accountability.
Mechanisms must be found to build trust between the parties based on openness and transparency, a sharing of records and respect for all perspectives. In this regard the terms of reference must be amended to include restorative justice as requested by many survivors to the scoping inquiry team, which last year recommended the commission be set up
The restorative justice request from survivors was largely ignored in the report of the scoping inquiry and is not mentioned at all in the terms of reference of the commission.
If we truly want to be survivor-centred, we cannot exclude the voices of some survivors because they do not suit a particular political agenda. Although we might be getting a bit better in how we approach these things, we still have a lot to learn.
Professor Marie Keenan, school of social policy, social work and social justice at University College Dublin, is co-author with Prof Anne-Marie McAlinden and Dr James Gallen of Transforming Justice Responses to Non-Recent Institutional Abuses, published by Oxford University Press
