Justice Beyond the State: Survivor-Led Museums, Institutional Abuse and the Pursuit of Dignity

How is justice experienced beyond formal legal processes? Socio-legal scholarship on institutional child abuse has concentrated on state responses – inquiries, apologies and redress – while cultural practices that sustain recognition after these conclude have received less attention. Where museums have been examined, the focus has been on state-led initiatives and public memory rather than on how those whose histories they commemorate evaluate them. This article takes up this question through the Australian Orphanage Museum, a memory project founded and run by Care-leavers. Drawing on interviews and focus groups, it situates survivor-led commemoration within victim-centred scholarship that conceptualises justice as evaluative, relational and socially situated. It argues that when authored and governed by those directly affected, museums function as dignity-affirming sites of non-legal justice. Rather than delivering a finite outcome, they endure as sites through which justice is continually evaluated, and authority over the public narration of institutional harm reconfigured.