Breaking Silences

The Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission project analysed the role of media, journalism and social media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-17) (RCIRCSA). 

Through an investigation into the impacts of a rapidly changing media environment on this national ‘listening’ exercise, this was the first major Australian research to explore the nexus between media and commissions of inquiry in the digital era. 

The project, which was funded through the Australian Research Council Discovery Program and was based at the University of Canberra, provided governments, journalists, victims advocacy groups, future commissions of inquiry and researchers with knowledge and tools to understand and manage the role of a rapidly transforming media environment and the public inquiry process. 

A case study approach was used to critically analyse the role of a transitioning local, national and social media in instigating, reporting on and keeping alive the findings of the royal commission, ensuring victims of institutional child sexual abuse are heard, and justice is upheld.

The project interrogated the interplay between this large-scale witnessing exercise and locally-based and globally resonant networks of journalism and social media advocacy, to listen and uphold justice for victims of child sexual abuse. 

Research methods included: archival research and historical methods to explore the mediatised processes of the inquiry; interviews to explore the media-related practices of journalists who reported on the RCIRCSA, former Royal Commission staff, and survivor advocates; and media analysis of news and social media texts using content and discourse analysis to document the patterns of reporting, exemplar coverage, priorities and silences in news coverage. 

Our research finds that public discussion of the Royal Commission, its hearings and outcomes, was pivotal to changing the national conversation about child sexual abuse in institutional settings. Innovative advocacy media practices of survivor advocacy organisation gave voice to previously untold stories, and the RCIRCSA was transformative in its approach to ‘open justice’. We have identified journalism that did indeed ‘break the silence’ and news cultures that walked with communities as they reckoned with the living history of abuse in their communities. 

However, our analysis shows that media reporting practices remain gendered, racialised and privilege the stories of the able-bodied. We have documented how media ‘hierarchies of attention’ driven by news values underpin the uneven and discursively structured nature of reporting of child sexual abuse that foregrounds some powerful institutions and individuals over others. We call this the ‘overshadowing’ effect.