Child Sexual Abuse Reported by Adult Survivors: Legal Responses in England and Wales, Ireland and Australia

Child Sexual Abuse Reported by Adult Survivors is a wide-ranging and timely critical history and analysis of legal responses to ‘historical’ or ‘non-recent’ child sexual abuse (NRCSA) in England and Wales, Ireland and Australia, each of which represents an evolving and progressive approach to this important and complex issue.The book examines the emergence of NRCSA as a distinctive social, political and legal phenomenon in each country and explores the legal responses developed to address its unprecedented challenges. Courts and parliaments in each country have reformed existing doctrine and practice and have created new ways of holding state and private actors accountable and new ways of addressing survivors’ injuries. Criminal law, tort law, public inquiries and state reparations have all been to the forefront of these new legal responses, which have transformed law’s engagement with NRCSA survivors and understandings of justice itself. However, despite this undeniable progress, the book identifies ways in which the legal responses developed in each country fail to deliver accountability and recognition to NRCSA survivors and argues that such failures betray the law’s inherent ambivalence to delivering justice for these survivors. Creating new insights into legal responses to this complex contemporary legal, social and political problem, this book will be of great interest to academic lawyers, political scientists and historians, as well as those working on related topics in criminology, sociology, social policy, cultural studies and gender studies.

About the Author

Sinéad Ring is Assistant Professor at the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University where she teaches courses on crime, evidence, gender and sexuality and law, and state responses to historical gendered violence. She has published widely on sexual violence and the law, with a particular focus on the legal issues relating to non-recent child sexual abuse.

Kate Gleeson is Associate Professor of Law at Macquarie University and Chair of Full Stop Australia, which aims to put a full stop to sexual, domestic and family violence.

Kim Stevenson is Emeritus Professor of Law, Crime and History in the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth. She has published widely on aspects of the criminal law with specialist expertise in the contemporary and historical contexts of the legal regulation and criminalization of sexual behaviour and offending. She is Lead General Editor Routledge SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice Histories and Co Founder SOLON Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Law, Crime and History.