I found out because […] his new wife called and, by coincidence, I picked up the phone in the house, where I now lived with my mom and her new husband. His wife said: "Lisa, I have to talk to your mother." I thought it was strange, and I wondered if he had perhaps been hospitalized again? I knew he was admitted occasionally. Then I went down in my room […] no into my room […] I lived on the frst foor at this time, and then I could hear my mother whisper far too loudly to her husband: "Richardt has taken his own life," in a hysterical voice. And it was […] she couldn't even tell it to me!

Today, however, Lisa and her mother Annabeth get along well, and Lisa suggests that I also talk to her mother to get the details of Richardt's story from more than one perspective. I agree and get in touch with 82-year-old Annabeth. It turns out that she has a slightly different version of the same event:

Well, Lisa was in the house, it was the day we returned from holiday. Birgit [the father's new wife] knew when we came home, and then she called and told me that Richardt had taken his own life […] And I was […] well it was terrible, right? And Lisa, she had a room in the basement and […] [long pause] and she came, she could sense that something horrible had happened, because I started to scream out loud, and Herman was holding me, and it was just too much for her. She thought I should have come to her frst. And talked with her about it. But it was a tragedy, right?

These two divergent testimonies, including uncertainties about the location of Lisa's room, remind us of the unreliability of memory.35 Yet, throughout the long conversations I had with both Lisa and Annabeth, it became evident that the family secrecy around Richardt's mental illness extended far beyond the disagreement between the two of them about the communication of his death. This secrecy was mainly built on a misunderstanding. Annabeth was told that Richardt had taken his own life, but she was not told *how*. Lisa thought her mother kept that information from her, but her mother said she did not discover the details about Richardt's death until many years later at a family gathering. At this event, according to Annabeth, an uncle, who was married to one of Richardt's sisters, suddenly referred to Richardt having hanged himself. Through the interviews, it became obvious that it was primarily Richardt's religious family, mainly his two sisters, who concealed both his mental illness and the details about his death.36

Richardt was raised in a family that belonged to a certain religious movement in Denmark called the "Inner Mission." His father developed Parkinson's disease and was in a wheelchair for most of Richardt's childhood, so the family was run by his mother and, for the most part, his two older sisters. At the age of 16, Richardt stood up in the church and made a scene. He was clearly attempting to break with his family's religious belief, but this inappropriate outburst led to his admission to the mental hospital in Risskov. According to Annabeth's recollections, no one in the family mentioned Richardt's admission to hospital or his mental illness to her before they married. Only after Lisa's birth did Annabeth discover that something was severely wrong. Richardt started acting in a psychotic manner and was admitted to the mental institution once again.

Annabeth visited him frequently, accompanied by their small daughter, Lisa. However, Richardt and Annabeth's relationship did not survive the struggle, and they divorced when Lisa was three years old. Both later

36 It is quite possible that the cause of death, being a suicide, might have enforced the secrecy around Richardt. Historically, as well as presently, suicide is surrounded with stigma and is rarely openly talked about. Moreover, especially in religious circles, suicide has been considered a sin and thus very shameful. See, for example, Sudak, Maxim, and Carpenter, Suicide and Stigma; Moksony and Hegedűs, Religion and the Stigma of Suicide.

35Erll, Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies.

remarried. Richardt's new wife, Birgit, was part of the hippie movement, and she did not recognize his mental illness as a disease needing therapeutic or medical treatment. At this point in time, the infuence of the antipsychiatric movement in Denmark was strong, and it clearly affected Birgit's attitude towards medical treatment.37 According to both Lisa and Annabeth, Richardt then experienced some very turbulent years. At home, he and his new wife Birgit experimented with open relationships and drugs. When his mental condition was so severe that an admission to the institution in Risskov was unavoidable, he received LSD and electric shock treatment. Finally, he committed suicide.

After this tragic event, it was not just the cause of his death that was kept under wraps. Lisa and Annabeth were not invited to Richardt's funeral, nor were they informed about the time or place. Everything was taken care of by Richardt's two sisters. However, Lisa and Annabeth did have a closer relationship with Richardt's mother, Lisa's grandmother. Through her, they kept in touch with Richardt's relatives, and by and by, they also got on better terms with his sisters. When one of his sisters died, they were invited to her funeral. On this occasion, Lisa experienced yet another act of unpleasant secrecy. She realized that Richardt's existence had been erased from the family narrative:

I attended his sister's funeral; she'd got very old, I guess it was ten years ago. Then there was this very religious group of people. And the priest, he holds a speech, and he says: "Oh, it was such a lovely family, the "Petersons," living in this nice home at Stillingsvej in Aarhus. They had these two lovely girls, Elsa and Greta. It was such a warm house, and everyone was welcome," and so on and so on […] and my father wasn't mentioned with even a word!

This experience was clearly very uncomfortable for Lisa. There she was, participating in the funeral, but no one knew who she was. Lisa's and Annabeth's accounts both claim that Richardt's religious family played a major role in keeping Richardt's mental condition a secret.

The recollection of Richardt's life through Lisa's and Annabeth's memories shows how secrecy is never stable but always negotiated, including

37The anti-psychiatric movement in Denmark was highly infuential in the years that followed the young people's revolt of 1968. Initiatives such as "the mad movement" were established in 1979, in which mental illness was perceived merely as a social construct. See, for example, Rosenberg, Den psykofarmakologiske udvikling 1950–1970.

between the individual family members. What has for many years been thought of as a secret can easily turn out to be a misunderstanding caused by a lack of communication or by different perspectives on the same situation. Moreover, the story also shows how religious conviction, as in the previous story, has motivated the maintenance of secrecy, reinforcing the stigmatization of mental suffering. Yet, whereas Thomas and Edith were isolated within the religious family to avoid suspicion from the outside, Richardt was excluded from the religious environment and erased from the family narrative.

This pinpoints the diversity and situatedness of family secrecy practices. Families marked by religious structures and beliefs have also operated differently and engaged in different modes of concealment.  In addition to these different knowledge regimes, the particular secrecy practices carried out by Richardt's family were an inseparable part of his illness with respect not only to his own experience but also to the way his illness has been perceived and narrated by his close relatives.

### Conclusion

This chapter has shown how keeping secrets works as a social practice that restructures the emotional environments of the family and thus shapes the historically contingent experiences of mental suffering. As my analysis has demonstrated, the time-bound modes of communication have had both private and public impacts. On the one hand, the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure have marked the way mental illnesses have been experienced by the afficted. On the other hand, family secrecy practices have also created and reinforced a narrative on mental suffering that, through embodied silences and the work of memory, has been carried across generations. Oral history interviews offer unique insights into the intimate sphere of the family and have proved a valuable tool in arriving at knowledge practices of the past that would otherwise be left unspoken. Moreover, the testimonies made it possible to scrutinize and foreground the interrelational aspects of mental suffering and to trace how ambiguous practices of secrecy, silence, and "active non-knowing" have had an intergenerational infuence.

Religion played a signifcant role in several of the collected life histories. Not only did religious environments encourage secrecy, as in the case of Edith, where neighbors in the community warned against collaboration with the public psychiatric system, or in the case of Richardt, where the sisters kept their brother's funeral confdential and excluded his existence from the family narrative. The testimonies from the relatives also suggest that religious belief could have triggered the mental affiction in the frst place or caused a deterioration. Edith's breakdown happened while she was serving at a religious hostel, and Richardt's frst meltdown occurred at church, indicating a reaction toward the demands of the fundamentalist religious movement. In mid-twentieth century Denmark, whether religion should be considered a contributor or exacerbator of suffering, religious conviction defnitely shaped both the atmosphere and the secrecy practices of domestic life and hence marked the way mental illness was experienced.

*Family secrecy*, as a kind of knowledge practice, will always mediate between collective norms in the public sphere and intimate matters in the space of the family.38 Secrecy is formed by societal structures, but it also forms them. Furthermore, secrecy becomes "real" in respect of its consequences—that is, the effects it has on bodies and lives in the past as well as in the present. Depending on the moment, silence and speech can, as Sara Ahmed has formulated it, "have different even contradictory effects […] which is a question not simply of their time, but also of the place in which we reside at a given moment of time, the worlds we fnd ourselves in."39 To put it differently, secrecy can be simultaneously oppressive and protective, depending on the context, the perspective, and the specifc situation.

While my focus has been on secrecy, I hope this chapter will also serve to foreground the socio-material aspects of mental suffering, thus contributing to an increasing awareness and re-articulation of the fact that questions of mental health are not to be dealt with solely within the medical paradigm. In the past as well as in the present day, the family, as a historically changing site of struggle, plays an important role as a context of mental suffering. This comprehension might be especially important in

38Probing how the spatiality of secrecy and experiences of mental suffering have intertwined, the study also ties in with the growing research on mental health geographies. This scholarship posits that space and mental health are intrinsically linked and that the social, cultural, and political contexts are always part of the situated experiences of illness. See, for instance, Philo, Across the Water; Parr, *Mental Health and Social Space.*

39Ahmed, Secrets and Silence, xvi.

"the post-asylum era,"40 where families, as a consequence of the implementation of district psychiatry and the general trend towards deinstitutionalization in several European countries, are given greater responsibility and are once again more directly involved in the caring process.41 In this situation, it is crucial to keep in mind how every family is also determined by the more invisible cultural structures of power that affect knowledge management in private life and thus shape experiences of illness.

### Bibliography

### Literature

40Larsen and Topor, A Place for the Heart.

41 Suzuki, *Madness at Home*, 1.

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# Redressing or Excusing the Past? The Evaluation of Sexual Child Abuse in the Swedish Redress Scheme for Historical Abuse in Out-of-Home Care

*Johanna Sköld, Bengt Sandin, and Johanna Schiratzki*

### Introduction

Over the last few decades, experiences of welfare institutions have emerged on the political agenda. Experiences can be understood as lived or remembered events that happened to people, but also as the "culturally and situationally bound social process" of sharing and mediating experiences to

Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
J. Sköld (\*) • B. Sandin

J. Schiratzki

Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024 317

J. Annola et al. (eds.), *Lived Institutions as History of Experience*, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38956-6\_13

wider communities.1 Through such social processes, scandals of historical or non-recent child abuse in various institutional settings have become known to the public, and this has led to demands for investigations, reparation, and redress. It is a result of victim-based activism that has pushed for justice, redress, and recognition of the child abuse that has thrived in residential institutions, foster homes, faith-based institutions (churches), schools, and other extrafamilial institutions.2 The political response in many countries has been to establish inquiries to investigate the alleged abuse by collecting testimonies from adult care leavers. Since the 1990s, inquiries into historical child abuse have been launched in more than 20 jurisdictions, and tens of thousands of victims or survivors have testifed before them.3 In the Nordic countries alone, 20 national or regional inquiry reports were published between 2003 and 2016.4 In these reports, adult survivors broke the silence and taboo to speak about child abuse, and this happened in a context in which their experiences were given new meanings. Rather than being fragmented individual accounts of more or less disrupted memories, experiences became narrated in relation to a public discourse on historical child abuse, resulting in a collective political force.5 As a result, adults have come forward as child abuse victims, positioning themselves as people with experience of institutional child abuse. The child category, which is usually an age-related category, thus became open to people who once were children.6

In some countries, the inquiries' fndings have pushed the responsible bodies, whether it be governments, municipalities, or faith-based institutions, to initiate reparation frameworks through offcial apologies and the establishment of fnancial redress schemes. Globally, at least 36 redress schemes aimed at compensating victims of historical child abuse had been identifed in 14 jurisdictions by 2017, and the number has probably increased since then.7 Redress schemes constitute new welfare institutions that people who identify as victims of institutional child abuse meet and experience in their claim for justice. Reparations, such as public apologies

1Katajala-Peltomaa and Toivo, Introduction, 12–13.

2Wright and Henry, Historical Institutional Child Abuse, 2–3.

3Wright, Sköld, and Swain, Examining Abusive Pasts, 162.

4 Sköld and Markkola, History of Child Welfare, 143.

5Murphy, Memory, Identity and Public Narrative, 307–9; Kivimäki, Suodenjoki, and Vahtikari, Lived Nation, 10–12.

6Davet, "Jag är ett fnskt krigsbarn!", 77–8.

7Daly, Inequalities of Redress, 204.

and fnancial redress schemes, ideally have a transformative element in that they can encourage society to acknowledge the wrongs committed and promote state authorities and other bodies to take responsibility for what happened, and through this, promote victim healing. The sheer number of inquiries and redress schemes, as well as their arguably victim-centered focus, is an indication that they are a vital part of the transitional justice frameworks that are underway in established democracies today. However, as McAlinden has outlined, "there are several means by which individuals and collectives can 'apologise without apologising'."8

In this chapter, we explore how such a "non-apology" can feature in fnancial redress and how the transformative aspect of a transitional justice framework can vanish during its practical operation. The aim of acknowledging the individual victims' unjustifable suffering in order to offer redress was in the Swedish redress scheme juxtaposed with the question of whether caregivers (the representatives of the state) had failed in their responsibilities. This chapter sets out to explore this dual focus of the fnancial redress institution. As a case study, we look at the Swedish fnancial redress scheme for victims of historical child abuse in out-of-home care and how this resulted in renewed experiences of the welfare state. Taking sexual abuse as a starting point, we want to demonstrate how such abuse, understood as the worst kind of child abuse, was evaluated within a scheme that at frst glance seemed to be inclusive but, during its practical operation, came to be exclusive.

 Henry, From Reconciliation to Transitional Justice; Sköld, Historical Abuse; Winter, *Transitional Justice in Established Democracies*; McAlinden, *Apologies & Institutional Child Abuse*, 6.

9 Smaal, Kaladelfos, and Finnane (eds.), *The Sexual Abuse of Children*; Daly and Davis, Unravelling Redress for Institutional Abuse, 1272; Wright and Swain, Speaking the Unspeakable, 146–8; Wright, Sköld, and Swain, Examining Abusive Pasts, 169–70.

10Greer and McLaughlin, Theorizing Institutional Scandal; Greer and McLaughlin, The Sir Jimmy Savile Scandal.

political agenda.11 Furthermore, the silence around sexual abuse and sexuality in general has been challenged, and consequently, a language to verbalize what happened to them is now more readily available to victims.12 Clergy abuse scandals within the Catholic Church have also fnally received major attention after decades of cover-ups.13 Most importantly, child sexual abuse has come to be seen as the ultimate crime against childhood—a criminal act that deprives the child victim of his/her childhood.14

The exclusive focus on child sexual abuse within institutional settings in the redress responses in Australia, England, and Wales has been criticized by care-leaver advocates for ignoring the extreme vulnerability of children in care when they were abused and exploited in various ways as laborers in both closed institutions and in foster families.15 In contrast to schemes focusing exclusively on sexual abuse in institutional settings, the Swedish redress scheme intended for victims of historical child abuse in out-ofhome care had, at frst glance, a wider remit. It included care leavers who had been in out-of-home care in both institutions and foster homes. Moreover, it was oriented towards severe abuse, which was defned as frequent, "serious violations and repeated abuse or neglect meant to seriously harm the child's self-esteem"; occasional, "very serious physical abuse"; occasional, "sadistic or torture-like conditions"; and gross sexual abuse.16 While these defnitions include physical and emotional abuse and neglect as well as sexual abuse, the Swedish scheme was guided by criteria that restricted the claimants' eligibility in other ways. As this chapter will argue, redress schemes that include a plethora of abuse of different characters can also fail to recognize the vulnerability of the child in instances where negotiations about the state's responsibility overshadow recognition of the child victims' suffering. As this is a process that involves agents who are not equals, such an approach risks subordinating the interests of the victims to the interests of the state.17

11Wilson and Golding, The Tacit Semantics of 'Loud Fences'; Wright and Henry, Historical Institutional Child Abuse.

12 Swain, Why Sexual Abuse? Why Now?; Wright and Swain, Speaking the Unspeakable.

13Gallen, Jesus Wept, 344; Golding, Sexual Abuse as the Core Transgression, 198–9.

14Kitzinger, Who Are You Kidding? 161.

15Golding, Sexual Abuse as the Core Transgression.

16Government Bill 2011/12:160, 23.

17Winter, State Redress as Public Policy, 35.

### Money as a Symbol of Recognition and the Emergence of the Swedish Scheme

The fnancial redress scheme was the fnal government response to a decade-long process of victims seeking an apology and redress for injustices committed against them as children in public out-of-home care. The process commenced in 2006, when the government established an offcial inquiry into child abuse and neglect in institutions and foster homes (Sw. *Vanvårdsutredningen*). During the period 2006–11, this inquiry interviewed 866 care leavers who had been placed in out-of-home care between the 1920s and early 2000s. An offcial government interim report (based on 404 interviews) released at the end of 2009 contained shocking revelations of abuse and neglect, in which 90 per cent of the interviewees reported various forms of neglect, approximately 50 per cent reported physical abuse with weapons, 75 per cent other kinds of physical abuse, 50 per cent reported that they had been exploited as laborers, and equally as many reported that they had been sexually abused.18 The interim report prompted the government to respond, and it did so by setting up a parallel inquiry with the task of proposing recommendations for how the state could organize redress for the abused care leavers—the so-called Redress Inquiry (Sw. *Upprättelseutredningen*).

While this inquiry suggested a commemorative museum exhibition, actions to prevent future abuse and neglect, and an offcial apology to the collective of care leavers, which was eventually delivered by the chair of the Swedish Parliament in November 2011, the most important and farreaching recommendation was the fnancial redress scheme. In the Government Offcial Report, the Redress Inquiry Commission concluded that victims of historical child abuse would face serious diffculties in achieving justice through civil litigation due to the time-barred statute of limitations. Instead, the inquiry proposed a kind of *ex gratia* compensation, which should be considered as "recognition by society that the person eligible for compensation had been exposed to unjustifable suffering and not as compensation for concrete damages." This recommendation was endorsed by several victim advocacy groups.19 Money is transformative in character, and as Stephen Winter argues, fnancial redress "respects

18 Swedish Government Offcial Reports 2009:99.

19 Swedish Government Offcial Reports 2011:9, 138; Arvidsson, *Att ersätta det oersättliga*, 140–1.

the survivor's agency by providing the means to pursue and obtain a wide range of goods and services. Unlike redress 'in kind' or through service provision, money is extremely fungible—putting power into the hands of survivors."20 Therefore, fnancial redress is often favored by survivors, and it is also a response promoted by many inquiries.

After heated political debate about whether any fnancial redress should be issued in Sweden, a temporally enacted piece of legislation to be in effect between 1 January 2013 and 31 December 2014—the Redress Act—was passed by the Swedish Parliament in 2012. The aim of the redress scheme was, precisely as the Redress Inquiry had put it, to symbolically (through money) acknowledge the victims' unjustifable suffering in order to offer redress rather than compensate for concrete damages, as in a tort case.21 The scheme was constructed as a fat-rate payment in which eligible claimants would receive 250,000 SEK. The payment would symbolize the present society's sincere apology for, and acknowledgment of, the suffering that was caused to children that were wards of the Swedish state.

This fnancial redress scheme was operationalized by a court-like administrative body—the Redress Board. This consisted of 16 members who were experts in social work, pediatrics, and child psychiatry, as well as several judges. Each case was adjudicated by three or four board members, presided over by one of the judges. The board was guided by the Redress Act and another important document—the Government Bill. In the Swedish legal context, government bills "summarize one or several Governmental Offcial Reports as well as the responses of a referral process among authorities and stakeholders," and they are used by those enacting legislation to analyze the aims and possible interpretations of a legal act.22 The Government Bill, the Redress Act, and the Redress Board altogether constitute a new welfare institution with which claimants for historical justice have been confronted.

The idea of money as a symbol of the state's or the government's recognition of victims' suffering is something other than a fnancial redress scheme's legal practice and outcome. What redress schemes actually do is to clarify for whom the symbolic recognition is intended and for whom it is not. Kathleen Daly has described this as the scheme's money logic:

20Winter, State Redress as Public Policy, 39.

21Government Bill 2011/12:160, 27.

22 Schiratzki, Sköld, and Sandin, Redress in Context, 104.

"how to decide and how much to pay."23 The how-much-to-pay dimension of the Swedish scheme was straightforward because, in contrast to many schemes internationally, it did not contain any graded steps. The claimant got either the fat-rate payment or no money at all. The how-todecide dimension, in contrast, was far more complicated and was outlined in the legal criteria specifying who was eligible for compensation. These criteria were specifed in the Redress Act, to some extent defned in the Government Bill, but ultimately interpreted by the Redress Board in their assessment of each individual application.

In order to be awarded money under the Swedish scheme, applications had to meet four specifc criteria: applicants had to prove that (1) *they had been taken into care between 1920 and 1980* (2) *under specifed Child Welfare Acts*, and they had to (3) *give credible evidence of exposure to severe abuse* that occurred (4) *in conjunction with municipal out-of-home care*. Our previous research suggests that the four criteria functioned as excluding mechanisms that fragmented the applicants' narratives of abuse. Any incident an applicant reported that failed to meet one of the criteria was excluded from the fnal ruling. Consequently, many of the abusive incidents in an applicant's story and documentation could be considered nonvalid, with the result that the whole application might be rejected.24 This runs contrary to the explicit position taken in the Government Bill that, in its fnal ruling decision for each case, the board should "make an overall assessment of whether the abuses or neglects that had occurred in total could be determined as being of a serious nature."25

As we shall see, this practical implementation of the money logic of the Swedish scheme was not always as logical and predictable as expected. In total, the scheme compensated only 46 per cent of the approximately 5000 claimants who sought fnancial redress for past harms. The fact that more than half of all claimants received nothing stands out in international comparison.26 The money logic alone cannot fully explain the outcome of

26 Sköld, Sandin, and Schiratzki, Historical Justice Through, 179. The fnal report from the Redress Board does not contain information about the exact number of individual applicants, but according to the Redress Board, 46 per cent of the applicants received the payment. We know that 5285 applications were fled with the board, and approx. 300 of them were renewed applications from people who had had their frst application rejected before the closing date of the scheme, see Ewerlöf, *Slutrapport*, 9–10.

23Daly, *Redressing Institutional Abuse*, 126.

the scheme. Rather, it is important to address how the design of the redress scheme and the assessment carried out by the Redress Board (the redress institution's praxis) affected the scheme's aim of symbolically acknowledging childhood suffering. To do this, we need to investigate how individual cases were adjudicated. Such an approach is still quite unusual. In previous research, the outcomes of redress schemes for historical child abuse have been analyzed either at an aggregate level by examining offcial reports27 or else by scrutinizing interviews with offcials working with the schemes28 and interviewing victims who have been, or will be, affected by the schemes.29

### Data and Method

The data for our analysis comprise a sample of the three- to six-page decision texts in individual cases adjudicated by the Redress Board. Every decision text has a formal structure, consisting of the background to the applicant's placement history, the grounds on which the applicant claimed redress, and the board's summary of the applicant's story, concluding with the board's assessment, in which the decision to reject or award compensation is justifed. The decision is the fnal document in a case fle that consists of many other documents, such as the submitted application form, the applicant's written submission, any other written evidence (witness testimonies, verdicts, etc.), archival documentation, the memorandum that summarized the case prepared by clerks (Sw. *föredragande*) assisting the Redress Board members, notes from the oral hearing that was held with 82 per cent of the applicants, and so on.30 The decision text, in contrast to any other document in a fled case, is regarded as a public document under Swedish law and was therefore accessible to us. However, personal information, such as names, places, and even the number of years

27Daly, *Redressing Institutional Abuse*; Studsrød and Enoksen, Money as Compensation for Historical Abuse; Winter, Two Models of Monetary Redress.

28Daly and Davis, Unravelling Redress; Studsrød, Utføre oppreisning; Winter, Redressing Historic Abuse in New Zealand.

29Lundy and Mahoney, Representing Survivors; Hamber and Lundy, Lessons from Transitional Justice? Pembroke, Historical Institutional Child Abuse in Ireland; Studsrød and Enoksen, But Then Again.

30Ewerlöf, *Slutrapport*, 16–17.

a person was placed in care, are excluded from these decision texts.31 We collected every fourth decision—1225 in total. Of these, 521 applications were successful and 704 were rejected.

Firstly, we processed all the decisions in an Excel spreadsheet. Each decision text was coded according to the following variables: whether the application was successful or rejected, the applicant's gender, the number and character of placements, the grounds for claiming redress, the categories of abuse the applicant had described (differentiating between physical abuse, sexual abuse, work exploitation, detention, discrimination, violation, and neglect), what perpetrators were registered in the applicant's story, and what arguments the Redress Board gave to justify its decision.

 While the Swedish scheme included various categories of abuse, our sample of every fourth decision from the Redress Board demonstrates that child sexual abuse was prevalent in 65 per cent of the successful applications in our sample.  However, allegations of child sexual abuse are also mentioned in applications that did not meet the criteria for being eligible for compensation.  It is important to note that an applicant's story as summarized by the Redress Board often contains allegations about several types of abuse, which sometimes occurred at various placements during the applicant's childhood—thus, the sexual abuse was one abuse amongst several. Determining why the incidents of sexual abuse did not meet the eligibility criteria required us to return to the decision texts and subject them to close readings. Special attention was directed towards how the Redress Board balanced a recognition of the victims' suffering against their understanding of how the state's responsibility for past abuse in outof-home care should be comprehended, based on their interpretation of the Redress Act and the Government Bill.

31The information collected guarantees the applicants' privacy in accordance with the Ethical Review Act that guides any research involving living persons in Sweden, and the research project was approved by the Regional Ethical Vetting Committee in Linköping on 10 March 2015.

Let us take a closer look at the 215 rejected applications in our sample that contained information about sexual abuse and the grounds upon which they were rejected.

Table 13.1 presents the grounds for rejection in relation to the criteria that outlined the Swedish scheme's money logic. In a previous article, we presented the four criteria in more detail, concluding that, among other things, the credibility criterion inherited a requirement that the applicant must have the capacity to provide details of traumatic experiences.32 In Table 13.1, we can see that 28 of the 215 applications containing reports of sexual abuse failed to meet this requirement or failed to present suffcient evidence for the board to presume that the applicant had indeed been exposed to severe abuse. Five applications were also rejected because the applicant abstained from the legal process—that is, he or she did not

**Table 13.1** Grounds for decisions to reject the application among the applications containing reports of sexual abuse

*Grounds for decisions to reject the application among the applications containing reports of sexual abuse*

Comment: As some applications were rejected with reference to several grounds, the total number of grounds (236) exceeds the total number of applications (*n* = 215)

32 Sköld, Sandin, and Schiratzki, Historical Justice Through, 15.

appear at the oral hearing or made a renewed application without adding new information to the case.

When it comes to the care criterion, those whose abuse occurred after 1980 (6) or who were not taken into care under any of the Child Welfare Acts specifed in the Redress Act (27) were not eligible for compensation, no matter how severe the sexual abuse may have been. The second most common ground for rejecting applications containing information about child sexual abuse was the conjunction with the care criterion, which we will comment on in the second section of this chapter. First, we turn to the severe abuse criterion, which was the most common ground for rejecting applications.

Of 215 rejected applications in our sample in which the applicant had reported child sexual abuse, 89 were rejected because the abuse was not considered to meet the severe abuse criterion. What kinds of sexual abuse were not considered severe enough?

It is not easy to establish a rationale for how to group incidents of child sexual abuse. Any categorization carries the risk of trivializing the suffering of the applicants. However, in order to gain an overview of the reported abuses that were not considered severe enough by the Redress Board, we have distinguished between hands-off and hands-on abuse, because such a distinction might have infuenced the decisions of the board. A similar distinction was made in one of the preceding government offcial reports.34

Table 13.2 shows several categories of hands-off sexual abuse that were not considered severe enough to entitle the applicant to compensation. For example, 11 applications contained allegations of perpetrators exposing their genitals or masturbating in front of the applicant. This might

33Government Bill 2011/12:160, 25.

34Government Offcial Reports 2011:61.

 Age was a decisive factor: the younger the child, the more serious the abuse was considered to be.36 Nevertheless, the Government Bill only stated in one section how age could matter:

The younger or more helpless the child is, the greater the responsibility the home [the caregiver, our interpretation] has for the child's protection. With

35Each case in our sample is provided with a number. This number does not correspond to the original reference number in the archive, only to the number in our database. This is due to the Swedish Ethical Review Act that guides us to safeguard the applicants' privacy. Therefore, the decisions' original reference numbers were redacted when we collected the data from the archive. All decisions are preserved in the National Archive, The Redress Board's Archive, 3.2-17 Kopior på beslut i ansökningsärenden, avidentiferade.

36Persson et al., Tillämpningen av ersättningslagen, 18.

increasing age and maturity, however, children become more independent and the protective role of the caregivers changes and becomes more diffcult to some extent.37

This refects that if the applicant was understood as a young child at the time of the abuse, the state, through its representatives, was responsible for what happened, but if he or she was older (mature), the caregivers and hence the state—could not be expected to protect this young person.

If we now turn to the hands-on abuses listed in Table 13.2, most of the allegations concern applicants being fondled over their clothes (36) or under their clothing (29). In some cases, the applicant has not been able to verbalize in more concrete ways what happened.  It is stated in the board's decision that the applicant had trouble giving a more detailed description of what had happened (case 2014:326). Consequently, this narrative is categorized as fondling, although it might have encompassed even more serious abuse. Fondling beneath clothing includes several cases in which the perpetrator touched or masturbated the child's genitals.

In addition, ten applications reported that the child was forced to masturbate or touch the perpetrator, which also did not qualify as severe abuse, according to the board. Nine of these ten applications concern cases in which the child had been forced to masturbate or touch an adult carer, and one case concerned peer-to-peer abuse—a boy who was sexually abused by his ten-year-older foster brother (case 2015:407). It is diffcult to extract the motivation as to why this category did not count as severe abuse, but it is apparent that the board did not assess these cases as gross sexual abuse nor as frequent "serious violations and repeated abuse or neglect meant to seriously harm the child's self-esteem."38 Some of these decisions contain information that the abuse happened only once or twice, which perhaps did not count as frequent. In one case (2013:135), however, a boy was molested by his foster mother on frequent occasions (two or three times a week) in a foster home where the applicant claimed to have been placed for about two years. The board, in contrast, argued that the archival documents could only support a claim that the applicant had been placed in this foster home for about two weeks. The board explicitly

37Government Bill 2011/12:160, 20.

38Government Bill 2011/12:160, 25.

stated in its decision that such a short period of time was suffcient to conclude that the abuse was not severe.

This case demonstrates that the archival documentation was pivotal for the assessment of the severity of abuse. While archival documentation was needed to prove an applicant's custodial status, the Government Bill also stated that an applicant "should present evidence to the board to presume that the applicant, in conjunction with care, had been exposed to severe abuse or neglect."39 The Bill gives a few examples of how severe abuse may be evidenced through archival documentation or by calling witnesses, but it does not explicitly mention that archival documentation on placement periods should trump the applicant's narrative. This is an effect of the board's interpretation of the Bill. However, previous research, as well as one of the inquiry reports foregrounding the redress scheme, have demonstrated the diffculty of following a child's journey through the child welfare system based on child welfare records. Documents may be missing, incomplete, or inaccurate.40 Consequently, child welfare records must be treated with caution, and their veracity can only be determined in light of how complete the whole case record appears to be. We do not know the status of the child welfare record in the above-mentioned case, only that the Redress Board found archival documents that contradicted the applicant's narrative.

 Our sample of applications rejected because the sexual abuse was not considered severe enough contains fve cases of rape and six cases of attempted rape. As the same individuals reported both attempted and completed rape in some cases, nine individuals were affected by these decisions to reject the application—two men and seven women.

The two men both reported rape. One of them was between 11 and 15 years of age when he was raped by another boy at an institution (case 2013:102). This happened once, and despite the fact that the applicant told the staff, no one reacted. The other boy was 11 years old when a female staff member at an institution forced him to have intercourse with her on three occasions (case 2013:211). Without being explicitly stated in the decision, it is possible that the board deemed this a voluntary act because the decision text also contains information that the applicant and

39Government Bill 2011/12:160, 17.

40 Sköld, Foberg, and Hedström, Conficting or Complementing Narratives?

other boys used to peep beneath this woman's skirt because she wore no underwear. The fact that the boy was only 11 years old when the sexual abuse took place was not taken into consideration.

Three women also reported having been raped as children in care, all by adult men.  Interestingly, one of these decisions to reject the application was decided on by a divergent board. Two board members opposed the decision, but as the chair of the board had the casting vote, the decision to reject the application was upheld anyway. The case concerns a 14-year-old girl who was raped once by her foster father after he got her drunk. The dissenting members of the board argued that the applicant should be compensated because the foster father took advantage of her sense of security in the home and got her into a helpless state by giving her alcohol.  The board cited in its ruling a statement in the Government Bill that the assessment must not "completely ignore conditions that today would generate the same settlement of damages as the proposed compensation."41

This quote indicates that the assessment of the severity of abuse should relate to contemporary tort law, despite the fact that the purpose was not to compensate for concrete damages as in a tort case but to symbolically acknowledge the victims' unjustifable suffering.42 In contrast to tort cases, where a lower settlement of damages would be an option, the Swedish redress scheme had only two possible outcomes—the claimant either received SEK 250,000 or nothing at all. This comparison between a fat payment *ex gratia* response and a tort settlement had negative consequences for many applicants, as the above-mentioned case exemplifes, because tort settlements in Swedish practice are normally low compared to other national standards. For example, the suggested compensation for a child rape victim at the time when the redress board adjudicated the cases was SEK 100,000 upwards, according to the Swedish Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority (*Brottsoffermyndigheten*).43 In a previous article, we argued that the extent to which contemporary tort law

41Government Bill 2011/12:160, 25.

42Government Bill 2011/12:160, 27.

43Brottsoffermyndigheten, *Brottsoffermyndighetens referatsamling*, 32–5.

came to infuence the assessment of these historical redress claims was probably not foreseen during the political process leading up to the establishment of the Redress Act.44 The symbolic acknowledgment of victims' unjustifed suffering was translated into a legal assessment of historical abuse in accordance with contemporary tort law, which does not seem to be intentional and was not included in the ambitions of Parliament when they settled for an *ex gratia* payment. In such cases, the legal/judicial practice seems to have obscured the explicit political intention.

### The Web of Criteria and Rejected Child Sexual Abuse Victims

Even if an applicant's report of sexual abuse qualifed as severe abuse according to the board's assessment, other criteria could still disqualify the applicant from being awarded compensation. In this section, we turn to the conjunction with the care criterion that, after severe abuse, was the most common ground for rejecting applications containing information about child sexual abuse. As we will show, this criterion was complex, and it often had paradoxical consequences for applicants. We take the conjunction with the care criterion as a case study for how the character and extent of the state's responsibility overshadow the recognition of victims' suffering. Finally, we will present a few decisions to reject the application that have proven diffcult to categorize because they appear incomprehensible to us.

The conjunction with the care criterion means that the abuse must have occurred within the institution or foster home, not outside it (for example, at school, in hospital, when the child had run away, etc.). In addition—and this is a more critical dimension of the conjunction with the care criterion—the caregivers, if they were not themselves the perpetrators, had to be considered to have been aware of the abuse and would have had to have deliberately chosen to refrain from taking preventive action.45 We have previously shown that this criterion in effect meant that, if the applicant admitted that as a child, he or she did not tell anyone about the abuse committed by someone other than the caregiver, the application was rejected.46 This is exactly what happened in 43 of the 215 rejected

44 Schiratzki, Sköld, and Sandin, Redress in Context, 8.

45Government Bill 2011/12:160, 19–20.

46 Sköld, Sandin, and Schiratzki, Historical Justice Through, 186.

applications containing information about sexual abuse. It is possible that these applications contain information about gross sexual abuse, but because the applicants did not tell anyone, their caregivers were not aware of the abuse and thus could not act to prevent it from happening again.

However, during a close reading of decisions to reject the application referring to the conjunction with the care criterion, we found at least 12 cases where the decision text contained indications that the caregivers were indeed aware of the abuse. The board rejected these cases anyway. Why? One example concerns a boy aged between 13 and 15 who was sexually abused by two male friends of his foster mother. The frst perpetrator abused him on six or seven occasions, mostly at the male perpetrator's home but once in the foster home. The applicant disclosed the abuse when he was moved to another foster home, which eventually led to a trial where the male perpetrator was convicted. According to the applicant, it was revealed during the trial that this man had also tried to lure other children to come home with him. He was infamous and rumored to be a pedophile. In the decision text, it is claimed that the applicant never personally told his foster mother he was residing with at the time of the abuse, but that he believes she knew about it. The second male perpetrator was a neighbor of the foster parents, and he sexually abused the applicant on four or fve occasions. The applicant never told his foster mother about this. In the motivation for the decision to reject the application, which included an assessment of the violations of both perpetrators, the board states:

Nothing has indicated that the foster parents knew or had reason to suspect abuse. Therefore, they cannot be considered to have failed in their responsibility to care for the applicant in the manner required for the abuse to entitle [the applicant] to compensation.47

Despite clear indications, such as rumors about one of the perpetrators being a pedophile and an alleged guilty verdict, the board concluded that there was nothing to indicate that the foster parents knew about the abuse. The decision text does not reveal whether the board made efforts to track down the trial verdict. However, had they done so, a non-existent verdict would almost certainly have been mentioned in the decision, as would a verdict that could support or contradict the applicant's narrative.

47Case 2014:347.

An even more delicate aspect of the conjunction with the care criterion is that we found seven applications rejected on the ground that the caregivers became aware of abuse and acted to prevent it. Therefore, the caregivers had not failed in their responsibility to care for the applicant, according to the Redress Board's assessment, even if they had failed to protect the child from abuse. Consequently, the conjunction with the care criterion resulted in a paradox in which the applicant was damned if he or she did not tell anyone about the abuse but also damned if he or she did disclose the abuse and the caregivers acted upon it. A passage in the Government Bill was decisive in such cases:

In order to assess whether the child in such cases has been exposed to abuse or neglect in conjunction with care, one must take into consideration what a home [caregiver, our clarifcation] normally could have been expected to be aware of or act upon. If the home has taken responsibility and demonstrated such care concerns as are expected, it cannot be claimed that faws have occurred in conjunction with care.48

Case 2013:97 demonstrates how this passage was put into effect. The applicant was sexually abused as a seven-year-old girl by a man who was a tenant in the foster home. He used to lie on top of her and ejaculate, and he also photographed her genitals while threatening her with severe consequences if she told anyone. On one occasion, the foster mother discovered them. The foster mother took the applicant out of the room and gave *her* a spanking. After this incident, the applicant was moved to stay for a short period of time with a female friend of the foster mother. When the applicant returned to the foster home, the man was gone.

Interestingly, in its motivation for the decision to reject the application, the board does not say much about the abuse to which the applicant had been exposed but more about whether "normal care concerns could have prevented what occurred [the abuse]." With explicit reference to the Bill, the board concludes that "It has emerged that the applicant's foster mother acted to protect the applicant when the sexual abuse was disclosed. The foster parents cannot therefore be considered to have failed in their responsibilities."49 It is signifcant that both the Bill and the decision of the board rests on the premise that it was suffcient that the caregiver acted

48Government Bill 2011/12:160, 20.

49Case 2013:197.

after the abuse had taken place in order to fulfl his or her responsibilities.

This passage in the Government Bill together with the board's interpretation of it exemplify how the redress scheme came to shift and narrow its focus from the victim to the limits of the state's responsibility. The purpose of the scheme—to acknowledge victims' unjustifable suffering by offering redress—was downplayed in favor of a focus on proving whether the caregivers (the representatives of the state) had failed in their responsibilities or not. The abuse in itself was not regarded as a legitimate claim for compensation. Instead of redressing historical child abuse, the scheme came to accept it.

Finally, three applications containing information about sexual abuse were rejected for reasons that must be explained with reference to fragmentation and distinctions made between single events of abuse. The board had an obligation to make an overall assessment of each applicant's abuse according to the Government Bill, but it seems to have failed to do so in a couple of cases that cannot be understood otherwise. Incomprehensible decisions are particularly delicate within a redress scheme in which the applicant had no right to appeal the board's decision, as in this Swedish scheme.50 Two of the three incomprehensible decisions to reject the application concern cases in which the sexual abuse was ignored in the motivation the board gave for its decision, while other incidents listed in these cases were disqualifed with reference to other criteria.

In case 2014:275, the applicant claimed compensation on the grounds that she had been sexually and physically abused, offensively treated, and exploited as a laborer during numerous placements at several institutions and foster homes. She had been sent back and forth to out-of-home care from the ages 2 to 3.5 years and from 12 to 18 years. The sexual abuse occurred in a foster home where she stayed for a short period of time as a teenager (a week, according to the archival documentation). The foster father used to touch her genitals beneath her clothing and on one occasion pushed his fngers into her anus. In its decision, the board motivated its rejection by stating that the volume of individual placements was not a

50While the board's decision could not be appealed against, those who received a rejection before the redress scheme's closing date—31 December 2014—could make a renewed application before that date. In a few cases, the redress board reconsidered its frst decision if the board members agreed that new decisive information had been added to the case. See Schiratzki, Sköld, and Sandin, Redress in Context, 114.

ground for compensation, and moreover, the placement periods were very short, and therefore, the abuse could not be considered severe. The sexual abuse was not even mentioned in the motivation. We argue that this is an example of how the board came to fragment the applicants' narratives so that a childhood with a lot of different experiences of abuse in many different locations did not ft the outline of the money logic, whereby each incident had to meet all the different criteria. This case also shows that the board did not meet the requirement of the Government Bill to make an overall assessment of the child's vulnerable situation—the child had been moved from place to place and abused constantly in different ways, including sexually, for many years.

### Conclusions

This chapter demonstrates how, during its practical operation, a redress scheme can shift away from its explicit aim to acknowledge the victims' unjustifable suffering, moving instead to conditioning victims' interests in relation to the state's interest in only granting compensation for abuse for which the state could be considered responsible. While some aspects of this shift were detectable in the Government Bill, and therefore must have been obvious to, if not intended by, the designers of the scheme—the Swedish parliament—other aspects are effects of the legal operation that were probably diffcult for politicians to foresee. The devil is in the details, and, in this chapter, we have outlined which details were pivotal for why 215 victims of experiences of child sexual abuse did not receive compensation from the Swedish fnancial redress institution. We have identifed several possible explanations for this.

Firstly, the Government Bill did not state that all kinds of sexual abuse would count as severe abuse eligible for compensation. Instead, the Bill made a distinction between gross sexual abuse that clearly would be compensated for and "serious violations and repeated abuse or neglect meant to seriously harm the child's self-esteem" that would also be compensated for if occurring frequently. Consequently, the text of the Bill urged the Redress Board to consider some child sexual abuse as being insuffciently severe. Our data demonstrate that the board certainly did not evaluate sexually abusive acts—such as fondling, the perpetrator exposing his or her genitals, masturbating in front of the child, or forcing the child to touch or masturbate the perpetrator—as serious violations, even if they occurred frequently. Moreover, not even rapes or attempted rapes by caregivers were considered gross sexual abuse or serious violations if they only happened once or occurred during a placement of only a short duration. Such experiences of child sexual abuse were consequently not considered grounds for redress.

Secondly, a less obvious detail that came to infuence the board's decisions is how the historical abuse described by the applicants compared to current understandings of compensation under tort case law. While the Redress Inquiry argued that contemporary tort case law should not apply when the government was issuing an *ex gratia* payment as a symbol to acknowledge the victims' unjustifed suffering, the Government Bill, on the contrary, suggested that the defnition of severe abuse "could not ignore circumstances that today might lead to equally high damages as the proposed compensation."51 In the internal guidelines of the Redress Board, this was expanded upon when it was stated that the board, in defning severe abuse, should "glance at what is required for settlement of damages of SEK 250,000 in a corresponding situation."52 As tort case compensation in Sweden is rather low compared to other national standards, a single event of abuse, even if it concerned child rape, could not easily reach SEK 250,000 in contemporary tort case damages.

In effect, the compensation amount set the standards of what counted as severe abuse, which prioritized a legalistic view of the responsibilities of the state over the victims' experiences of sexual abuse and suffering, as well as need for redress. The extent to which contemporary tort law would infuence the assessment of the historical redress claims once the law was passed was probably not foreseen by the politicians in Parliament. This is an important reminder for designers of forthcoming schemes internationally to be observant about how other contemporary legislation can relate and shape the court practice of redress schemes.

Thirdly, the ambition to both acknowledge the suffering caused by the experiences of severe child abuse in welfare institutions and to assess the responsibility of the state in legal terms proved diffcult to combine. This resulted in renewed experiences of suffering within the welfare state institutions. Ultimately, this had devastating effects for applicants who were able to prove they were severely abused, including grossly sexually abused, while in municipal out-of-home care, but were still not granted the

52National Archive (Riksarkivet), Utredningen av inrättande av Ersättningsnämndens arkiv, volume 7, Ewerlöf, G. *Processbeskrivning*, 1 December 2012, 24.

51Government Bill 2011/12:160, 25.

compensation or the state's acknowledgement of their suffering. A signifcant factor here was the details in the outlining of the conjunction with the care criterion, and how they were interpreted by the Redress Board. This criterion explicitly states that compensation could only be granted for abuse for which the state, through its representatives—the caregivers could be proven responsible. The Bill specifed that the state could only be held responsible for abuse occurring within the home and in cases where the caregivers either were themselves the perpetrators or deliberately refrained from taking preventive action for abuse of which they were aware.53 The effects in legal practice of these details of the Bill were probably diffcult to foresee.

One of the most surprising and disturbing results of our study is that applicants ended up in a catch-22 situation. They were denied compensation if they had acted as many child abuse victims do by remaining silent for fear of the consequences and not being believed, or perhaps because they did not understand the full ramifcations of what had happened to them. They were equally denied compensation if they had spoken up or if the caregivers found out about the abuse in other ways and acted upon it *after* the abuse had occurred. The caregivers were not held responsible if they did not know or if they knew and had taken some action to prevent further abuse. The fact that caregivers had not been able to protect the children from abuse did not make them responsible in the eyes of the board. Instead of pursuing the message that child abuse within out-ofhome care is always the adult caregivers'—and ultimately the state's responsibility, the message to claimants who failed to receive fnancial compensation was that the victims are to blame if they do not speak up, or that no one is to blame for severe abuse in out-of-home care. We argue that this is not at all compatible with the Swedish redress scheme's explicit aim to acknowledge the experiences of victims of historical child abuse in out-of-home care.54

53Government Bill 2011/12:160, 19–20.

54This research was funded by Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, Forte Dnr 2014-0279.

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