The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is the largest royal commission in Australia’s history and one of the largest public inquiries into institutional child abuse ...internationally. With an investment from the Australian government of half a billion dollars, it examined how institutions with a responsibility for children, both historically and in the present, have responded to allegations of child sexual abuse. Announced in the wake of previous Australian and international inquiries, public scandals and lobbying by survivor groups, its establishment reflected increasing recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by childhood sexual abuse and a strong political commitment to improving child safety and wellbeing in Australia. This article outlines the background, key features and innovations of this landmark public inquiry, focusing in particular on its extensive research program. It considers its international significance and also serves as an introduction to this special edition on the Australian Royal Commission, exploring its implications for better understanding institutional child sexual abuse and its impacts, and for making institutions safer places for children in the future.
In Australia, survivor advocacy groups have been closely engaged with the emergence and development of policy and redress responses to institutional child abuse. Their activities and influence in ...this respect have been under-researched. This study focuses on the use of Twitter, a tool increasingly employed by activist groups in their lobbying repertoires. Using content and thematic analysis, tweets of 15 non-survivor led advocacy groups, and one survivor-led organisation—
Care Leavers Australasia Network
(CLAN)—referring to ‘redress’ were analysed for rhetorical content (via Aristotle’s traditional framework of
ethos
,
pathos
, and
logos
) and communication purposes using three broad functional areas defined by Lovejoy and Saxton (2012). In keeping with Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) framework, the results found that for both non-survivor led advocacy groups and CLAN the primary function of their use of Twitter was to convey information to audiences. However, the integrated use of the
rhetoric
framework with the
function
framework revealed markedly different lobbying styles between the non-survivor led advocacy groups and CLAN with the latter pursuing a more confrontational and direct style of lobbying in communications. CLAN also overwhelmingly pursued emotion-focussed rhetoric in lobbying communications.
Testimony before inquiries into out‐of‐home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children ...in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn’t we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they serve, how they are organised and how they gather evidence. Using as a case study, a survey of historical abuse inquiries in Australia, this article explores the shift to victim and survivor testimony and in so doing offers a new way of conceptualising and categorising historical child abuse inquiries. It focuses less on how inquiries are constituted or governed, and instead advances an historically contextualised approach that foregrounds the issue of who speaks and who is heard.
This article examines the insinuation of therapeutic culture into everyday life from the vantage point of a qualitative cross-generational study of economically marginalized young women and their ...mothers. Against dominant assessments of therapeutic culture — as representing cultural decline, social regulation or transformation — we draw on interview narratives to analyse its practical and situated effects. We argue that desires for disclosure and open communication are not trivial or narcissistic and instead interpret them as productive emotional strategies for managing difficult circumstances, and for engendering a sense of competence and possibility.Thus a concern with`talkingthings through' is neither ineffectual nor adequately understood as a manifestation of an ahistorical feminine alignment with emotions and interior life. While we do not dismiss regulatory aspects of therapeutic culture, our analysis offers an alternative and empirically based account of the ways cultural imperatives are enacted across generations.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the guidance movement secured a foothold in the Australian educational landscape. Educators and psychologists looked to new initiatives in Britain and America in ...the hope that guidance programmes would provide solutions to a range of social, economic and educational problems: vocational guidance to help young people identify their calling and secure employment, educational guidance to assist with post-primary selection and placement, and child guidance clinics for the treatment of emotional, psychological and behavioural problems. The distinctive aims of different forms of guidance, however, have tended to obscure in recent historiography the common ideas and rationales that underpinned their establishment: in short, the preclusion of social, educational and industrial 'misfits'. This article argues, therefore, for a reconceptualisation of guidance as a broader philosophy of individualised education, with a related set of practices, that took root internationally during the interwar years. Through a focus on developments in Australia, an examination of guidance in this broader sense points to the critical place of psychological knowledge and the expanding role of schools in managing the development of children and adolescents and guiding them towards adulthood and future citizenship.
At the intersection of action theory and value theory is a provocative thesis: the Guise of the Good. The Guise of the Good (GG) states that whenever an agent acts intentionally, she sees some good ...in her action. Thus, according to GG, positive evaluation is essential to the nature of intentional action. Kieran Setiya (2010), however, argues that it is possible to act intentionally without believing that there is any reason to count in favor of one’s action: if intentional action is action for a reason, says Setiya, then the Guise of the Good is false. But I argue that Setiya’s account is insufficiently sensitive to the relationship that agents bear to their own prospective actions. I argue that this relationship is inherently normative and that, consequently, the Guise of the Good is true.
Curriculum development When the idea for a residential learning center was first proposed, NPS staff explored partnering with a local state university to develop and staff the educational program at ...Cuyahoga Valley National Park. When state budget cuts caused the university to withdraw from the proposed arrangement, the park turned to its primary partner (its Friends Group), the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and asked if it would be the operating partner of the new Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center. Using an educational advisory committee that included school district curriculum directors, administrators, and teachers allowed the nonprofit organization and park staff to provide input and feedback. The result is that the center has a rich relationship with urban school districts in the area and reaches many children that would not have been able to attend without this financial model. Because of the successful partnership model with shared leadership created at Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center, there is an emphasis on extending the model to other partners.
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