Can ‘inquiries’ deliver ‘justice’ for victims/survivors of non-recent institutional abuses?

Prof Anne-Marie McAlinden
Queen’s University Belfast

Many jurisdictions across the world, including Canada, the United States of America, Australia and Europe, have grappled with devising official responses to past institutional abuses of women and children. This has encompassed abuses within a range of contexts including residential care settings (such as care homes, industrial schools, workhouses, mother and baby institutions and ‘Magdalen laundries’) as well as within medical or health settings; past abuses by members of religious organisations (such as ‘clerical sexual abuse’); as well as forced removal of children from their families where many suffered abuse and neglect whilst in and out of institutional care (such as within the context of forced adoption or ‘fostering’). As this broad but non-exhaustive list indicates, abuses and harms include not only physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect but also a range of human rights abuses such as forced and unpaid labour, coerced adoption, institutional racism, inhuman and degrading treatment and denial of educational opportunities. Moreover, the term ‘institutional abuses’ also recognises not just ‘abuses’ committed within institutional settings as harm, but the ‘othering’, categorisation of individuals and institutionalisation per se as policy wrongs.