Based on a database of Australian cases from 1834–1954, this article argues that abandonment was an intentional strategy intended to maximise a child's chances of survival while preserving its ...family's reputation. However, abandonment had the potential to expose family secrets, bringing them into the public gaze and subjecting them to interrogation. Abandonment was also used for revenge, exposing the identity of putative fathers in a demand for financial support. Through this analysis the article positions abandonment as a key site of interaction between the individual and society, and the private and the public in relation to the politics of secrecy.
The announcement of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was the culmination of a long campaign by survivor groups to have their stories heard. Although ...this campaign, and the organisations themselves, date only from the last years of the twentieth century, institutional sexual abuse has a far longer history. This paper will seek to trace the evidence of sexual abuse back into the nineteenth century and ask why it took so long for survivors to have their stories heard. It will argue that while institutional responses to allegations of sexual abuse remained remarkably consistent over time, it was only in the aftermath of the feminist (re)discovery of child sexual abuse in the 1970s that survivors were able to access a language through which to understand and articulate their experiences. Without access to such a language enabling them to position themselves as victims of, rather than being complicit in, such abusive behaviours, survivors were ill-equipped to resist the attempts by those in authority to silence their concerns.
Feminist analyses have shown how from the mid-nineteenth century women shaped the cities in which they lived. This article argues for the existence of an urban gynocentric zone, the site of a cluster ...of women-owned businesses charged with handling the unwanted products of women's bodies. Shaped by shame, it constituted a female space within a larger metropolis, invisible, unacknowledged, yet well enough known to be a place of ready resort for women who needed its services. The article analyses the network of services businesswomen developed to do the dirty work necessary to cleanse the city of moral impurity, and the ways in which they negotiated the taint that such transgressive work necessarily involved. In so doing it promises to inform wider debates about the history of abortion, midwifery, baby farming and adoption.
Adoption was legalised in Australia in the 1920s, but not widely embraced before the Second World War. During the 1950s, a series of court cases in which birth mothers challenged the validity of the ...adoption of their children, threatened the viability of this new social policy. This paper argues that the 1960s tightening of secrecy provisions should be understood in the context of these challenges which reopened debates around the status of adoptive motherhood. By listening for the voice of relinquishing mothers, it challenges the view they were complicit in the process which deprived them of claims to maternal status.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New ...Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlements in place by 1910. Drawing on a wide range of sources, its comparative approach provides an insight into the historical foundations of present-day controversies in these settler societies.
Abstract
Inquiries into historical institutional abuse have only recently come to be viewed through the lens of transitional justice. This article argues that their distinctive victim-focused ...approach disguises a reality that institutions in which violence was endemic blurred the line between victims and 'perpetrators.' Earlier inquiries often blamed residents for the prevalence of institutional violence, avoiding accusations that authorities had failed. Contemporary inquiries, intent on exposing institutional failures, draw a dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, but this makes it difficult for a victim/'perpetrator' to find a space in which to speak. This article explores the ways in which such people shape their understandings of their dual identity and the challenges which they pose to the unity of survivor advocacy groups in the shift from inquiry to redress. It argues that the existence of victim/'perpetrator' should be seen as evidence of institutional failure rather than an indication of individual culpability.
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