Kent’s Professor Gordon Lynch is among a number of experts from the History and Policy network calling for transparency from organisations regarding Child Abuse case records.
As the principal author on the newly published research paper ‘The uses of historical research in child abuse inquiries’, Professor Lynch and his co-authors argue that alongside evidence from survivors and representatives of organisations, archival research plays a crucial role in shedding greater light on specific organisational failures in protecting children’s welfare. It can also reveal in greater detail how organisational systems and cultures have failed to protect children.
This is vital for the public’s understanding of the responsibility organisations have for these past failings and how specific problems may persist today.
The paper also argues that abuse inquiries play a role in shaping the public’s understanding of past abuse, often long after final reports are published. Thinking about inquiries in this way raises important questions about how work is presented and preserved, including records from archives that researchers might not normally be able to access. Reference to non-recent examples of child abuse as being due to an institutional misunderstanding of the subject, is often incorrect in regard to the fact of well-informed legal and policy frameworks having been contravened by organisations, as demonstrated by archives.
The authors call for the broad opening of historical records by organisations in relation to these cases, thereby allowing experts to identify further patterns leading to child abuse within organisations, as well as reveal the accurate history with which to inform public perception.
Professor Lynch also emphasises the call for organisations’ records to be opened to public scrutiny. He said: ‘Recent national child abuse inquiries in Australia and Britain have shown how important it is that we’re able to access and analyse relevant archival material. Historical insight is never a one-off thing, but an on-going process and the greater access and transparency there is in relation to this material, the better our understandings of the past will be.’
The authors have different experiences of working with national child abuse inquiries – including acting as a former inquiry chair, a member of inquiry staff and as expert witnesses and commissioned researchers. The paper also draws on insights emerging from a workshop run in conjunction with History and Policy in September 2019, involving academic researchers and others with direct experience of inquiry work, funded by an AHRC Fellowship held by Professor Lynch.
The full paper, ‘The uses of historical research in child abuse inquiries’ is published by the History and Policy network. It can be read here.