Tamatea, ArmonSimpson, Karen2024-08-132024-08-132024-02-25https://hdl.handle.net/10289/16781Children and adolescents brought to the attention of New Zealand care and protection authorities are sometimes removed from their homes and placed into State-run residential care facilities. While the aim placing young people into residences is to improve their wellbeing, child sexual abuse is common in this setting and more pronounced than in the general population. There are many psychological theories, perspectives and movements which have attempted to explain child sexual abuse spanning from the 1800s to the present day. These partial and, at times, unsupported understandings of abuse have been shaped by socio-cultural and socio-political conditions. This has had serious implications for our collective (mis)understanding of child sexual abuse and the ways in which we respond to abuse with dominant discourse often transcending into policy, law, and the courtroom where social (in)justice occurs. In addition, despite there being three centuries of child sexual abuse research, to-date there has been limited exploration of the phenomenon in residential care settings both globally and within Aotearoa. However, the opportunity to explore child sexual abuse in this setting has availed itself with the New Zealand Government launching a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in 2018 to better understand abuse across State and faith-based settings between 1950 and 1999. This thesis aims to provide additional insights to the inquiry by exploring the different ways in which child sexual abuse in residential care is understood as well as the conditions which legitimise or silence these understandings. A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was used to analyse 47 publicly available documents from the inquiry including statements, transcripts, and evidence briefs from survivors, survivor advocates, counsel, and representatives from institutions that provide care and protection for young people. Analysis found six discourses: control and punishment, fabrication, harmful, power and oppression, shameful, and State and institutional failure. These discourses reaffirm previous findings in sexual abuse research including sexual abuse as shameful and notions of fabrication. New insights were also found and include the use of sexual abuse as a method of controlling and punishing young people; predatory sexual behaviour in young people as a method of self-protection; cultural genocide and intergenerational care placement as victim sequelae; and the development of adaptive survival behaviours in residents in response to the State’s failures to protect them. In addition, systemic failures were uncovered including inadequacies in internal and external monitoring, failures in vetting, poor investment in professional capabilities of frontline workers, and a culture of tolerance toward abuse. Overall, the analysis found cultures of sexual violence and cultures of tolerance toward abuse within residential care, which emerge from the young person’s status as a State Ward.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.child sexual abusechild abuseresidential careabuse in care inquiryNew Zealand Abuse in Care InquiryFoucauldian Discourse AnalysisDiscourse AnalysisState caresexual abusesexual violenceThesis