Meeting victims’ needs in institutional child abuse: A proposal for evaluating reparation programmes

Abstract

Institutional child victimisation refers to individuals who suffered diverse and severe forms of harm within institutional settings, with long-lasting negative impacts on their lives. Despite the seriousness of these experiences, while recent decades have seen an increasing number of inquiries that formally provide for victim participation, the existence of such provisions does not guarantee their complete or satisfactory implementation. In practice, original commitments can be curtailed or reshaped by limiting circumstances, including economic constraints and institutional interests, which may reduce the scope and depth of victim engagement initially envisaged. The victims’ stories often remained confined within institutions, silenced by the victims themselves due to fear of consequences. Moreover, these experiences do not carry the same moral panic associations as child sexual abuse does in contemporary discourse. As a result, there is a significant gap in understanding the specific needs of these victims, which has translated into the design of reparation programmes. Existing programmes often focus narrowly on sexual abuse and do not always reflect a comprehensive approach based on victims’ actual needs. This article reviews what the literature identifies as good practices in victim reparation and proposes a basic evaluation framework that can be applied at various stages of reparation programmes. The evaluation is subsequently applied to a selection of international responses to institutional child abuse. The proposed system, grounded in empirical findings on effective and ineffective practices, seeks to overcome common limitations in reparation design and provides a structured and objective tool to assess whether a programme’s core features are likely to meet victims’ needs and expectations.