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Research Projects

Institutional Child Abuse

About This Project

On November 14, 1997, the Minister of Justice, the Honourable A. Anne McLellan, wrote to the LAW COMMISSION OF CANADA requesting it to prepare “a report addressing processes for dealing with institutional child physical and sexual abuse”. In framing this request [hereinafter the Reference], the Minister charged the Commission with the task of furnishing “governments, and Canadians generally, with an inventory and comparative assessment of approaches available” for providing redress for adult survivors.

The Reference was meant to examine abuse that took place in residential schools for Aboriginal children and in institutions such as orphanages, schools for the Deaf, long-term mental health care facilities, sanitoria and training schools. According to the Minister, the goal of the Reference was to identify “what types of processes would best address wrongdoing, while affording appropriate remedies, and promoting reconciliation, fairness and healing”.  (A copy of the Minister's letter can be found in our Interim Report.)

The Commission’s initial task, in responding to the Minister’s question, was to decide how to organise its research. Almost from the beginning, it concluded that it could not limit itself to considering only physical and sexual abuse. To ignore or discount emotional, racial and cultural abuse would be to take the problem of historical physical and sexual abuse of children in institutions out of the larger contexts within which it occurred.

Of equal importance, the Commission resolved to keep the perspectives of survivors foremost. It is the concerns survivors identify, the outcomes they seek, and the effect of any redress processes on them that have been the Commission’s primary, though not sole, ways of evaluating the desirability of particular redress measures.

As a first official step in developing a response, the Commission issued an Interim Report in February 1998. The Interim Report set out the issues that the Commission felt needed to be addressed in order for it to be able to assess properly what were “fair and reasonable ways” to respond to adult survivors of institutional child abuse. It reviewed the state of knowledge in the field and described the further research that would have to be undertaken.

Based on the issues identified in the Interim Report, the Commission asked four teams of researchers to produce papers looking at four key aspects of the question posed by the Minister. One paper was an inventory and description of institutions where abuse is alleged or has been proven to have occurred. A second paper provided an analysis of the needs of survivors of residential schools for Aboriginal children, and a third paper reviewed the needs of survivors from other types of children’s institutions. A fourth research paper examined the experience of other countries in dealing with state-sanctioned and long-standing abuse of sectors of the population.

To obtain advice and input from those closely connected with the issues it was studying, the Commission established contact with a number of Aboriginal organisations and established two volunteer study panels which included survivors of institutional abuse, therapists who have counselled survivors, lawyers who have acted on their behalf, prosecuted alleged perpetrators, and those who have participated in commissions of inquiry, as well as some representatives from government and from affected communities.

The study panels each met three times. The panels were convened in July and September of 1998 to review drafts of the research papers and to offer advice about other studies to undertake. As a result, further research was commissioned to determine how traditional Aboriginal law was violated in residential schools and case studies were completed in four communities.

The Commission released a Discussion Paper in December 1998. This Discussion Paper drew together the results of the research studies prepared in connection with the Reference, and set out various policy options. Over 2,000 copies of the Discussion Paper were circulated, and the Internet site on which it was posted recorded more than 20,000 visits.

During the winter and spring of 1998–1999, the Commission organised or participated in several meetings, roundtables and colloquia to obtain feedback about the Discussion Paper. The executive summary was translated into three Aboriginal languages and a Braille version was also produced. The entire Discussion Paper was made available on audio tape. A special two-day consultation was held with the Deaf community. In addition, the Traditional Indigenous Healers of Canada held a workshop with the Commission on the impact of residential schools. Two listservs (one in English and one in French) were also launched and conversations were carried on for many weeks.

The Commission released a Report entitled Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions in March 2000. The Report has an executive summary which provides an overview of the paper.

The Commission is grateful to all those who participated in its feedback processes. The extent of agreement it heard, and the key points upon which members of the study panels and those who responded to the discussion paper disagreed, have sharpened the Commission’s perspective and have been very helpful in the preparation of its Report. Nonetheless, the Report should be taken as reflecting only the Commission’s own perspective and conclusions.