Abstract
This article examines the tensions between ‘publicness’ and ‘privacy’ in national commissions of inquiry. Through the insights of those who worked deep inside Australia's landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA, 2013–2017), and the evidence provided in its final report, we explore the organisational and media logics of the Commission's highly publicised public hearings, and the ‘quiet’ institutional listening practices of its private sessions and engagement with marginalised communities. Royal Commissions are an important mechanism for raising awareness of past crimes on the public agenda. Our research finds that while the revelatory outcomes of the RCIRCSA have been well documented, its private sessions, engagement and research are less well understood. We argue ‘publicness’ is a relatively unchallenged good that is enacted through news media and the royal commission process, but media logics can limit their capacity to address the ongoing causes and impacts of child sexual abuse against the most impacted children. Participants reflected on the media logics that drove strategic decisions to ‘make public’ some cases and institutions, while others remained in the Commission's private realm. The article concludes that the confidential sharing of evidence has been undervalued in inquiry media studies that often centre the journalists’ role in uncovering and publicly revealing previously unheard stories. Drawing on international comparisons we find that while quiet listening risks negating the opportunity to amplify experience, it may also counter the potential silencing effects of unwanted public media scrutiny and protect potential witnesses from further harm.
Keywords
Introduction
In this article, we examine the tensions between ‘publicness’ and ‘privacy’ in national commissions of inquiry. Australia's landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA, 2013–2017) was ground-breaking in its revelations and recommendations to address the dark history of child sexual abuse in institutional settings. This was a truth-telling, therapeutic and ‘catalytic’ style of royal commission (Resodihardjo, 2020), with a mandate to provide justice for victims, change institutional practices and improve public understanding. It was a discursive intervention on the issue of child sexual abuse in institutional settings, which had long been silenced in media and public discussion (Wright and Swain, 2018). News media are considered a dominant institution in the community's changing understanding of child sexual abuse (Kitzinger, 2004; Mitchell, 2021). Investigative journalists played a pivotal role in bringing the issue to public attention and in the establishment and reporting of Australia's Royal Commission. Intense publicity of the Commission's 57 public hearings enabled the wider public to hear the stories and experiences of victims and survivors 1 and understand the prevalence and nature of historical and contemporary child sexual abuse in Australian institutions. However, media reporting of the inquiry was uneven, amplifying the voices of some institutions and victims and survivors, while others remained unheard (Waller et al., 2020; Dreher and Waller, 2022). Here we explore the role of media logics that silence, from the perspective and insights of those who worked deep inside the Royal Commission.
The Child Abuse Royal Commission had a unique organisational structure comprising ‘three pillars’ of public hearings, private sessions and community engagement, and research and policy (RCIRCSA, 2017). To date there has been little examination of its organisational and communicative aspects. In this article, we explore the divergences between the public and private faces of this influential public inquiry. We argue that while the revelatory outcomes of the RCIRCSA have been well documented, its ‘quiet’ listening practices have been less well understood. Through the words and experiences of 16 former Royal Commission staff, and the evidence provided in its final report, we document the Royal Commission's strategic communication practices, from media relations to its mediatised decision-making. We explore the legal, organisational and media logics of the heavily publicized public hearings, and the ‘quiet’ institutional listening practices of its private sessions, research and engagement with marginalised communities. The Commission's ‘architecture of listening’ (Macnamara, 2016) ensured a wide range of victims’ and survivors’ voices were collected and curated as evidence for the final report and recommendations. We explore how decisions were made not to publicise some cases, and the activities of those who refused to participate in media and Royal Commission logics, instead working ‘beyond the boundaries of news’ (de Souza and Dreher, 2023) and hence largely unacknowledged by news media.
Our research examines ‘publicness’ as a relatively unchallenged normative good that is enacted through news media and the royal commission process. We follow a line of critique arguing for the need to challenge the ‘assumed relations between publicness, transparency and collective agency’ (Georgiou and Titley, 2022: 336). The article argues that ‘making public’ is both an ideal and a strategic communication practice that carries with it intended and unintended consequences. In mediatised institutions, organisational media-related practices are shaped by their interactions with ‘media logics’ (Altheide, 2016). How an event may be represented through media is a crucial factor influencing decisions around whether justice is best served by publicising it or allowing it to remain private.
The article concludes that the confidential sharing of evidence has been undervalued in inquiry media studies that often centre the journalists’ role in uncovering and publicly revealing previously unheard stories. Evidence collected via the public(ised) hearings was only one source of justice for victims and survivors, but this was arguably privileged in public discourse around the Royal Commission. Participants reflected on the strategic decisions made to make public some cases and institutions, while others remained in the Commission's private realm. Information emerging from the private sessions and engagement contributed to key decisions about whether to expose the experiences of some groups to media publicity (Salter, 2020). Recent international commissions of inquiry have taken divergent approaches, including the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Investigate the Norwegianisation Policy and Injustice Against the Sámi and Kven/Norwegian Finnish Peoples' strategy of keeping witness testimony silent, suggesting the need to investigate the significance of more private modes of institutional listening. We need to better understand the process that led the Commission not to publicise contexts where abuse was open to being weaponised against the victims and survivors of child sexual abuse. Quiet listening risks negating the opportunity to amplify experience, but it may also counter the potential silencing effects of unwanted public media scrutiny and protect potential witnesses from further harm.
Literature review
Three bodies of literature inform our thinking about how media logics and public communication shaped the outcomes of the Child Abuse Royal Commission. The first is the centrality of ‘publicness’ to royal commission process and its status as a foundational concept in media and deliberative democracy studies. The second is the growing recognition and research around listening in strategic communication, and its more critical application in media studies. Finally, we consider the concepts of weaponising, silencing and overshadowing, and the critical role played by news media in privileging the voices of the powerful at the expense of victims and survivors from marginalised yet most impacted communities, which we argue has been under-theorised in media and communication studies.
Publicness
A key feature of the Royal Commission process is its capacity to provide public spaces for truth-telling and recognition of past injustice (Prasser and Tracey, 2014). Krabill (2001) argued that media publicity was crucial to the success of the ground-breaking South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it provided ‘…a public platform for victims of gross violations of human rights’ beyond the physical audience. Laplante and Phenicie (2010: 208) are more circumspect, arguing that media can have ‘…a direct role in either creating democratic spaces for a tolerant and respectful national dialogue that enables this consensus or in further entrenching societal divisions’ (see also Hayner, 2011). In doing so, they challenge assumptions about the positive role of the mediated revelation of past injustices through national inquiries that is inherent in journalism, democratic and media studies.
Georgiou and Titley (2022) define publicness as ‘the condition of having been rendered public’; a process whereby private experience is revealed to a wider audience. They argue that ‘publicness as a resilient democratic imaginary’ constitutes a ‘process of revelation, of rendering transparent, exposing the nature of the problem’ [italics in original] and ‘…mobilising the basis for some form of collective response’ (2022: 333). The normative position draws on the pervasive deliberative tradition of democracy that links informing public understanding to democratic action (Habermas, 1989; Splichal, 2022). Scudder et al. (2022) describe an institutional listening process whereby publicly facing institutions such as royal commissions enable the transmission of demands formed in the public sphere into empowered spaces of authority and decision-making. Matheson (2018: 589) also evokes the deliberative nature of publicness, referring to it as ‘… a matter of how people interact and orient towards shared norms…’. However, Georgiou and Titley argue that we need to challenge the ‘assumed relations between publicness, transparency and collective agency’ (2022: 336). They question the assumption that publicness inevitably leads to enhanced public understanding and political and institutional action, exploring ‘commoning’ as an alternative.
The intersection between mediatised commissions of inquiry and media logics is a crucial line of investigation to better understand the media's role in providing justice to victims and survivors through royal commissions. News media are the key institution in this process of giving voice to the revelations of private experience. A dominant institution in public understanding of child sexual abuse (Kitzinger, 2004; Mitchell, 2021; McCallum, Holland, et al., 2023), journalism plays a key role in bringing previously unheard stories and experiences to the attention of a wider audience. In the context of the Child Abuse Royal Commission, McCallum, Waller et al. (2023) identified ‘revelation’, the uncovering and making known of previously silenced crimes and injustices, as a crucial first step in the recovery process. They say: ‘The media's role is to witness and make public others’ painful experiences, and, in doing so, create a collective experience that ideally is part of the process of response and recovery’. In mediatised institutions, organisational media-related practices are shaped by their interactions with ‘media logics’ (Altheide, 2016; Gans, 1979). News values and agendas are therefore central to the operation of a royal commission and its success in revealing previously silenced voices, and ultimately to mobilising a collective response (McCallum and Waller, 2021; Hjarvard, 2013). We have found previously that reporting of the RCIRCSA was uneven, with journalists’ news values resulting in intense focus on some cases and institutions, while others received little or no coverage (Waller et al., 2020). Here we extend that line of thinking to question what it means for a case to be the subject of intense publicity, or to be overshadowed in public discourse.
Listening
Institutional listening provides a conceptual framework that both makes sense of and challenges the underlying assumptions of ‘publicness’. We define institutional listening as an active practice of listening enabled by formal institutions; a space structured to recognize and respond to citizens' voices, particularly to the marginalized and vulnerable (Dreher, 2009, Husband, 2009). While ‘making public,’ or the giving of voice to victims and survivors through mediated channels, is crucial to breaking the silence around past crimes and injustices such as child sexual abuse, Dreher and de Souza (2021: 13) call for attention to ‘listening’ as the ‘other side’ of communication (see also Couldry 2010). Parks (2018: 130) emphasises that ethical communication or ‘ethical listening engagement’ demands ‘active’, ‘intentional’ and ‘narrative’ presence’. ) focus on the capacity for listening in institutional settings to transmit the voices and experiences of the marginalised into empowered spaces. This turn to listening further unsettles the dominant frame of publicness. An organisation can listen and amplify less prominent voices, or it can circumvent the act of making public by recognising and responding to the voices it has made a space to hear.
McNamara (2016, 2023) has developed a body of research focusing on the organisational aspects of listening through his framework of an ‘architecture of listening’. This research opens an important space to challenge dominant organisational and institutional communicative practices. ‘Listening in organizations may promote respect for all partners engaged in dialogue, commitment to understanding shared messages, hearing of diverse voices across contexts, and openness to multiple narratives’ (Parks, in Place, 2023). Edwards (2018) says public relations has the potential to be a place where ‘spaces of appearance’ may be constructed for individuals within deliberative systems, but ‘…the scope of this democratic, discursive, and deliberative purpose for organizational listening has yet to be fully explored’ (Capizzo, 2023: np). There has been limited academic research about the organisational listening structures of the Child Abuse Royal Commission from either a strategic communication or political listening perspective, and little consideration of how media-related practices may have fostered or hindered its capacity to listen and offer recognition to the vulnerable and marginalised (Couldry, 2010: Dreher, 2009).
A listening frame puts the onus on the journalist, as witness and communicator, to listen, amplify and respond to the experiences of the most marginalized of victims and survivors (McCallum and Waller, 2021: 783). de Souza and Dreher (2023) examined the media-related practices of child sexual abuse survivor advocacy organisations ‘beyond the boundaries of news’ which provided alternative genres of testimony to both news media reporting and government. Salter (2020) explored the use of private testimony in the RCIRCSA as a ‘transitional space’ between personal and political dimensions of individual traumatic experience, and offers important insights to navigate the public/private divide in public hearings. Further research is needed to examine how this ‘quiet’ work of the Royal Commission impacted on its recommendations and on public understanding through what was made public, and what remained private in the royal commission process.
Silencing, overshadowing and weaponising
A final element of our conceptual framework coalesces around the ideas of silencing, overshadowing and weaponising in media studies. As media and cultural studies scholars we are interested in how publicness (Georgiou and Titley, 2022) is filtered through media logics. Waller et al. (2020) found mainstream media reporting of the child abuse royal commission worked against the RCIRCSA's agenda to examine child sexual abuse in all institutional contexts. They argue that media logics, values and practices lead to the prioritising of some topics on the news agenda and the overshadowing of others. These ‘media hierarchies of attention’ (2020: 182) played a crucial role in some cases receiving intense publicity, while other experiences of child sexual abuse by some of the most marginalised never made it onto the public agenda.
Earlier research has found that media hierarchies of attention unevenly distribute grief, value and care. This is most starkly evidenced by news reporting of First Nations children abused in care. Of the 17,000 survivors who testified to the RCIRCSA, 8,013 of which were heard in private sessions, more than 14 per cent identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (RCIRCSA, 2017: 4). Of those, three quarters said they were abused in out-of-home care (OOHC), the majority in a historical residential institution such as a children's home or mission dormitory. The RCIRCSA found that the long-term, intergenerational impacts of colonisation, ongoing legacies of removal policies and practices, including overrepresentation in OOHC, youth detention and the Stolen Generations, all increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children's exposure to risk of sexual abuse in institutional contexts. Despite the large number of First Nations survivors who gave evidence in RCIRCSA private hearings, racialised news values contributed to a silencing in overall news coverage. Vranic and Skogerbø (2022) examined media coverage of the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, finding media practices that exclude and marginalise Indigenous minorities in public debate contributed to a lack of media coverage, and that this was exacerbated by the Commission's organisational methods and practices that were designed not to attract media attention.
Where mainstream media has turned attention to sexual abuse against First Nations children, this has often been weaponised against their communities in public discourse and political debate. Despite clear recommendations coming out of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (recommendations 205–208) which addressed ethical ways media should report on Aboriginal affairs, a deficit narrative persists, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victims of violence and abuse are continually framed as ‘unworthy’ and therefore not newsworthy or worthy of justice. Cripps (2021) highlights how news media reporting of sexual violence against Indigenous women and girls fails to value and respect their lives and rarely frame them as grievable, while McQuire (2021, 2022) shows how institutional media bias actively silences Aboriginal women on issues of violence, instead weaponising narratives of ‘black victimhood’ to obscure settler colonial violence. Dreher and Waller (2022) found that media practices actively silenced First Nations and other marginalised voices in reporting of the Government's response to the victims of child sexual abuse, while de Souza and Dreher (2023) find mainstream media reporting of the First Nations experiences of abuse against Indigenous children characterised by exclusion and racist representations shaped by a settler colonial mindset. Well-known examples of weaponising experiences of child abuse against First Nations include the Bill Leak cartoon of 2017 and several controversial segments on breakfast TV. McQuire (2017) has written that these media attacks ‘contribute to silences, in that Aboriginal women often feel they cannot talk about issues around violence without our words being misused’.
Previous research demonstrates that news values and media priorities can reproduce systems of violence, debilitation and injustice through what Thill (2015) has termed ‘disabling hierarchies of attention’. First Nations people and people with disability hold deep ambivalence towards both commissions of inquiry and mainstream media and call attention to the trauma of repeated cycles of inaction. News journalism too often focuses on ‘exceptional’, individual ‘events’ or acts of abuse rather than the slow and cumulative violence of institutional harm. Media routinely falls short in responding to the political aspiration ‘nothing about us without us’ when news stories are more likely to hear from family, ‘loved ones’, carers, and disability service providers rather than centring the political voice of people living with disability, their authority and expertise (Ellis and Goggin, 2017; Gibbs, 2022; Gilroy et al., 2019; Titchkosky, 2019). Too often, the voices of disabled people are diverted into therapeutic or ‘friendly’ modes of listening where their stories are packaged to resonate on an individual register of empathy or ‘care’, rather than on a structural and temporal register of justice or institutional transformation. Care Leavers have argued that the public debate that prompted the Royal Commission, and the subsequent media reporting, reflects what CLAN Vice President Dr Frank Golding OAM has termed a ‘hierarchy of esteem’ or a hierarchy of care in regards to people who have experienced OOHC as children (Golding, 2018).
Research approach
To address these challenges for media, cultural and democratic theory, we drew on research conducted for the Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission project that has investigated the role of media, journalism and social media activism in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Our research for this sub-project asked three questions:
How did the RCIRCSA public hearings bring to attention child sexual abuse in institutional settings? How did the RCIRCSA listen to the stories of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse beyond its public hearings? How did media logics intersect with the Royal Commission's stated aim to achieve justice by listening to survivors?
We took a ‘media as practice’ approach that asks what people do with media, and what they say about media (Couldry, 2004; McCallum and Waller, 2017; de Souza and Dreher, 2023). This method typically uses in-depth interviews to gain insights into the media-related practices of professional communicators. Herbst (1998) and Davis (2007) also used interviews to learn about how experts practice mediated politics. We followed these traditions and used depth interviews with staff who had worked on the Royal Commission as our primary source of evidence. In 2017 during the latter part of its operation, the lead Investigator was invited to meet with the Commission Chair, Justice Peter McClellan, who offered his support for the research, and provided access to the Commission and its staff. Following this formal introduction, participants who had worked in a range of roles in the de-commissioned orgnisation (n = 16) were recruited for interviews via referrals.
2
Interviews were conducted face to face and online from 2020–2021, using the Otter.ai transcription service. Using an ‘expert interview’ method (Herbst, 1998) interviews were informal and conversational. Participants were asked to explain their background, how they came to work for the Commission and their role, to give their views about the role of media and social media advocacy and their perspectives on the Commission's overall success. Interviews ranged from 1 to 2.5 h, and several included follow-up correspondence. All interviews were confidential and de-identified, except where participants gave explicit consent to be named. For additional confidentiality we have not provided pseudonyms or roles alongside the exemplar quotations. The interviews were analysed using NVivo software to identify the key themes and insights from participants about the Commission's media-related practices. The theoretical lenses of publicness, listening and weaponising, discussed above, informed our analysis. We examine how staff navigated this mediatised Royal Commission and the impact of media logics and the decisions that were made around which cases and which institutions to bring to public attention, and which to be managed ‘privately’.
Carvalho (2008) calls for the need to examine the discursive strategies employed by social actors in the construction of texts. The RCIRCSA final report was a second source of evidence that offers valuable insights into the public hearings, private session testimonies, public and private round tables, and commissioned research (RCIRCSA, 2017). This material is vitally important to understanding why some stories and cases became highly publicised and others did not. A First Nations researcher on the Breaking Silence team, Samantha Joseph, led the analysis of all 17 volumes and four ‘brief guides’ of the final report with particular attention paid to the inclusion of First Nations content and voices. Together, these sources of evidence reveal the complex interplay between legal, media and organisational logics in the processes of evidence-gathering used by the RCIRCSA to uncover crimes against children in institutional settings.
Mediating revelation: the Royal Commission's public face
The leadership, structure and communicative practices of the Child Abuse Royal Commission meant that from the outset it was a high-profile, visible and publicly engaged royal commission. Former RCIRCSA staff supported its mandate and saw its internal unity and consistent public narrative as a core strength. The leadership of Justice Peter McClellan and his approach of open justice, ‘…that court proceedings should be subjected to public and professional scrutiny…’ (Australian Government, 2015), was widely attributed as being central to the overall success of the RCIRCSA in meeting its aims. One senior manager said: ‘by far he was one of the best bureaucratic leaders I’ve met’, while another said ‘He was beloved…[E]very Friday, he’d have his stand up, where people would kind of crowd into the public hearing room…and he set the tone’.
Media relations and strategic communication were prioritised in the Commission, with the Media and Communication function reporting directly to the Chair. News organisations were welcomed as partners in the Royal Commission process from the outset. The Chair met with the editors of all major media organisations prior to its commencement and invested with significant resources in trauma-informed media training. Media coverage was monitored throughout the Commission's five years’ 3 and positive media coverage was seen as vital to its success. One staff member said ‘I can’t tell you how deeply I respect the media's role at the Child Abuse Royal Commission and how critically important I think they are’. In the Chair's opening statement of Case Study 1, Justice McClellan said: ‘We are grateful to the media for the part it has played in helping us disseminate the commission's message, in particular telling people about the private sessions’ (RCIRCSA, 2017: 5). The relationship with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was understood as vital to the sustained and comprehensive coverage received by the Royal Commission. Several staff recalled the Chair commending the national broadcaster for its coverage at the Commission's final staff meeting, while a Commissioner interviewed for this project said: ‘There's no doubt about that the … commission itself is awfully indebted to the ABC for its coverage, and its consistent resourcing of people to cover it’.
The Royal Commission's 57 public hearings were the first ‘pillar’ of its organisational structure. Participants explained how institutions selected as Cases for public hearings were representative of similar institutions. As one participant told us: ‘only some types of cases [were] suited to a public hearing, some of those had to do with procedural fairness issues. Some of them had to do with powers of the commission, and some of them had to do with the nature of survivors, like what survivors had been able to tell us’. The public hearings were carefully crafted by the Chair and Counsel Assisting Gail Furness QC for maximum public impact. Each hearing began with the voices and stories of survivors, rather than subject institutions. All cases were live streamed and newsrooms shared footage of the proceedings. A dedicated media room in the Sydney headquarters provided journalists with unprecedented access and guaranteed maximum coverage. Staff reflected that media reporting of the public hearings was vital to raising the issue of child abuse on the public agenda and amplifying victim and survivor experience. But as one staff member explained: ‘I think that the…use of case studies, was very sensational. It … led itself to sensational media reporting’.
While only one of our interviewees worked in a dedicated media role, all had a keen understanding of the media's importance and were reflexive about media logics, journalists’ news values and public priorities in the uneven attention afforded across the 57 cases. Case Study 23, Knox Grammar School, was identified as a high-profile case that ‘caught the media attention’. One participant explained, ‘I think the mainstream picked up that like they do. It's the titillating stuff or some particular cases that rang a bell, you know, some of the private boys schools in Sydney’. They identified this private all-boys school's Sydney location, prestige and its connection with powerful and celebrity alumni as being ‘explosive’. Another said: ‘Knox College was one that got lots of media because of Hugh Jackman…was off in New York, watching it on live stream and commenting’. Revelations through the powerful mechanism of a Royal Commission provided the highest level of public exposure. Some explained the exceptional nature of revelations about this prominent institution: Knox Grammar sort of caught the media attention … because the general population might think unlikely to occur there… The shock factor of a private boys school, and, you know, if you're elite and special and different then how could something so terrible happen in those spaces?
One participant explained the impact of the intense spotlight on Knox Grammar through the highly publicised Royal Commission hearing: I'm sure there are kids out there today who have not experienced abuse, because their institution was exposed…We hammered them. It was a perfect case study of what happened, it was poor institutional response. And so I would guess that it's pretty safe at Knox now. In terms of issues or topics that got more media attention, the Catholics, obviously. And in the early days, I think one of the things the Commission had to counter was that they were not an inquiry into the Catholic Church.
Staff explained how the Royal Commission went to extraordinary efforts to respond to survivor advocacy and ensure Pell's testimony from Rome was made public. In response to the advocacy of the Ballarat Survivor's Group, a decision was made for a hearing to be held in Sydney, but for Pell to give testimony via videolink from Rome. Head of Media and Communications Dani Redmond said ‘And so there was a while there within the Royal Commission where you could literally hear the clock ticking…And then when the decision was made. Okay, we’ll go to Rome’. Significant financial, diplomatic and media resources were invested to ensure Pell's Rome testimony was made publicly accessible. A public gallery was provided at the Vatican and Ballarat survivors crowdsourced funds to travel to Rome to witness the testimony. The hearing was live-streamed back to Australia, and the Ballarat Town Hall secured for local Ballarat residents to view the testimony live. Head of Engagement Pia Van de Zandt described the moving experience of being at the Ballarat Town Hall with local community members to watch the live feed: We had the Royal Commission in Sydney operating from the courtroom. We had the Rome staff and the Rome site for Pell's evidence, and then I was at the Ballarat Town Hall with 200 people, and a large screen, listening to it there. It was just, you know, unbelievable…I mean, it was surreal, amazing….I couldn’t quite believe it was happening, you know, that we’re connecting all of this.
Beyond public hearings: quiet listening to survivor stories
The RCIRCSA's final report and the insights of its former staff suggest that the mediated public hearings were only part of the story heard and acted upon by its Commissioners. An amendment to the Royal Commissions Act (1902) in the Commission's first year enabled, for the first time in an Australian context, private sessions, whereby Commissioners and staff met with victims and survivors in neutral locations to record, de-identify and summarise their testimony. Over its five years, the six Commissioners met and took testimony from victims and survivors in 8013 private sessions. The evidence collected, combined with written accounts and extensive research and analysis conducted by the Commission's policy teams, was central to the process of scheduling a public hearing. Beyond the individual listening exercises, the private sessions served as a mechanism for Commissioners and staffers to uncover patterns of abuse in specific institutions which may have otherwise gone unnoticed. As one explained: ‘so it was really private sessions that started to unearth problem areas, in terms of sport, sports, schools, out of home care’.
A senior staff member described the private sessions as a ‘fundamental mechanism for listening’. She explained that it took people a bit of time to realise their importance and their significance. It was only after the Commissioners had started to conduct them … that their potential [was] realized and then filtered throughout the rest of the organisation as the powerful mechanism that they were. There was also an understanding amongst us that this was a vehicle, private sessions were also a vehicle for being heard, for people in a position of authority to hear and believe… because you know for people who for their entire lives have been told that they were lying or what they had said wasn't true or couldn't possibly have been true, actually being heard and believed was a really huge thing and I think that's why so many more people came forward, to be honest.
As well as legal documentation of the private hearing testimony, a team of creative writers and journalists was employed to synthesise and write up the de-identified testimony. Simply titled ‘Narratives’, this section of the RCRICSA's Final Report captures 3949 individual stories and provides some of the most compelling insights into the historical and contemporary experience of child sexual abuse in Australian institutions. A staff member told us ‘significant resources were afforded toward the end of the Commission to hire writers, you know, screenwriters and others to write the stories of the private sessions’. They explained that those given testimony were afforded legal protection of privacy for ‘multiple generations’ to ‘allow people the safety to talk’. That these individual private testimonies were presented in the Final Report as collective narratives speaks to their effect in not only sheltering victims and survivors who wanted to remain private, but places their voices alongside a chorus of others who testified behind closed doors.
So yeah, I think there's light and shade, the public was one narrative that was curated. And there were other narratives that also existed which are necessary I think, again for this shift in, in social consciousness, which is again about what the transition is in in transitional justice.
However, this collective testimony went largely unheard by Australia's news media and is therefore a little understood aspect of the Royal Commission's findings compared to the named and shamed advocates and public hearing witnesses.
The final ‘pillar’ of the Royal Commission was an extensive program of community engagement, public round tables and commissioned research. There has been limited academic engagement with this aspect of the commission but it represented a significant resourcing investment, including the employment of First Nations staff, specialist staff to engage with the disability community as well as criminalised and incarcerated victims and survivors. Systematic outreach and liaison through survivor organisations meant unprecedented access to some of the nations most closed institutions. One staff member told us: The jails opened up the doors for us. It was quite extraordinary that that happened. But that was something to do with the power of the Royal Commission and its kudos in society but we had every jail in Australia saying all these strange people could come in and talk to the prisoners about child sexual abuse. Like wow!
Media logics and the overshadowing effect
It is clear that child sexual abuse of certain marginalised, stigmatised or criminalised groups, including Indigenous, incarcerated, Culturally and Linguistically Marginalised (CARM) and disability communities was of the highest priority to the Commission, but that these were fractured throughout the presentation of the report, and did not accord with the Commission's institutional case study logic. Several of the Commission's case studies dealt with historical maltreatment of First Nations children in institutions, including Case Study 7 (Parramatta Training School for Girls/Institution for Girls, Hay), Case Study 17 (Retta Dixon Home), Case Study 19 (Bethcar Children's Home) and Case Study 33 (The Salvation Army Children's Homes, Aus. Southern Territory). Indeed, both Counsel Assisting and the Chair explicitly drew the connection between exposure to child sexual abuse and the stolen generations practices of the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families to these institutions. However, the Royal Commission's mandate to focus on the institutional response, and its tendency toward legal and media logics, often negated these causal systemic factors.
While most staff we spoke to worked in roles unrelated to the Commission's formal media function, our interviews suggest that they were aware of the media-driven logics underpinning decisions about what made it onto the public agenda through the mediatised public hearing process, and which cases stayed in the private realm. They identified that strategic decisions were made about whether the Commission should hold public hearings specifically about the exposure of First Nations children and children with disabilities to child sexual abuse. They were critically aware that once made public, victims and survivors were subject to media-driven consequences. The following statement reveals an awareness that in some contexts, crimes committed by one person could be used as a weapon against the entire community. If we did that sort of hearing and sort of showcased that Aboriginal children were abused [by] White people but also by other Aboriginal people …How is that gonna play out? And is that going to just entrench some of that stereotypical thinking that Aboriginal people, sexually abused children and things like that. We were always really mindful of those sorts of things.
Former Commission staff described ongoing debates and deliberations as to how to convey stories relating to the most impacted communities. For instance, regarding the decision to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences throughout the 57 Case Studies wherever possible, rather than a specific case study focused exclusively on First Nations experiences of child sexual abuse in institutional settings, one participant said: We had a very big debate about whether we should have separate volumes on particular topics, like a disability volume… we decided that disability and Aboriginal content should and in fact, serve as a principle for diversity. You should not hide it off in some kind of separate place where nobody reads it unless they're interested in it. It should be filtered through, it should come up in every volume. That was a conscious decision.
In December 2017, the RCIRCSA released three short volumes titled ‘Brief Guide to the Final Report’. One focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, another on CARM communities and another on People with Disability. Our interviews with RCIRCSA staff indicate that the creation of this was a late consideration following advocacy by staff. Drafting of the guide was led by staff in the policy unit with contributions from across the Commission. Interviewees also mentioned criticisms received from First Nations and disability advocacy groups in regards to the lack of visibility of voices from these communities so clearly over-represented across the RCIRCSA hearings. Another participant reflected with genuine ambivalence about the ‘deliberate decision not to group it all together into one report’ saying that there are ‘pros and cons’.
Discussion and conclusions
Interviews with those who worked at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have enabled us to better understand the complexities of media power in a settler colonial inquiry context. This method, while painstaking in its execution and requiring trust and rapport between researchers and participants, can provide deep insights into organisational communication practices that textual analysis alone is unable to contribute. Combined with a close reading of the Commission's testimony and explanatory material through the final report, and unusually open public commentary from its Chair and staff (Ford, 2018; RCIRCSA, 2017), these interviews offer a unique perspective. Those deeply committed to the Royal Commission and its purpose were also able to see and explain how contemporary strategic communication practices work within a social context of marginalisation, racism and structural inequality.
Participants in our study used their sophisticated understanding of how media operate to shed light on why some cases investigated by the Commission gained excessive attention, while others were virtually ignored. They understood the logics used by both media and public institutions, and explained to us the ‘hierarchies of attention’ given to different cases, perpetrators and victims and were aware of the damage that such high-profile media attention and highly publicised and sensational public hearings could have. One participant explained in relation to child sexual abuse at Knox Grammar, one of the most highly publicised cases, ‘their institution was exposed’ because ‘we hammered them’ and that children at this prestigious institution ‘would be pretty safe at Knox now’. Likewise, the globally networked public hearing to hear the testimony of the late Cardinal George Pell fostered a public reckoning and recovery as the mediated advocacy of the Ballarat survivors was heard and acted upon by the Royal Commission (McCallum, Waller et al., 2023). This extraordinary example of public listening was powerful in its public reach, but it was not one that was afforded to victims and survivors abused in other contexts and institutions.
Our participants explained that cases involving First Nations, disabled or incarcerated victims were of intense interest to the Royal Commission. Indeed, it went to great lengths to seek out victims and survivors from these contexts and to listen to their stories. Several public hearings were held that involved victims and survivors from these communities, and transcripts and the Final Report show that the Chair and his Commission did not shy away from linking past policies of child removal with exposure to abuse and intergenerational trauma (RCIRCSA, 2017). But the historical focus on the institutional response, rather than contemporary experience, meant these were some of the public hearings the media paid the least attention to (Waller et al., 2020). Interviewees also explained that the Commission purposefully managed the investigation into those issues so that they were not sensationally brought to the attention of journalists reporting on the Royal Commission.
We conclude that in relation to Research Question 1: How did the RCIRCSA public hearings bring to attention child sexual abuse in institutional settings?, the public hearings were a strategic platform through which the Royal Commission could bring the dark history of child sexual abuse to the attention of the nation. Public hearings not only revealed to the public the extent of institutional child sexual abuse, but were themselves a mechanism for changing institutional behaviour and public discourse (Wright and Swain, 2018). Publicness is indeed a necessary factor in rendering transparent, or revealing, previously hidden issues of institutional injustice. Our participants provided examples of where ‘making public’ led to collective agency (Georgiou and Titley, 2022), where whole communities could come together to bear witness to the testimony of institutional leaders where child abuse had taken place. We conclude that when a past crime resonates, as it did with private boys' schools or Catholic Church, publicity can also bring a public reckoning and help a community work towards recovery (Zelizer, 2002; Waller and McCallum, 2023).
Our second research question asked: How did the RCIRCSA listen to the stories of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse beyond its public hearings? Pillars 2 and 3 of the Royal Commission were pivotal to listening beyond the media (de Souza and Dreher, 2023). The Commission's innovative private sessions were an important mechanism for listening and bearing witness to the broadest range of experience. Media publicity urging victims and survivors to come forward and tell their story through the private sessions contributed to the reach and success of the Royal Commission. The evidence taken from the 8013 private session testimonies provided evidence that led to a public hearing and/or fed into the report recommendations. In addition to a program of research and public round tables, engagement and outreach with CARM, religious minorities, First Nations, disability and incarcerated communities extended the range of communities that engaged with the Commission. Participants were acutely aware of the reasons it needed to go to extra effort to seek out victims and survivors from these cohorts. This was particularly important in relation to building a body of evidence that past policies of child removal were central to the exposure of Indigenous children to child sexual abuse and ongoing intergenerational trauma (RCIRCSA, 2017; Dreher and Waller, 2022).
Salter (2020) has described the private sessions as a transitional process that brought private trauma into the public domain. This ‘quiet’ work of the Commission enabled victims to work through their narratives in preparation for a public hearing. In those cases, the media attention enabled the public to bear witness to the case, and to ultimately bring about change. But for others, including the 14% of private session witnesses who were Indigenous, this transitional part never happened. Participants explained that in a mediatised Royal Commission the risk of harm, of news media weaponising child sexual abuse against those it was supposed to be bearing witness to, was too great (deLaet and Mills, 2018). It was agreed that for these cohorts telling their stories in private was the safest, most productive strategy.
Our third research question asks: How did media logics intersect with the Royal Commission's stated aim to achieve justice by listening to survivors? Here we argue that the mediatised nature of the Commissionand its close alignment with news values, agendas and logics, are an important, but previously unexplored, aspect of the Child Abuse Royal Commission. Strategic decisions not to hold special hearings to address the abuse of Indigenous children in institutional settings were a matter of debate within the Commission. Decisions were made that in this case it was better if the stories of these victims and survivors were kept largely in the private realm during the Royal Commission. Commission staff explained the strategic decisions that resulted in three additional cross-cutting volumes being produced to explain the position of these ‘diversity groups’ throughout the final report, and reflected that media logics were ambivalent about how much to ‘play up’ or ‘play down’ abuse in particular contexts (RCIRCSA, 2017).
Participants reflected on the wariness of First Nations and people with disability towards both commissions of inquiry and mainstream media. They explained, often with deep reflexivity and critical insight, the logic of why Indigenous and disability victims might not want to engage in public hearings. They were aware of uneven ethics of care among media and public, and the risks of news media publicity leading to the weaponisation of child sexual abuse by public figures against the Indigenous community (Cripps, 2021; McQuire, 2021). We also know that communities from intersecting groups identified as a high priority by the commission are often those most subject to media harms or being framed as unworthy of attention. News journalism too often focuses on exceptional, individual events or acts of abuse rather than the slow and cumulative violence of institutional harm (Titley, 2019; McCallum et al., 2023). This paper suggests that assumptions of what will resonate with mainstream values can also be raced, ableist, classed and gendered and may not receive similar attention. This underscores the uneven stakes in speaking up/out and being heard for some groups. There was an awareness that rather than facilitating change, or fostering transitional justice, this type of publicity could entrench racial stereotypes and do further harm. This risk was realised more recently when the leader of the federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton used the context of the referendum to recognise First Nations Australians through a Voice to parliament to weaponise child abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. His words generated sensationalist media reporting and were used as an opportunity to call for a return to interventionist policies (Allam, 2023). Like Vranic and Skogerbø (2022) we find that media logics can work to ensure public discussion of some cases is excluded from the ‘public’ side of inquiry activity, offering valuable lessons for organisations seeking justice and redress for victims and survivors of abuse in care, including child sexual abuse.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery project: Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission. DP190101282.
