Violence and value: Religious organisations and child sexual abuse

There is a high prevalence of historic sexual abuse in institutions and organisations that have a duty of care towards children. Through a qualitative, abductive analysis of the evidential material submitted to the Religious Organisations and Settings investigation within the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) I theorise value frames for understanding how the perpetrators of child abuse may be privileged over victim-survivors within organisational contexts, contributing towards their protection. Value judgements are intersubjectively co-constructed and, in relation to the abjection of victim-survivors, perpetrators are framed as having higher worth. Three contextually relevant value frames are embedded into everyday processes and practices to protect perpetrators: intrinsic value – denoted by unquestioned, unconditional esteem; holy value – denoted by reverence of the edicts of faith and religion; and kinship value – denoted by the idea of the religious organisation or setting as ‘family’ and ‘community’. I extend existing research by showing that the dynamic relationship between protection and abjection produces and maintains a fairly stable, though contingent, value hierarchy in which perpetrators are positioned above and better than victims, further enabling abuse to go unreported or unremarked.