IILAH Seminar Series
'Is Redemption Possible Here? Developing an Ethics of Memory for Historical Childhood Sexual Abuse in Ireland'

Dr Sinéad Ring
Convened by Dr Rose Parfitt

Monday 7 December, 1:00pm - 2:00pm, Room 608, Level 6
Melbourne Law School, 185 Pelham Street, Carlton

This paper engages with questions of representation and memory in the Irish courts’ engagement with adults who report childhood sexual abuse. In the last twenty years, the Irish criminal justice system has been confronted with an explosion in the number of people seeking criminal prosecutions for abuse they suffered as children. The courts have had to consider whether the delay in reporting prevented a fair trial. They have framed the reasons for the delay in terms of an innocent child paralysed by a dominating abuser. This interpretive move has ensured that criminal responsibility is not constrained by temporal limits, so that these trials may proceed. However, in the process problematic narratives about victims are produced. These tend to emphasise individual victims’ traumatised experience, rather than State complicity in their suffering. This is marked contrast to victims’ testimony to courts and public inquires of providing contemporaneous reports of abuse to teachers and police. According to these testimonies, these figures of State authority did not act on reports of abuse. Furthermore, public inquiries have found evidence of deference by the police to the authority of the Catholic Church. The courts’ insistence on the idea of the traumatised victim erases the agency of individuals from the historical record, and nourishes the fiction of the ‘innocent Irish State’, apparently passive and ignorant of the harms and extent of child sexual abuse.
This paper seeks to explore the redemptive possibilities of drawing attention to the unheard stories of adult victims of childhood sexual abuse. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Wendy Brown, I explore how victims’ testimonies of frustrated contemporaneous reports may illuminate the connections between past injustices and present responses to claims of historical victimisation. The paper considers how an ethics of memory and shame might foster new forms of engagement with the past, and create a space for understanding the Irish State’s relationship to both the sexual abuse of children in the past, and the silencing of victim-survivors in the past and the present.
*This research is financially supported by a Socio Legal Studies Association Small Grant.

Bio
Dr Sinéad Ring is a Lecturer at Kent Law School where she teaches The Law of Evidence and Gender, Sexuality and Law. Her research interests lie in memory and trauma studies and in law’s responses to historical sexual violence.
Sinéad’s PhD, which was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, examined questions of fairness and truth-telling in historical child sexual abuse trials.
Sinéad is currently a Visiting Scholar at University Technology, Sydney. She has been a visiting researcher at University College Dublin, Harvard Law School and Osgoode Hall, York University. Drafts of published papers are available here.

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EVENT DETAILS
DATE Monday 7 December
TIME 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
VENUE Room 608, Level 6, Melbourne Law School 185 Pelham Street Carlton
REGISTRATION Complete the Registrations Page
ENQUIRIES law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au or (03) 8344 6938