The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ran from 2013 – 2017 with the mammoth task of examining institutional failures to protect children from child sexual abuse across Australia. In the course of the Commission, over 8,000 adult survivors gave verbal testimony about their abuse, while others submitted their stories in writing. In my research on the Royal Commission, survivors described being “treated like the Queen”. At each step of the process, from the very first phone call to the personally signed thank-you card after they spoke, the Royal Commission impressed upon survivors their importance and the worth of their testimony.

When the Royal Commission was first announced, I was a skeptic. It looked to me to be the latest in a long line of public inquiries into institutional abuse that had accomplished little over the years. But I became a convert over the course of the Commission, as it crafted processes and spaces in which survivors felt not just safe but valued even as they described experiences of sexual abuse and betrayal. The Commission was courageous in the way that it conspicuously allied itself with survivors, and challenged those vested interests that prefer silence over justice.

Sexual violation and institutional betrayal are deeply embodied experiences; they are saturated in shame and humiliation, in particular. The Royal Commission offered survivors an opposing experience, one that I’ve come to call “institutional dignity”. In her work, Donna Hicks (Hicks, 2011, p. 1) defines dignity as “an internal state of peace that comes with the recognition and acceptance of the value and vulnerability of all living things”. For me, this definition captures how survivors felt in the Royal Commission but also the underlying principles that shaped the response of the Commission to them: everyone is valuable and vulnerable simultaneously.

In my work with research colleagues, including Heather Hall and Rebecca Moran, “dignity” has become an important concept in articulating how we want survivors to feel in institutional responses to sexual violence. I worked as an expert advisor to the Royal Commission and I was struck by how uplifted I felt just being a part of a dignifying institution. For me, the Royal Commission proved that betrayal and failure are not inevitable features of institutional responses to sexual violence, and that institutional responses can be personally and socially transformative – not just for survivors, but for all of us.

Hicks, D. (2011). Dignity: The essential role it plays in resolving conflict. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.