Kent Law Lecturer Dr Sinéad Ring has been awarded more than £1.7K by the Socio Legal Studies Association Research Grant Scheme to investigate the Irish State’s engagement with child sexual abuse from 1950-1990.
Dr Ring’s project entitled, ‘Wilful Ignorance? Exploring the Irish State’s Failure to Protect Children from Sexual Abuse in the Period 1950-1990’, will help inform debate on how criminal law on sexual abuse is enforced.
Dr Ring said: ‘Until recently child sexual abuse victims in Ireland who sought to report were not believed. In the 1990s a change in public awareness and attitudes towards victims led to unprecedented numbers of prosecutions for sexual abuse dating back decades.
‘The frame of the project is complicity; how to talk about the blame, if any, to be attributed to criminal justice actors who turned a blind eye to abuse. My research will explore how child abuse was understood by the State, as evidenced by a range of documentary sources relating to policy formation and implementation, legislative initiatives, social work, medical and legal texts and reports of inquiries.’
The research builds on Dr Ring’s doctorate, part of which documented and explored how victims were frustrated by figures of State authority (such as police officers, social workers and teachers) when they attempted to report their testimony to Irish courts.
Dr Ring said: ‘The courts have erased these stories and have blamed the delay on individual defendants. They have not acknowledged the State’s failure over decades to protect victims, but have decided that officials were ignorant of sexual abuse. This narrative of ignorance persists, despite the findings of official inquiries that the State covered up and ignored abuse in institutional settings. This study interrogates the narrative of ignorance by locating it in the context of State actors’ understanding of sexual abuse.’
To find out more about Dr Ring’s research and publications, visit her staff profile page.