The discursive production of public inquiries: The case of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Since the turn of the century, public inquiries into the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse within religious institutions have proliferated throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. This article examines the role that news media discourses might play in supporting this trend. Taking Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a case study, I compare how news media constructed its precipitating issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church at two different points in time: the period surrounding the announcement of the Royal Commission and a period 10 years earlier when calls were made for a Royal Commission that were not actualised. I find that in the decade before the Royal Commission’s establishment news media deemed the Church capable of and responsible for delivering justice, and as such licensed it to respond to allegations of abuse internally. In the period surrounding the Royal Commission’s establishment, however, the Church was rendered complicit and had lost its authority to manage the issue internally, while the State had become marked as responsible for recourse instead. This suggests that the emergence of the Royal Commission was imbricated in broader discursive shifts regarding which institution was attributed the right and responsibility to respond. These findings both indicate that news media discourses may play a role in facilitating or inhibiting the emergence of public inquiries and also raise critical questions about the consequences of a discursive shift that centres the State as responsible for and capable of delivering justice in the aftermath of institutional child sexual abuse.

Keywords

Catholic Church child sexual abuse public inquiries Royal Commission news media

Introduction

Since the turn of the century, public inquiries into the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse within religious and other institutions have proliferated throughout Europe, North America and Australasia (Gallen, 2016; Swain et al., 2018; Terry, 2015; Wright et al., 2017b). In Australia, at least 13 public inquiries have been established since the mid-1980s that have either directly investigated or reported upon the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse by religious ministers (Boxall et al., 2014; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RC), 2017a: 4–9; Swain, 2014). The proliferation of these public inquiries signifies, as Salter (2016: 87) attests, that they have become ‘an increasingly common method through which governments respond to critical child protection incidents and public concern about child abuse’. This article contributes to the growing body of scholarship dedicated to examining this trend (see Sköld and Swain, 2015). Taking Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a case study, this article explores the role that news media discourses may play in either inhibiting or supporting the emergence of such responses.

Criminology needs to attend to the increased role that public inquiries are performing as State responses to institutional child sexual abuse. The perpetration of child sexual abuse, particularly institutional child sexual abuse, is an issue that criminal legal systems have consistently ignored, exacerbated or failed to adequately address (Balboni and Bishop, 2010; Daly, 2014; Ellis and Ellis, 2014; Gallen, 2016; Gleeson, 2018; McAlinden, 2006; Smart, 1989; Townsley, 2007). In this context, the conditions that moderate the establishment of public inquiries also moderate when and how these harms become recognisable to the State and its legal apparatus. Moreover, public inquiries have the potential to be structurally transformative – that is, to facilitate the social and legal change needed to prevent future instances of harm, and to offer victims new avenues for seeking redress which may have been unattainable through criminal proceedings alone (Balint et al., 2016; Gallen, 2016; Salter, 2020; Wright and Swain, 2018; Wright et al., 2017a). As such, if the State is to be responsible for ‘doing justice’ (see Balint, 2012), and if public inquiries have become one of the ways that States promise to fulfil that responsibility in relation to institutional child sexual abuse, then the conditions that facilitate their emergence must be understood in the interests of justice.

Scholars have already identified several factors involved in the rise of public inquiries. Wright and Henry (2019) have argued that victim advocacy and activism played a key role in the production of public inquiries in the Australian context, for instance. Swain (2015: 83), meanwhile, has identified a confluence of discursive shifts in the social and political sphere that have supported the rise of public inquiries by rendering child sexual abuse articulable as ‘a cause of national moral concern’. The literature on public inquiries more broadly accounts for an array of political factors that support their establishment, showing that public inquiries both require and support the consolidation of the State’s interests in relation to any given issue (Ashforth, 1990; Balint et al., 2016; Eburn and Dovers, 2015; Gilligan, 2002; Marchetti, 2006; Prasser and Tracey, 2014; Razack, 2015; Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2010). In this article, I suggest that an additional factor ought to be considered: that is, the role that news media discourses might play in supporting or inhibiting the establishment of a public inquiry.

The power that news media discourses wield to affect social and legal responses to crime is a crucial factor to consider. Media criminologists have shown that news media constructions drive popular understandings of crime and affect public consensus on the appropriateness of different responses to it (see Barak, 2012; Greer, 2008). Barak (2012: 376) has argued that news media is so influential in this regard that it is ‘difficult, if not impossible, to clearly distinguish between the perception, reaction, and production of crime and justice’. Yet the power of news media constructions is particularly pertinent in the present context given that news media is one of the most dominant institutions involved in the construction of child sexual abuse in the contemporary era (Greer, 2003; Mejia et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2014; Olafson et al., 1993; Popović, 2018; Weatherred, 2015, 2017). Weatherred (2015: 17) contends as such, writing that for many people ‘news media are the main and possibly only source of information about CSA [child sexual abuse]’. Accordingly, scholars have investigated how news media constructions of child sexual abuse affect public conceptions of and attitudes towards child abuse itself, including the nature of the abuse, its victims and its perpetrators (Donnelly and Inglis, 2010; Mancini and Shields, 2014; Schofield, 2004; Weatherred, 2015). Scholars have also investigated the effects that news media constructions of child abuse have had on the quantity and kind of reporting that victims and their supporters make to authorities (McDevitt, 1996; Saint-Jacques et al., 2012), as well as the role that these constructions play in affecting how governments respond to it (Davidson, 2008; Kitzinger and Skidmore, 1995). The relationship between news media reporting about institutional child sexual abuse and the rise of public inquiries in response to it has not yet received scholarly attention, however.

As such, this article takes the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a case study to explore this relationship. Australian Royal Commissions are quasi-judicial public inquiries that governments establish ostensibly to investigate an issue of public concern and to make recommendations regarding how they ought to respond to it (Gilligan, 2002; Prasser, 2006). In form, Australian Royal Commissions evolved from and emulate similar modes of public inquiry that have been or are still practised in the United Kingdom as well as several former and continuing British colonies. They are formally appointed by letters patent from the Crown, which are issued at the government’s request, operate according to terms of reference which are outlined in those letters, and are statutorily vested with extra-judicial coercive powers, including the ability to compel testimony, seize protected evidence and serve compulsory summons (Prasser, 2006). These features grant Royal Commissions the status of Australia’s most prestigious and most powerful public inquiries (Prasser, 2006) and as such they are established, as Wright and Swain (2018: 148) attest, ‘only in exceptional circumstances to deal with issues of major significance’.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (hereafter ‘the Royal Commission’) is an apt case to consider because it is an exemplary instance of a public inquiry dedicated to institutional child sexual abuse. The Royal Commission ran between 13th January 2013 and the 15th December 2017 and was guided by terms of reference that were both inquisitorial and advisory in scope. It was instructed to produce a comprehensive account of the nature, causes, and scope of institutional child sexual abuse, and to make recommendations for institutional, policy, and legislative reforms that might provide victims with new mechanisms for redress as well as prevent future instances of harm.¹ It earned the titles of Australia’s lengthiest and most expensive Royal Commission, having run for more than 5 years and cost more than 342 million dollars (RC, 2017a: 172).² It has also achieved the highest level of public visibility and participation of any Royal Commission, having handled 42,041 calls, received 25,964 letters and emails and held 8,013 private sessions.³ On this basis, Wright et al. (2017a: 1; see also Salter, 2020: 218–219; Wright and Swain, 2018) argue that the Royal Commission was ‘one of the most important public inquiries into institutional child abuse globally’ and as such that it ‘warrants close attention from the international community’. Gleeson (2018: 735) notes, too, that the Royal Commission has earned a reputation as ‘an international high-water mark in the treatment of historical institutional child abuse’. This given, the Royal Commission’s conditions of emergence are important to understand both in their own right as well as to shine light on the mechanisms involved in the rise of public inquiries in general. The Royal Commission is also an apt site to investigate the role that news media discourses have played specifically in this regard as both popular and scholarly commentaries have already suggested that news media reporting supported its emergence (Wright and Henry, 2019: 2–3; Wright and Swain, 2018: 141–142; Wright et al., 2017a: 2–3). Waller et al. (2020: 181) have argued, for instance, that the news media helped to bring the Royal Commission into being by ‘breaking the silence around child sexual abuse’ and ‘rais[ing] the issue on to the public agenda’. The character of the news media’s contribution has not yet been interrogated, however.

This article unfolds in four sections to come. First, I outline the Royal Commission’s historical background. Second, I describe the method that I used to analyse the role that news media discourses may have played in supporting or inhibiting the Royal Commission’s emergence: namely, a comparative discourse analysis of news media reporting on ministerial child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in 2002–03, when a Royal Commission was called for but not actualised, compared to 2012–13, which was the period surrounding the announcement of the Royal Commission.⁴ In the final two sections, I unpack the details of that analysis, focusing first on how the character of key actor’s contributions, as well as the politics of their speaking position, changed over time, and second on how the content of news media discourse about ministerial child sexual abuse changed over time. Collectively, these sections suggest that the Royal Commission emerged in the context of a broad discursive shift not in how the issue of ministerial child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was constructed per se but in how it was characterised as an issue of law. News media discourses had shifted from framing the Church as responsible for and capable of responding to the issue internally towards framing the Church as immoral and complicitous, and the State had become marked as responsible for delivering justice in its place.

Prologue: The road to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

The establishment of a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church had been routinely demanded and consistently rejected in the Australian public sphere for decades before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse came into being (RC, 2017a: 2).⁵ Catholic ministers had been organising, perpetrating and concealing child sexual abuse in Australia on an immense scale throughout the 20th century and this gradually became the subject of public knowledge from the early 1980s onwards (RC, 2017b: 123).⁶ The Church itself was aware and actively concealing the extent of the problem, indicated by the recurrence of child sexual abuse as a central agenda items for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference from the late 1980s onwards (RC, 2017b: 299–302). The Australian public was also made aware as victims began to speak publicly about the harms perpetrated against them as children and as feminist consciousness-raising contributed to a discourse of ‘discovery’ emerging around child sexual abuse (Daly, 2014: 8; Salter, 2016). Discussions of cover-ups by State and Church authorities surfaced in the public sphere and calls were made for formal investigations to be launched, but a Royal Commission did not eventuate.

The issue of ministerial child sexual abuse was a prominent subject in the Australian public sphere in the 1990s, as it was elsewhere in the West (Donnelly and Inglis, 2010; Mancini and Shields, 2014). Hill (2005) reports that the 1990s featured an ‘avalanche of abuse complaints flowing from Australian church communities’, and that as a consequence the Church began publicly responding to the mounting allegations. In 1996, the Church introduced its Melbourne Response and Toward Healing investigatory and compensation schemes. These schemes claimed to formally address allegations of child sexual abuse, yet in practice were adversarial, disbelieving, accusatory, unresponsive and operated primarily in the Church’s interests (Ellis and Ellis, 2014; RC 2015a, 2015b, 2017b: 311–334). Meanwhile, between 1993 and 2002, at least 80 Catholic priests and brothers were convicted of sexual offences in Australian courts, and more than 60 received jail sentences (Porter, 2003: 95). These cases documented testimony regarding the widespread and systemic nature of abuse perpetrated by Catholic ministers and this became the subject of substantial media attention (Finnane and Smaal, 2016). On the back of this, calls for a Royal Commission were made repeatedly in the public sphere by victims, politicians, Church ministers, as well as members of the public (Marr, 2014: 71). Yet, state and federal governments consistently rejected these calls. When calls for a Royal Commission were made during the trial of serial offender Gerald Ridsdale in 1993, for instance, Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett declared that child sexual abuse is ‘a matter for the Catholic Church to resolve itself with its constituency and with the community’ (Marr, 2014: 71–72).

Calls for a Royal Commission continued throughout the 2000s. Internationally, public attention regarding ministerial child sexual abuse intensified following the laicisation, prosecution and custodial murder of Boston priest John Geoghan in the United States and the surrounding Boston Globe investigation (Dale and Alpert, 2007; Dixon, 2004). Meanwhile in Australia in 2002–03, there were calls for a Royal Commission in the wake of allegations of abuse and cover-up made against George Pell, who at the time was the figurehead of the Catholic Church in Australia, and the then Governor-General Peter Hollingworth (Marr, 2014: 6–7; Milligan, 2017: chap. 7). Pell was, and in many ways still is, what Milligan (2017) terms ‘a true Catholic celebrity’: he had been appointed to the Australian Catholic Church’s most senior post as Archbishop of Sydney in 2001, after having been Archbishop of Melbourne since 1996, and had built a prominent public profile. He had been closely involved in the Church’s handling of child sexual abuse allegations since the mid-1990s, and in 2002 was accused of having sexually abused a 12-year-old boy 40 years earlier when he was a student priest at an altar boys’ camp (Milligan, 2017: chap. 7). Hollingworth, meanwhile, was accused of mishandling child sexual abuse allegations during his tenure as the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane. These allegations provoked the Australian Democrats Senator Andrew Murray to call for a Royal Commission in the Australian parliament on the 19th of June 2002, where he argued that:

Something is terribly amiss if the Australian government can ignore the pressing moral and social imperative and urgent need for a royal commission into the sexual assault of vulnerable children . . . Such is the growing public outrage in Australia about child sexual assault, and particularly the role of the churches in it, that we can no longer ignore the calls for a royal commission . . . They [churches] are not to be trusted to cure themselves, and they have breached their sacred mission. The state must therefore act.

Despite Murray’s call, a Royal Commission did not eventuate. However, nearly a year later, on the 13th May 2003, the question of whether a Royal Commission should be instituted was debated again after Labor Senator John Faulkner delivered a motion that demanded that the Prime Minister dismiss Hollingworth from the office of Governor-General and establish a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in religious settings. Faulkner’s Labor Party, the Australian Greens and the Australian Democrats supported the motion, giving it majority support. Yet, while the motion passed and Hollingworth resigned 16 days later, then Prime Minister John Howard refused to establish a Royal Commission (Marr, 2014: 6).

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse eventually came into being on the 13th of January 2013 following a resurgence of public concern regarding the perpetration of child sexual abuse by Catholic ministers. This was catalysed, in part, by the ‘whistle-blowing’ of Peter Fox, a former Detective Chief Inspector of the New South Wales Police (Marr, 2014: 9–17; Wright and Swain, 2018: 140–141). Fox had made allegations that the Church ‘covers up [abuse], silences victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests to protect the good name of the church’ in an open letter to the New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell and in an interview on the current affairs program Lateline (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2012; Fox, 2012). On these grounds, Fox called for a public inquiry, writing that ‘If this doesn’t warrant a royal commission something is very wrong’. An outpouring of public discourse on ministerial child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church followed in the aftermath of Fox’s letter. In the subsequent days, a Nielsen/Fairfax poll indicated that 95% of the public supported a Royal Commission, both of Australia’s major political parties announced their support, and George Pell – who had vehemently opposed the establishment of such an inquiry for decades prior – released a statement of support on behalf of the Catholic Bishops of Australia (Marr, 2014: 16). Four days after Fox’s Lateline interview, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Royal Commission.

Method: Investigating the role of news media discourses

That a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse within religious institutions, most often the Catholic Church specifically, had been called for but rejected for decades suggests that conditions had changed in 2013 to make its arrival possible. As I argued earlier, the role that news media discourses may have played in supporting or inhibiting the production of a Royal Commission ought to be considered. To analyse the relationship between news media discourses and the production of a Royal Commission into ministerial child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, I conducted a discourse analysis that compared how Australian newspapers discussed the issue of ministerial child sexual abuse during two different periods. I selected the first period, June 2002 to June 2003, because this was a period in which there was an abundance of calls made for a Royal Commission that did not eventuate. These calls were buoyed by the large volume of reporting on the issue following the international child sexual abuse scandal that was unfolding at this time (Cheit et al., 2010), as well a series of domestic crises surrounding allegations directed towards Cardinal George Pell and former Archbishop and Governor-General Peter Hollingworth. I selected the second period, June 2012 to June 2013, to capture the discursive conditions present in the lead-up to and surrounding the announcement of the Royal Commission. I sampled articles from two newspapers, the Herald Sun and The Age, because these were two of the most read newspapers in Australia at the time yet differed in corporate ownership and political leaning (Mendes, 2000: 54–55).⁷ After specifying chronological parameters, I searched the online archives of the print editions of each newspaper for all articles containing the phrase ‘catholic church’ and screened articles for relevance to the issue of child sexual abuse. This returned 625 results from which I sampled every fifth article, arranged chronologically. My analysis strategy, following Keller’s (2013: 71) advice, was structured primarily by two questions: ‘who may legitimately speak where?’ and ‘what can/may be said and how?’ In the following two sections, I unpack my analysis following each of these questions in turn.

Overall, this analysis identified that a discursive shift took place between 2002–03 and 2012–13 regarding which institution was attributed the right and responsibility to respond to the perpetration of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. News media discourses granted a quasi-legal authority to the Church to exercise jurisdiction over its own affairs in 2002–03. This meant that it was licensed to manage victims and offenders, arrange redress and administer justice on its own terms. In 2012–13, however, this authority had been rescinded. In its place, the State had become marked as both necessary and responsible for legal recourse.

Shifts in the politics of voice

News media discourse on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in both 2002–03 and 2012–13 featured four key speaking positions – Victims, George Pell, Catholics and the State. Over time, each of these speaking positions underwent a significant transformation in the frequency with which they were able to speak, the kind of narrative that they offered, as well as in the character and authority that surrounding commentators attributed to their voice. In this section, I address how these changes affected each position in turn.

Victims

Victims frequently featured in news media accounts of ministerial child sexual abuse during both periods, yet the character of the narrative that the news media used their voices to generate differed. During 2002–03, news media used victims’ voices most often to illustrate the nature of abuse and its personal effects. For instance, when the Herald Sun recounted Greg’s story, who had been ‘molested by his parish priest during the late 1970s’, the narrative focused on the impact of his victimisation: that is, on ‘how the abuse has affected all areas of his life, including his failed marriage’ (4 June 2002). In another account, the Herald Sun quoted a victim as saying ‘I was desperate . . . I wasn’t handling life at all and I’d tried suicide, alcohol and other things to try to forget’ (5 June 2002). The Age also emphasised individual experiences of harm when dealing with victim’s voices, highlighting a victim’s account of ‘himself as “a nervous wreck”’ who ‘blames his inability to form relationships with women on eight years of sexual abuse’ (7 June 2002). Such accounts of harm focused on individuals and their experiences of trauma and victimisation and rarely situated the perpetration of these harms in their institutional context.

In contrast, in 2012–13 the news media cited victim’s voices less often to narrate their experiences of trauma and victimisation and more often to support calls for the State to respond to these matters. This was reflected in one editorial on the experiences of Anthony Foster – a well-known advocate for child sexual abuse victims whose daughters had been abused by a Catholic priest (Marr, 2014) – that took as its narrative focus Foster’s assertions that the Church was ‘above the law’:

‘[A]ssaults on children . . . were always a crime and should have been reported to the police’. Mr Foster believes members of the church hierarchy should be charged with being complicit in the further crimes of those criminal priests it moved on to other parishes and, sometimes, other countries, and who then reoffended. He also believes the church put its own laws (canon law) above the laws of the state of Victoria. (Herald Sun, 12 October 2012, my emphasis).

As such, this article frames the Church and its ministers as having escaped legal accountability. The discourse of criminality that appears in this excerpt constructs ministerial child sexual abuse as a violation of the State’s legal code, and as such, carries the assertion that the police – as the agents of the State’s law – ought to respond.

The suggestion that the Church’s lack of accountability to the State is an issue that must be resolved recurs throughout victim narratives in 2012–13. One article cites a victim who argues that justice requires that the Church is made accountable to the State’s law and that it should no longer be treated as exceptional:

It is the whole god nonsense which has allowed the church to continue to evade justice. As a victim of childhood sexual assault I have no doubt that the time for prevarication is over. The church will only have credibility among its followers and the rest of society if it agrees to be accountable to the law as everyone of us is obliged to be. (The Age, 4 July 2012).

Here, the victim places the provision of justice outside of the domain of the Church and argues that justice is something that is delivered by the State and not the Church. The article thus suggests that by avoiding State-legal accountability the Church has ‘evaded’ justice. Similarly, one Herald Sun editorial constructed victims as desiring legal justice specifically, arguing that in the wake of allegations the Church needs to demonstrate to ‘the hundreds of victims and the wider public . . . that actions, support, untrammelled transparency, compensation, justice and co-operation with prosecuting authorities [will] follow in every case possible’ (28 May 2013, my emphasis).

George Pell

George Pell was another prominent figure in the news media’s reports on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during both periods. Since the 1990s Pell has been, in Milligan’s (2017) words, ‘the most recognisable face of the Australian Catholic Church’, and has been closely associated and centrally involved with the Church’s handling of child sexual abuse allegations (Marr, 2014). He was a key figure and witness in the Royal Commission’s investigations into the Catholic Church, not only for his leading role in developing and carrying out the Church’s responses to child sexual abuse allegations since the mid-1990s, but also for his close association with several convicted perpetrators particularly during his tenure as a priest in the rural Victorian town of Ballarat. For this reason, Pell has been deeply implicated in the Church’s perpetration and cover-up of child sexual abuse for decades. In 2019, Pell was convicted on multiple historical child sexual abuse charges, becoming the highest-ranking Catholic minister to receive such a conviction.⁸ This conviction was later overturned, however, in a controversial appeal to the High Court in 2020.⁹

During both 2002–03 and 2012–13, Pell was among the most frequently featured voices in the news media. Pell’s contributions were characteristically similar in 2002–03 and 2012–13, including fervent denials of the Church’s institutional fault or responsibility, denials of allegations made against him, denials that he knew about allegations of abuse before the 1990s, and affirmations of the Church’s capacity and right to handle matters internally.¹⁰ For example, Pell used one interview in 2002 to distance himself from involvement with matters of child sexual abuse, frame himself as moral, frame the Church as the victim of child sexual abuse and blame lawyers – that is, agents of the State’s legal system – for any misinterpretations to the contrary. Speaking about a now-infamous incident where Pell, then as a Bishop of Melbourne, accompanied serial offender and Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale during his first Court appearance in 1993 (Marr, 2014: 6), Pell had the following to say:

Dr Pell yesterday admitted he had made a ‘mistake’ in attending court with Gerald Ridsdale in 1993. Dr Pell said at the time of the court case, he had little idea of the extent of Ridsdale’s ‘evil’. ‘I did accompany him in priestly solidarity . . . This was a mistake as it misled people about my basic sympathies with the victims . . . My sympathy was always with the victims. When I explained to (Ridsdale’s) lawyers that I would insist on saying Ridsdale had done great damage to his victims, the church and himself, the lawyer, declined to call me as a witness’. (The Age, 4 June 2002).

Pell’s voice also featured prominently in 2012–13, yet his figure was constructed differently. In 2002–03, the commentariat surrounding Pell expressed support for him more often than they expressed disapproval. Popular conservative columnist Andrew Bolt wrote in Pell’s defence, for instance, arguing that ‘it was Pell who, more than any other Catholic leader here, put an end to any secret deals to protect pedophile priests’, and that it was ‘Pell who made sure victims got no-strings payouts of around $50,000 each’ (Herald Sun, 22 August 2002). Elsewhere, one commenter wrote in a letter to the editor that ‘Anyone with a basic understanding of responsibility within the Catholic Church would appreciate that Dr Pell had done everything that he was able to do’ (The Age, 5 June 2002). In another instance, in an article reporting on allegations of abuse made against Pell, the author editorialised that:

[Pell is] widely acknowledged for his efforts to provide justice for abuse victims, largely through processes he established when Archbishop of Melbourne . . . he has won widespread support throughout Australia from citizens, community and religious leaders and Prime Minister John Howard, who all spoke of his honour and integrity. (The Age, 24 August 2002).

Yet in 2012–13, Pell’s support had mostly evaporated in the sample of articles that I analysed. There remained a few high-profile figures that continued to support him, including Andrew Bolt, yet commentators much more frequently criticised his actions or expressed dislike for his character. This included statements that derided his attempts to justify ‘his institution’s shameful inaction’ (Herald Sun, 13 November 2012), rebuked him for ‘seem[ing] more concerned that the seal of the confessional is violated than that children are violated’ (The Age, 15 November 2012) and cast him as a hypocrite for denying allegations while simultaneously ‘support[ing] numerous perpetrators through administrative shuffling, payouts with silence clauses and [. . .] throwing Catholic money at keeping these people out of jail’ (The Age, 4 July 2012). One commentator remarked that his behaviour would compel ‘Jesus Christ [to] turn in his grave’ (The Age, 15 November 2012). In another instance, a ‘retired bishop’ called Pell ‘an embarrassment to a lot of good Catholic people’ and argued that he ‘should no longer be the voice of Australian bishops in the wake of his [derisive] comments about child sex abuse within the church’ (The Age, 16 November 2012). As such, even while there were a few prominent figures that continued to advocate for Pell during this time (many of whom also publicly defended him during his trial, conviction and appeal in 2017–20), the George Pell who in 2002–03 had appeared by-and-large as an upstanding public figure who represented a moral institution had in 2012–13 become predominantly constructed as an antagonist of justice who represented an increasingly iniquitous Church.

Catholics

A shift also occurred in how members of the Catholic Church, both ordained and lay, constructed the issue of ministerial child sexual abuse. Priests, for instance, framed the Church’s responsibility for ministerial child sexual abuse differently at different points in time. In 2002–03, priests often sought to vindicate the Church and absolve its complicity in abuse. One priest excused the Church’s wrongdoing on the grounds that concealment ‘was 30 or 40 years ago when pedophilia wasn’t understood as much as it is today . . . It was not seen as a sickness, like alcoholism’ (Herald Sun, 8 June 2002). Similarly, priests in this period often defended the Church’s morality despite the few ‘bad apples’ that had damaged the Church’s good name. One editorial remarked that ‘Most Catholic priests are not sexual abusers, but the whole institution suffers from the sins of a few, and from past failures by the leadership to acknowledge and act on the problem’ (Herald Sun, 18 June 2002, my emphasis).

In contrast, in 2012–13 some priests directly acknowledged the institutional complicity of the Church in abuse. One bishop affirmed that ‘the church had effectively facilitated sexual offences against children by placing one of Australia’s worst child predators, Gerald Ridsdale, in positions that enabled him to abuse’ (Herald Sun, 30 April 2013). Many priests also expressed disdain towards Pell and the Church as an institution for how it had handled child sexual abuse allegations. In a feature article on the well-known Melbourne priest Fr Bob Maguire, for instance, Maguire denied knowledge of abuse (‘No one said anything to me’) but said that if he had known of abuse when it was occurring he ‘would have told [the victim] to go straight to the coppers’ (Herald Sun, 28 June 2013). He stated further that he ‘was saddened and disappointed’ as well as ‘sorry if someone involved with us couldn’t come to us’. Maguire thus expressed that he favoured a State-legal response over the Church’s internal mechanisms and acknowledged the resentment that victims had expressed towards the Church’s response to allegations of abuse in the past. Similarly, in another article a group of Catholic Bishops distanced themselves from Pell’s denialism and issued a statement supporting the establishment of a Royal Commission, writing that a Royal Commission is ‘an opportunity for victims to get a compassionate hearing and justice’ and that as ‘painful and difficult as the commission might be for the church, it was nothing compared with the hurt of those who had suffered’ (The Age, 1 December 2012). Elsewhere, Melbourne priest Tony Kerin criticised the Church for failing to grapple with the severity of the harms that it was complicit in:

I’m not sure that some church leaders have got it yet . . . They haven’t understood that we can’t fix this problem. We can manage it, but it’s not going to blow over. This is the new normal, dealing with wounded people in the community and dealing with the fact that some of our despicable brothers were the perpetrators. (The Age, 19 July 2012).

In 2012–13, lay Catholics also began to criticise the Church’s response to allegations of abuse and call for State-legal intervention. One commentator wrote in a letter to the editor that ‘As a practising Catholic I have great cynicism about the machinations of the hierarchy and agree that a royal commission is the only way to get at the truth here’ (The Age, 4 July 2012). Similarly, another commenter wrote:

As a lifelong Catholic, I doubt if I am alone in the following cry from the heart: ‘Politicians, please do not resist calls for a royal commission for fear of a reaction from the Catholic Church’. Our church is much more than the hierarchy we are stuck with; we want this whole terrible business exposed. We want all the perpetrators, including those who protected abusers, punished and restitution offered. (The Age, 13 November 2012).

In each of these instances, the Church is configured as blameworthy and the responsibility to deliver justice is placed squarely in the domain of the State.

The State

A shift also occurred in the presence of State actors in discussions of ministerial child sexual abuse. 2012–13 featured a range of commentators speaking as agents of the State, yet these voices were nearly absent in 2002–03. Police officers, for instance, were cited only once in the 2002–03 sample, yet appeared often in 2012–13 both as commentators and as the subject of conversation. In 2012–13, police were acclaimed for their role in exposing the Church for its crimes. One commentator wrote that:

Victoria Police is blowing the whistle long and loud on the church. It is expressing absolute frustration, built over many years, about how its officers have been thwarted as they tried to investigate notoriously secretive crimes that have caused serious damage to individuals and their families and which have led to dozens of suicides. (The Age, 12 October 2012).

Here, the police are praised for bringing the issue to light and perpetrators to justice despite the Church’s attempts to ‘thwart’ them. In the same article, a commentator excoriates the Church for failing to cooperate with police and for preventing or obstructing State-legal justice, speaking of the ‘disturbing failure on the part of the church to bring to police, and then the courts, any one of the identified perpetrators of sexual abuse in its community’. Elsewhere, a commentator praised a recent police report on the issue for being able to break through ‘the full, brutal force of the church’s defences’ and to deal a ‘death blow’ to the Church (Herald Sun, 12 October 2012). This commentator pronounced further that ‘the church has wasted its money’ on cover-up schemes because ‘Thanks to the diligence and brave honesty of Victoria Police, the truth is out’. Here, police officers appear as noble agents of truth, foiling a Church that deliberately tried to obscure or hide from it.

Government officials also contributed to the framing of ministerial child sexual abuse more often in 2012–13. During 2002–03, only one news media article cited a member of government, yet 2012–13 regularly featured commentary from the Prime Minister, several Premiers and several members of parliament. These commentators often spoke of the harms of abuse, decried the lack of redress that victims had been offered and offered strategies for reform that would help the State’s legal apparatus to capture harms committed by the Church and its ministers more effectively. Labour MP Richard Wynne criticised ‘the power the Catholic Church exerted over its congregations’, its ‘inviolate’ status, and its lack of accountability, for instance (The Age, 22 December 2012). He wrote further that the Church ought to allow itself to become an object of State-legal scrutiny, stating that ‘The church needs to take down the battlements, stop hiding behind lawyers and legalese and reach out and seek forgiveness from those it has permanently scarred’. Other government officials also appeared in the sample in 2012–13 to make similar arguments. The Child Safety Commissioner, for instance, was cited as arguing that the ‘criminal law must be strengthened’ so that Churches are no longer exempt from measures like mandatory reporting (Herald Sun, May 6, 2013). In both cases, government officials were able to argue for the extension of State-legal power over the Church. That there was minimal participation from these actors in 2002–03 suggests that there had been a shift to configure ministerial child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a topic that was open for the State and its agents to contest in 2012–13.

Shifting constructions of legality

Many of the shifts that were revealed in my analysis of ‘who’ was speaking also appeared in my analysis of ‘what’ was being said in 2002–03 versus 2012–13.

Several discourses were dominant in 2002–03 but near-absent in 2012–13. The most notable of these was a cluster of discourses that I call ‘repudiations’. Repudiations diminished or denied the issue of ministerial child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the Church’s complicity. This included the ‘bad apple’ defence as well as the deployment of an ‘unreliable victim’ narrative. Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt made such assertions regarding one of Pell’s accusers in 2002–03, calling him ‘a proven liar and convicted criminal’ and ‘in it for the money’. Bolt went on to describe the victim’s pursuit of justice as a ‘priest-hunt’, characterising this as follows:

A priest-hunt works like this. You get, say, a convicted drug trafficker, tax cheat and liar who claims the country’s most admired Catholic leader fondled him 41 years ago. And you treat the accuser and the accused – the lying drug-trafficker and Archbishop George Pell – as men whose allegations and denials must at best be given equal weight . . . So who to believe: Mr X, the drug trafficker? Or the priest? Hmm. Tough one. (Herald Sun, 22 August 2002).

Another commentator made similar remarks to Bolt’s in a letter to the editor, asking ‘what do his [Pell’s] so-called accusers really want: more sympathy, more notoriety, or more money?’ (The Age, 5 June 2002). As such, both parties perpetrated the trope of ideal versus unreliable victimhood, which Corteen (2018: 106) characterises as follows:

[Ideal] attributes comprise: innocence and vulnerability; no criminal history of their own; no culpability; not being out of place and, moreover, doing some kind of good; and having a lack of capacity to fight back or resist a big and bad perpetrator with whom they have no acquaintance . . . The non-ideal victim flip-side attributes encompass: some aspect of blame and a lack of vulnerability; some hint of deviant status and/or an element of culpability; being somewhere and doing something that they should not be; being acquainted with the perpetrator; and possibly having some capacity to defend oneself.

The unreliable victim is a pervasive figure in both popular and legal constructions of sexual victimisation which, in tandem with its opposing figure of the ideal victim, works to determine which recipients of harm will be attributed or denied victim status and the affordances attached to that label (Ring, 2018). In Bolt’s hands, the figure of the unreliable victim works to vindicate Pell, and by extension the Church, by discrediting his accuser’s account of victimisation as untrustworthy and self-interested with nefarious intent. This discourse not only repudiates Pell and his Church’s guilt but also reinforces their position as moral by implying that they are the ‘real’ victims in this scenario.

The assertion that Pell and the Church were the ‘real’ victims of allegations of child sexual abuse was a common feature elsewhere in the news media’s reporting in 2002–03 as well. Pell often made this assertion himself, for instance by lamenting that convicted abuser Gerald Ridsdale ‘had done great damage to . . . the church’ (The Age, 4 June 2002). Yet other commentators proffered this notion as well. One editorial spoke of ‘the hurt the allegations have caused him [Pell] and his family, the church and the Catholic faith’ (The Age, 30 September 2002). In a letter to the editor, another commentator defended the Church, writing that it ‘should be praised for its mechanism to deal with sexual abuse’, and expressed resentment for the criticism directed towards the Church, asking ‘How many other religions could stand up to so much scrutiny?’ (The Age, 27 August 2002).

Another mode of repudiations that appeared in news media discourses between 2002–03 centred around the assertion that the news media was prejudiced against Pell and the Church. During this period, the news media often accused itself of running a ‘smear campaign’ or generating controversy in the interests of capital. Many examples of this discourse arose regarding accusations made against Pell. In a collection of letters to the editor, one commentator complained that Pell was suffering a ‘trial by media’, asking ‘How much longer must we endure the fresh allegation, prompt refutation cycle before the media recognise this beat-up for what it is?’ (The Age, 5 June 2002). Another commentator criticised an episode of 60 Minutes Australia that covered the scandal, writing that ‘in this instance the truth was not allowed to get in the way of . . . a good story’ (The Age, 5 June 2002). Elsewhere, the news media was criticised for portraying ‘priests as monsters’ and was accused of ‘gloating over the church’s problems’ (Herald Sun, 1 June 2002).

In 2012–13, by contrast, these repudiations were less prominent and a cluster of ‘blame discourses’ had risen to displace them. Blame discourses claimed the inverse of repudiations: rather than working to diminish the Church’s culpability in ministerial child sexual abuse, these statements held the Church accountable for its role in the perpetration and concealment of these harms. These discourses included criticism directed towards the Church for failing to appropriately respond to victim’s allegations, for failing to hold perpetrators accountable, for concealing perpetration and avoiding State-legal scrutiny, for acting in self-interest and for facilitating abuse.

A key element of blame discourse was the framing of the Church as ‘self-serving’ (Herald Sun, 2 February 2012) – that is, as disregarding its victims in the interest of protecting its wealth, reputation, or power. This can be seen in the assertion that Church leaders’ ‘motivation is not justice for the children, or the truth, or searching their souls’ but that ‘Their motivation is transparently only the self-interest of the organisation and the individuals in it’ (The Age, 13 November 2012). Elsewhere, this accusation was directed at Archbishop Dennis Heart, who was described as being ‘bent on preserving church wealth instead of restoring broken lives’ (The Age, 6 June 2013). In another article, the author also framed the Church as hypocritical and self-interested:

[T]he church’s leaders are concerned, above all, to prevent damage to the institution. While they say they want to support victims, some of their actions are questionable in law and may cause the most vulnerable to lose hope of ever seeing justice done. (The Age, 12 October 2012).

Blame discourses also framed the Church as an active participant or complicit in child sexual abuse. One commentator asserted that the Church ‘gave them [perpetrators] access to their victims’ (The Age, 12 November 2012). In the same article, a child abuse ‘expert’ is cited as suggesting that the Church facilitated abuse by letting perpetrators ‘free to roam’ and allowing them ‘to use [their] ‘uniform’ to attack other children’. This notion of complicity also appeared in a letter to the editor where a commentator wrote that ‘For too long the Catholic Church has in effect colluded with offenders from outside of the clergy – and moreso within’ (Herald Sun, 1 July, 2012). A spokesperson for a victim organisation put this starkly, stating that:

There’s been a deliberate cover-up . . . They still haven’t owned up to the full level of how badly they treated victims, how they deliberately abused and brutalised victims . . . in order to keep them silent. You don’t do that accidentally or naively, you do that deliberately. (Herald Sun, 7 July 2012).

Elsewhere, an editor attacked the character of the Church, writing that:

The Catholic Church is not just discredited. We now know it is nasty. Where was the empathy? Where was the will to eradicate its imposter paedophiles? Where was the help for its countless victims? (Herald Sun, 12 October 2012).

This sentiment was shared by a member of the public who wrote in a letter to the editor: ‘Suffer the little children – everyone who still supports the church sees that they still suffer, all right’ (Herald Sun, 30 May 2012).

Calls for the Church to take responsibility for its role in facilitating abuse appeared alongside constructions of the Church as a perpetrator. One commentator described the Church’s concealment of abuse as ‘sickening’, and argued that ‘The church needs to take responsibility and right the wrongs of the past’ (Herald Sun, 30 May 2013). This sentiment was echoed by another commentator who wrote that it is time that the Church ‘ensure[s] they [perpetrators] are dealt with’ (Herald Sun, 20 October 2012). Elsewhere, another commentator called on the Church to admit blame, writing that the Church ‘must shoulder some blame for its failings . . . [and] for its manipulative response to the discovery of the plague of criminal clergy in its ranks’ (Herald Sun, 12 October 2012).

This call for accountability was often paired with calls for a State-legal response and affirmations of the State as responsible for providing justice. This was apparent in remarks that ‘church leaders had a duty to report alleged criminal offences involving children to police’ (The Age, 23 November 2012), and that ‘Religious institutions seem woefully immune to prosecution’ (The Age, 4 July 2012). This sentiment also appeared in a letter to the editor where the author called for a Royal Commission, writing that a Royal Commission ‘is the best hope of rendering justice to the victims and their families and loved ones, of bringing criminals to justice and of saving more vulnerable young people from horrific abuse’ (The Age, 10 November 2012). The commentator continued, declaring that the Church ‘ought to be investigated’ by the State, and called on the State to deliver punishment and restitution. And in another letter to the editor, one commentator asked ‘Why is it [ministerial child sexual abuse] being dealt with as a religious matter? Why is the government allowing such an organisation to protect criminals?’ (The Age, 4 July 2012). Some commentators also refuted the Church’s claims to be able to deal with allegations appropriately, deeming its mode of delivering justice inadequate. One commentator remarked that in the Church ‘the punishment does not always fit the crime . . . A few Hail Marys and you are absolved is just not good enough’ (Herald Sun, 1 July 2012).

The positioning of the State as responsible for the provision of justice in 2012–13 also manifested in the rise of the use of ‘crime’ as a category to describe the harms of the Church and its ministers. While a discourse of criminality was almost absent in 2002–03, in 2012–13 various commentators described ministerial child sexual abuse as ‘cruel and despicable crimes’, ‘outright crimes’, ‘crimes. . . against the most vulnerable of victims’, ‘punishable offences’ and ‘sex crimes’ that ‘should be reported’ to the State (The Age, 10 November 2012; Herald Sun, 28 May 2012; Herald Sun, 20 October 2012; Herald Sun, 15 November 2012; Herald Sun, 1 July 2012). One commentator wrote that they wanted legal reform to ‘reinforce the fact that any abuse of a child . . . is actually a criminal act’ (The Age, 4 April 2013). Using the language of criminality, each of these statements frame the harms perpetrated by Catholic ministers specifically as breaches of the State’s legal code. This means that these are harms are framed not only as perpetrated against the State in some way, but also that it is specifically the State, as the source and administrator of the criminal law, that ought to respond to them.

Conclusion

This article sought to analyse the relationship between news media discourses and the production of the Royal Commission. In doing so, it has revealed that news media discourses on child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church shifted between 2002–03 and 2012–13. In both periods there was widespread acknowledgement that child sexual abuse had been perpetrated by Catholic ministers and concealed by the Catholic Church, yet there was a difference in how this abuse was characterised as an issue of law and thus which institution was called upon to respond to it.

In 2002–03, it was the Church and not the State that news media deemed capable of and responsible for ‘legal’ recourse: that is, for managing victims and offenders, arranging redress and administering justice. The Church primarily appeared as moral and acting in good faith, despite the wayward actions of a few of its ministers. Accordingly, many commentators gave the Church licence to respond to the issue internally and did not recognise its harms as warranting State-legal intervention. To this effect, George Pell – the Church’s principal representative – was framed mostly as trustworthy and honourable. Indeed, several commentators lamented that he had been unjustly hurt by the allegations made against him and his Church. Moreover, repudiations that worked to diminish or deny the Church’s complicity in the perpetration and concealment of abuse were dominant at this time. In this period, victim’s narratives, priests and lay Catholics framed the perpetration of ministerial child sexual abuse largely as a problem of sinful individuals (‘bad apples’) and either ignored or effaced the Church’s participation in these harms.

The frame had shifted in 2012–13. Rather than appearing as responsible for and capable of delivering justice, at this time the Church was framed as criminal – that is, as an institution that needed to be brought to justice. Pell’s image underwent a similar transformation, from appearing more often as trustworthy and honourable towards being cast as self-interested, hypocritical, iniquitous and deceitful. Correspondingly, blame discourses rose in prominence, criticising the Church for its role in the perpetration and concealment of abuse. Priests and lay Catholics now framed the Church as culpable for its participation in these harms and called for the State to intervene. Victim’s narratives were used to support criticism regarding the lack of State-legal intervention and appeals for the Church to be made accountable to the State. To this effect, agents of the State became visible participants in these discourses and were framed as responsible for responding to the issue. It was now the State, and not the Church, that was called upon for justice.

Collectively, these shifts suggest that the Royal Commission came into being at a time when the jurisdictional parameters of institutional child sexual abuse – that is, the attribution of the right and responsibility to respond to it – had been transformed in the Australian public sphere. That this shift coincided with the production of the Royal Commission suggests a relationship between news media discourses and the kinds of legal responses that arise in relation to the issues that those discourses address. This finding signals the need for further inquiry into the role that media discourses might play in the production of public inquiries, especially given that several questions remain to be resolved. First, while a relationship between news media discourses and the Royal Commission has been inferred, questions remain regarding the causal nature of that relationship and the other factors that may have been in play. Moreover, while my analysis showed that a discursive shift occurred, the factors that motivated this shift are still in question. It remains important to ask why the news media turned to the State as an instrument of justice, and to inquire into the factors that contributed to its denigration of the Church as one. It is important to note, too, that the calls for State intervention that proliferated in 2012–13 did not exclusively call for a Royal Commission. Rather, when taken together, they were demands for the State to do something to fill the void of justice that was unaddressed by the Church. The State responded to this demand in the form of a Royal Commission, but a Royal Commission was only one of a range of responses that the State could have delivered. As such, it is also necessary to ask why it was a public inquiry, specifically, that actualised.

Nonetheless, the shift that I have observed is significant. My analysis suggests that the emergence of the Royal Commission was supported by a re-orientation of public sentiment, albeit in the context of one partial discursive field, towards the State as the appropriate institution for the provision of justice in relation to institutional child sexual abuse. This raises critical questions regarding both the consequences of this shift as well as whether the State can deliver on the promise of justice that commissioned its intervention. News media discourses have increasingly supported a State-led response to institutional child sexual abuse based on a belief that this will deliver accountability and redress where it was absent previously. Yet, the State and its legal structures are neither neutral nor innocent actors in relation to child sexual abuse. Rather, as feminist scholars have comprehensively shown, the State has been complicit in the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse and has collaborated with and worked to protect its perpetrators in a myriad of ways (Ring, 2017). This was one of the reasons why Smart (1989) called upon feminists to decentre law in their struggles for justice. The State and its law, she argues, cannot promise justice. Indeed, she points out that the State has been blind to and thus enabled (child) sexual abuse and has consistently been involved in the secondary victimisation and silencing of its victims. In her view, ‘the criminal law seems designed to make it almost impossible to prosecute, or at least seems to ensure that the child is damaged in the process’ (Smart, 1989: 51). And indeed, the Australian State legally protected the Church from its interventions for decades, producing and maintaining criminal and civil legal structures that allowed the Church and its ministers to evade legal accountability by rendering their harms unjusticiable (Daly, 2014; Ellis and Ellis, 2014; Gleeson, 2018; Townsley, 2007). Gleeson (2016: 780) makes this point, observing that the State’s legal frameworks have ‘coalesc[ed] with the peculiar organizational structure of the Church [in a way that] has excluded justice for claimants and bolstered the Church’s sense of legal and ethical religious autonomy’. On this basis, Gleeson (2018: 735) argues that the Church’s ‘sustained immunity to civil law suggests a mutually reflexive relationship between Church and State’ in avoiding accountability. Similarly, the State’s law enforcement historically has shown little will to respond to allegations of child sexual abuse, particularly those directed towards the Catholic Church. In fact, the police often actively helped the Church to avoid State-legal intervention by discrediting, disbelieving and encouraging silence from victims, sabotaging attempts at investigation and by supporting the Church’s internal investigatory mechanisms (Family and Community Development Committee, 2013: 23; Marr, 2014; Ryan and Hoysted, 2013). As such, given that the State played a key role in supporting the perpetration and concealment of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, asking the State to provide justice may be not only unlikely to yield that which is sought but may also efface the State’s complicity in producing injustice in the first place.

The literature on public inquiries provokes similar uncertainty regarding their capacity to deliver justice. Public inquiries have the potential to deliver, at least partially, on promises for accountability and redress (Balint et al., 2016; Gilligan, 2002; Prasser and Tracey, 2014), and indeed the Royal Commission has gone some way towards accomplishing this (Salter, 2020; Wright, 2017; Wright and Swain, 2018). However, public inquiries’ relationship with the State often precludes their capacity to reach this potential. This is because public inquiries are typically constituted by and serve to reinforce State power, working to bolster the legitimacy of the State’s right and ability to govern in relation to any given issue (Ashforth, 1990; Balint et al., 2016; Eburn and Dovers, 2015; Gallen, 2016; Gilligan, 2002; Marchetti, 2006; Razack, 2015; Ring and Enright, 2019; Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2010). Ring and Enright (2019) have made this point about historical institutional abuse inquiries in Ireland, arguing that these inquiries have worked primarily to reinforce the sovereignty of the State and have failed to prioritise the needs and voices of victims. Indeed, State responses to victimisation generally, but often specifically in relation to child sexual abuse, tend to centre the State’s interests over victim interests, appropriate victim’s experiences by claiming ownership over interpersonal harms, and operate in ways that diminish or exclude victims’ participation (Gallen, 2016; Ring, 2017; Ring and Enright, 2019). Taken together, these literatures suggest that looking to the State to provide justice is a move that can simultaneously reinforce the State’s legitimacy while also working against the interests of victims. Going forward, then, scholarly attention needs to be directed not only at understanding the role that news media discourses can play in the production of public inquiries but also at understanding how the content of those discourses shape the form and possibility of a just response to the harms that they seek to address.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jennifer Balint, Dave McDonald and Mark Wood for their generous and incisive feedback on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their critical and insightful suggestions – they improved this article significantly.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Matthew Mitchell

Notes

Author biography

Matthew Mitchell is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research concerns the State’s involvement in harms related to gender and sexuality.

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