Ring, Sinéad and Enright, Máiréad
(2020)
State Legal Responses to Historical Institutional Abuse: Shame, Sovereignty, and Epistemic Injustice.
Eire Ireland - a Journal of Irish Studies, 55 (1 & 2).
pp. 68-100.
ISSN 0013-2683
(In Press)
Abstract
The history of the Irish State is littered with shamed bodies. For decades the State
collaborated with religious orders in incarcerating children and single women, shamed by
their poverty, race, disability, or association with sexual transgression (Fischer Gender,
Nation; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell; Smith; Buckley). Shaming practices such as head
shaving, using numbers to identify children, or flogging were used to punish and control
(Arnold; Coleman 121; Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse [CICA] vol. 1, ch. 8).
Women and children in industrial or reformatory schools, psychiatric hospitals, County
Homes, and Magdalene Laundries were burdened with a stigmatized identity that meant total
exclusion from society (O’Donnell and O’Sullivan 257). As they have begun to speak
publicly about their experiences, victim-survivors have forced the State and Irish society to
acknowledge this history. Their testimony to experiences of neglect, beatings, forced labor,
sexual assault, and imprisonment are an indictment of the sovereign State’s claim to protect
2
its most vulnerable and to detect and punish crime within its territory. In response, the State
offers an architecture of apology, investigation, and redress. Scholars have traced patterns of
violation of domestic and international norms at the core of this framework (Gallen and
Gleeson; O’Rourke, “The Justice for Magdalenes Campaign”; Ring, “The Victim of
Historical Abuse”).
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Child sexual-abuse; containment; laundries; politics; truth; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Law |
| Item ID: |
15305 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2020.0003 |
| Depositing User: |
Sinead Ring
|
| Date Deposited: |
25 Jan 2022 10:19 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Eire Ireland - a Journal of Irish Studies |
| Publisher: |
The Irish American Cultural Institute |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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