Agreements to Bind the Future: Uses of 'Consent' in Irish State Reports on Historical Institutional Abuse
1:30pm - 2:30pm /
Wednesday 16th March 2022
Type: Seminar /
Category: Department
- Dr Claire Pierson
- Admission: This is a free event, however please register via the Eventbrite link provided for Zoom link
- Book now
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This paper focuses on representations of mothers’ consent to adoption in the Report of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation (2021). Documenting how adoption consent forms and associated laws changed over the course of the twentieth century, I show how the Report relies on a narrow, transactional and form-based conception of consent, which largely ignores women’s reported experience of the context in which that consent was produced. This conception of consent is used both to legitimate forcible separation of mothers from their children within a closed and secret adoption system, and to conceal that separation’s long-term consequences. The vision of women’s autonomy underpinning this account of consent repeats across state treatment of other historical abuses and other reports. State reports repeatedly represent women’s entry into institutions, their failure to leave them, and their submission to a range of reproductive constraints as consensual. This device makes women and their families responsible for the injuries of institutionalisation in the past and present. The paper demonstrates that this gendered and contractual vision of consent remains central to the state’s approach as it purportedly atones for these injuries in the present.