Kathleen McPhillips

TURNING PUBLIC ISSUES INTO PRIVATE TROUBLES Lead Contamination, Domestic Labor, and the Exploitation of Women's Unpaid Labor in Australia

Residents living in the vicinity of lead smelters are subjected to particularly high levels of contamination from the toxic process of smelting. Yet, public health strategies currently promoted by state health authorities in Australia do not focus their major attention on stopping the contamination at its source. This article focuses on housecleaning regimes, largely implemented by women, aimed at stopping the toxic material from being ingested by children. Because the residential areas surrounding the smelters are degraded, their property value is low and, by and large, working-class families live there. As this article shows, the recommended cleaning regimes are embedded in social class and gender relations. Analysis of the implementation of the strategy and the historical context within which it is administered provides an example of a state gender regime, the state “doing” gender and class, and a lens through which to view contemporary gender and class relations.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is the largest royal commission in Australias history and one of the largest public inquiries into institutional child abuse internationally. With an investment from the Australian government of half a billion dollars, it examined how institutions with a responsibility for children, both historically and in the present, have responded to allegations of child sexual abuse. Announced in the wake of previous Australian and international inquiries, public scandals and lobbying by survivor groups, its establishment reflected increasing recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by childhood sexual abuse and a strong political commitment to improving child safety and wellbeing in Australia. This article outlines the background, key features and innovations of this landmark public inquiry, focusing in particular on its extensive research program. It considers its international significance and also serves as an introduction to this special edition on the Australian Royal Commission, exploring its implications for better understanding institutional child sexual abuse and its impacts, and for making institutions safer places for children in the future.

Shifting selves: the struggle for identity and spirituality in the work of three young women artists

This essay looks at contemporary art works produced by three young women who took part in a research project that was exploring the spiritual meanings of art in the lives of adolescents. Nineteen students were interviewed and we asked them to tell us about their art works which we then analysed in relation to a set of descriptors that we developed defining spiritual symbols and stories. We developed a central term—Connected Knowing—which seeks to appreciate a ‘spiritual rationality’ in works of art. This essay reports on three of these art works and explores the ways in which the artist understands the connections between self and other, self and world, self and community. We used theory on art perception and gender to understand the ways in which spiritual meaning was produced by the artists. A central theme that emerged from the three works was that identity is a struggle and not a given, and that multiple perspectives of self in the development of identity is experienced as a positive embodied value.

“Unbearable Knowledge”: Managing Cultural Trauma at the Royal Commission

Beginning in 2013, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (referred to as the Royal Commission) bought to public consciousness a history of child sexual exploitation that contradicts dearly held values of the preciousness and innocence of childhood and the trust of public organizations. The Royal Commission has publically validated the trauma that victims have experienced across institutions. It has also identified and raised the issue of a symptomatology of cultural trauma at work in community and public life. Using the work of contemporary trauma theorists and applying it to one hearing held in Victoria in May 2015, this paper suggests that collective trauma can shape cultural identity and influence the quality of communal life.

Whose Rights Matter

This essay considers the relationship between women, religion, and the Australian state via an examination of federal anti-discrimination law. Using two feminist methodologies, it will be argued that the neoliberal state allows discriminatory practices in employment and service provisions by religious organizations on the basis of protecting religious freedom. However, evidence suggests that women are often subject to discriminatory practices by both religious organizations and the state. The state is in the contradictory position of needing to protect the citizenship from religious influences while simultaneously providing a guarantee of religious freedom. Women, I will argue, are caught in a trap here; they are often denied full inclusion in religious traditions and institutions, and the state reinforces this marginalization through the very legislation it enacts to protect religious freedom. Yet the state also promotes the inclusion of women in public life through human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. This results in a quandary and begs the question: whose freedom is being protected? I am calling this form of secularism sexularism to describe the specific intersection between religious groups and gender rights in neoliberal states.

The Royal Commission Investigates Child Sexual Abuse: Uncovering Cultures of Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church

In this chapter, Kathleen McPhillips explores institutional contributions to cultures of sexual violence; particularly through the work of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017), which investigated sexual violence perpetrated against children across different institutions. The Commission’s findings paint a disquieting picture of the failure of many institutions to protect children from abuse. They also reveal that faith-based organizations have had the worst track record in child safety; in particular, the Catholic Church recorded the highest levels of child abuse of any organization under investigation. This speaks to a documented failure on the part of Church leaders and administrators to protect children, despite knowing that they were in danger. McPhillips explores the central reasons why sexual violence against children has been so widespread in Catholic organizations, considering the features of institutional religious settings that appear to render the sexual abuse of children such a ubiquitous occurrence. Specifically, she examines the Royal Commission’s public hearings on abuses perpetrated within institutions run by the Marist Brothers, a male teaching order of Catholic celibate men. McPhillips investigates the particular role that its institutional framework and cultures of masculinity played in producing a culture of abuse.

“Soul Murder”: Investigating Spiritual Trauma at the Royal Commission

ABSTRACT During its five-year tenure, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established that faith organisations, with inadequate practices of organisational transparency and accountability, hierarchical structures of power, and patriarchal cultures, have poor track records in child protection and high levels of child abuse. Evidence from the Royal Commission hearings identified spiritual trauma as an outcome of child sexual abuse across several religious organisations including the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Salvation Army, the Yeshiva Jewish School in Melbourne and Sydney and the Satyananda Ashram in NSW. The Catholic Church had the highest levels of institutional child sexual assault and was the site of most of the narratives of spiritual suffering. This article examines existing research on spiritual trauma with regard to child sexual abuse, applies a five-point classification model developed by Kenneth Pargament and colleagues for identifying and analysing spiritual damage, and examines the evidence from both survivors and expert witnesses that was heard during relevant public hearings involving the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission. Institutional responses to spiritual injury will be considered and it will be argued that the Catholic Church is a distinctive institution that has produced a powerful culture of spiritual identity and belonging, where the impact of child sexual abuse has resulted in a loss of faith for many survivors, families and communities.

Breathing Underwater—Swimming in the Sea of Collective Trauma

My response focuses on the two main issues raised by the three discussants: first, the complex forms of relationality that characterize both individual and group trauma and responses to trauma, and second, the function of vicarious trauma that is produced for witnesses and onlookers and the ways in which this enables a third space to develop with healing properties. I explore these two issues by returning to the work of the Royal Commission with an account of my experience of attending Case Study 43 in September 2016.

Religion and Gender in the Post-secular State: Accommodation or Discrimination?:

This paper considers the relationship between women, religion and the Australian state via an examination of federal anti-discrimination law. Much of the social research into religion-state relations over the last ten years, particularly with the rise of neo-liberalism, demonstrates that religious groups and ideas are actively involved in public debate, policy formation and implementation. While this has been examined by some scholars in social policy, particularly education, there has been little research on the relationship between women’s rights and post-secular politics. This essay will address this gap by firstly locating women’s rights in the context of global forms of neo-liberalism and specifically by examining Australian federal anti-discrimination legislation, which seeks to protect religious freedom by allowing religious groups general exemption from adhering to non-discriminatory employment and training protocols. It is argued via evidence, that such exemptions are premised on the treatment of women as other to masculine norms.

Introduction: Women, Religion and Politics

The papers in this special edition were part of an international seminar that was held in Shoal Bay, Australia in December 2012. Participants from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia gathered together for three days to workshop papers, discuss ideas and enjoy the beautiful coastal environment of northern New South Wales. The seminar was funded from a grant from the University of Newcastle, NSW for the research group Religion in Political Life, and was the first of two international seminars organized with Professor Lisa Isherwood at the University of Winchester. The second seminar was held in July 2013 at Winchester University and consisted of papers from European scholars. These essays will also be published in a future edition of Feminist Theology. As readers will find, the essays are inter-disciplinary in character and draw on the fields of religious studies, theology, feminism and gender studies, biblical studies, political theory, history and sociology. Essay themes include eco-feminism, biblical studies and materialism, historical analysis, feminist accounts of religion, gender and law, gender equality in post-modern Buddhism, feminist biblical studies, women, religion and the state in post-secular Australia, and Indigenous Womanist theology. While this may seem an eclectic mix, it can be argued that this is also a strength as the essays all engage emergent paradigms of knowledge that have characterized the new visibility of religion that has materialized in the last decade and which has led to a reassessment of the intersections of religion and gender in the contemporary world by feminist scholars. Hence, the essays explore the emergence of new articulations of feminist theology (Skye, Elvey, Wainwright); the uses of feminist biblical scholarship in the understanding of women’s religious experiences (Kelso); intersections between religion and law that constrain women’s citizenship (McPhillips); case study accounts that document gender and religious change processes (Jones, McPhillips, Halafoff and Rajkobal); and the experience of women in new religious groups (Halafoff and Rajkobal). It can be argued that these essays contribute to the project of radicalizing feminist theology, precisely by deconstructing these two terms, exploring the lived realities of 555627 FTH0010.1177/0966735014555627Feminist TheologyIntroduction introduction2015