The Australian Child Sexual Abuse Royal Commission’s Anticipation of the News Media Logics in Its Coverage

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Kerry McCallum, whose interest is in the media logics surrounding public inquiries into child abuse, focussing especially on the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, in 2013-17.

Media were a key player in making child sexual abuse in institutional settings in Australia public – but they can also reinforce public stigma and discriminatory policies. Public inquiries, in turn, can shift public discourse on critical social issues, but their non-public aspects of ‘quiet listening’ to the victims of survivors of abuse are just as critical; this needs to be better understood. This study therefore sits at the intersection between publicness and media revelation, public and institutional listening, and media silencing, overshadowing, and weaponising.

The project took a media as practice approach, and interviewed some 16 former staff of the Royal Commission as well as engaging in archival analysis; these revealed a complex interplay between media, legal, and organisational logics in the process of uncovering crimes committed against children in institutional settings. This complex process was facilitated centrally by the empathetic leadership of the Royal Commission chair, which also set the tone for the conduct of the public hearings, and coloured the coverage of the Royal Commission – and here, especially the in-depth and highly committed coverage by the ABC.

One key case discussed at the Royal Commission was the exclusive and extremely rich Knox Grammar School, where actor Hugh Jackman was once school captain (and apparently watched every minute of the inquiry on livestream from New York); such celebrity status, as well as the sense that child sexual abuse should not be able to happen in such extremely privileged institutions, also provided it with substantial additional coverage.

At the same time, behind the scenes there was a great deal of far less publicised work, especially also including some 8,000 private hearings that provided an ‘architecture of listening’ which enabled engagement with a very wide range of victims and survivors. The Royal Commission also paid substantial attention to victims and survivors from marginalised backgrounds, and especially also from First Nations backgrounds – but it made the decision to not hold a distinct hearing relating to the abuse of Indigenous children or to publish a separate volume of reports on Indigenous victims and survivors, in order to keep this area from being separated from the broader discussion and subsequently ignored and dismissed.

This anticipates the logics and hierarchies of media coverage of Royal Commission hearings; it reflects concerns about the entrenchment of stereotypes about Indigenous people and sexual abuse. Those deeply committed to the Royal Commission were clearly aware of media logics in a social context of marginalisation, racism, and inequality, and were careful not to do damage through any separate treatment of minority groups that may enable the playing up or playing down of abuse in specific settings. This raises important questions about the extent to which publicity or silence can deliver justice to the victims and survivors of child sexual abuse.