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This chapter focuses on ways of giving voice to the survivors of institutional abuse and how their contribution can be capitalised in raising community awareness of this phenomenon. The collection of testimonies demonstrates that institutional abuse is a common and widespread phenomenon that in most cases remains unrevealed throughout the life course. The participatory research process we describe is part of an important social and clinical intervention developed in the framework of two projects. The chapter illustrates outputs and outcomes related to disclosure of institutional abuse and its long-term consequences, as well as the meaning and implications of collective trauma. Results confirm the need to promote the voice of survivors to build a new professional and community culture and sensitisation towards children's right to be heard as an essential instrument to prevent and detect institutional ill treatment. Participatory processes can overcome the resistance of individuals, professional communities and politicians to recognising the phenomenon, emphasising institutional responsibilities and the specific effects of a serious form of maltreatment that requires extraordinary and specific interventions in terms of intensity and flexibility. This chapter describes a fieldwork and research experience made possible thanks to a strong alliance with survivors who engaged in a process of reflection and theoretical elaboration that generated both social and clinical impacts.

Since 1980s, institutional child sexual abuse has been ‘discovered’ as an internationally recognisable social problem. Public inquiries have become the most dominant mode of response to this, having been enacted throughout much of the western world. Driven by demands from victims/survivors for collective recognition, these have drawn on features of transitional justice as an important means of truth telling. While the role of survivors in precipitating the enactment of public inquiries has been well documented, less well understood is how social activism has been influenced in the aftermath of such inquiries. In this chapter, the authors explore a local phenomenon known as Loud Fence that arose in the Australian town of Ballarat as a case study to consider the relationship between activism and social change that can occur in the wake of official truth telling.

Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.

This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.

The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union. ¹

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

Issues and developments that have occurred in relation to elder abuse, specifically concerning the domestic setting, will be briefly explored. Over the last 15 years, there has been increasing global recognition of abuse and neglect of older people who might be at risk of such forms of harm, as a social problem needing attention. The role of the media and media representations of elder abuse are clearly of relevance here and are the main focus of this chapter.

Around 500,000 older people are believed to be abused at any one time in the United Kingdom, with most victims of elder abuse being older women with a chronic illness or disability, according to statistics provided by the government information service (NHS Digital, 2019). Most of the abuse recorded relates to domestic settings within communities.

Gender-based violence and abuse amongst older women may be overlooked by health and social care providers. For older women, their gender seems to be forgotten or becomes hidden. Media representation of abuse against older people, particularly older women, does not assist this situation.

Against the backdrop of the global ageing population, it is fundamental that the particular experiences, needs and rights of older people are adequately understood, and that health and care professionals respond appropriately. This chapter explores these issues, in particular the role of the digital media and representations of elder abuse in familial settings and its impact on victims, potential victims, perpetrators, health and social care service providers and the general public.

This chapter focuses on resident-to-resident elder aggression (RREA), aggression and violence that occurs between residents of nursing homes. Building on international literature and own research data from individual, qualitative interviews with professional staff from five nursing homes in Belgium, this chapter aims to increase knowledge on this specific type of elder abuse and mistreatment. First, this chapter describes the different types and manifestations of RREA, and pays attention to the relationship between perpetrator and victim, the multiple possible situations of offending, prevalence, location of the aggression, and impacts on the victim. Second, this chapter provides understanding on the triggers and onset of RREA in a nursing home, using the ecological framework looking at risk factors on individual/micro/exo/macro level. Finally, this chapter explores policy and practice on how to deal with RREA.