Innovative Justice Responses for Non Recent Institutional Abuses: Restorative, Transitional and Transformative Justice

Non-recent institutional abuse refers to the harm, marginalisation, and shame organisations and states have inflicted on individuals, nations, and entire groups of peoples. It can include physical, emotional, sexual, or cultural abuse and neglect within - state and non-state institutions. Institutional responses to such harms have historically focused on ‘bad apples’ and the actions of individual perpetrators (Keenan 2012). However, structural factors are increasingly recognised as contributing to such issues, with aspects such gender, age, race, disability, and power relations playing a role in oppression and inequality, demanding different approaches (Penhale 1999). Thus, although individuals within institutions can be responsible for specific acts of abuse, harm may also be more widespread or systemic. Currently, victim/survivors of non-recent institutional abuses can pursue justice through criminal prosecution, civil litigation, inquiries or commissions of investigation, and redress schemes, most commonly resulting in apologies and monetary redress (Hamber and Lundy 2020). Despite these measures, much of the literature indicates that current legal systems premised on retributive justice are not adequately responding to the needs of victim/survivors. In a search for other approaches, this paper explores three additional justice paradigms of relevance to historical (or non-recent) institutional abuses: restorative justice (RJ) transitional justice (TJ) and transformative justice. Each will be explored in turn.