Katie Wright

Theorizing therapeutic culture Past influences, future directions

Analyses of the influence of psychology and the growth of counselling during the 20th century commonly point to the deleterious effects of a cultural shift from reticence and self-reliance to emotional expressiveness and help-seeking. Indeed, the ascendancy of therapeutic culture has been widely interpreted as fostering cultural decline and enabling new forms of social control. Drawing on less pessimistic assessments of cultural change and recent directions in social theory, this article argues for greater recognition of the ambivalent legacy of the therapeutic turn. Through a reinterpretation of the consequences of the diminution of traditional authority, the weakening of the division between public and private life, and the rise of the confessional, the article challenges dominant readings of decline and control. In doing so, it draws attention to how psychological knowledge and therapeutic understandings of the self have given legitimacy to, and furnished a language with which to articulate, experiences of suffering formerly confined to private life. In advancing a less pessimistic interpretation of cultural change, it considers two historic moments in Australia: the advent of telephone counselling in the 1960s and the Royal Commission on Human Relationships in the 1970s.

To See through Johnny and to See Johnny Through: The Guidance Movement in Interwar Australia.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the guidance movement secured a foothold in the Australian educational landscape. Educators and psychologists looked to new initiatives in Britain and America in the hope that guidance programmes would provide solutions to a range of social, economic and educational problems: vocational guidance to help young people identify their calling and secure employment, educational guidance to assist with post-primary selection and placement, and child guidance clinics for the treatment of emotional, psychological and behavioural problems. The distinctive aims of different forms of guidance, however, have tended to obscure in recent historiography the common ideas and rationales that underpinned their establishment: in short, the preclusion of social, educational and industrial ‘misfits’. This article argues, therefore, for a reconceptualisation of guidance as a broader philosophy of individualised education, with a related set of practices, that took root internationally during the interwar years. Through a focus on developments in Australia, an examination of guidance in this broader sense points to the critical place of psychological knowledge and the expanding role of schools in managing the development of children and adolescents and guiding them towards adulthood and future citizenship.

Remaking collective knowledge: An analysis of the complex and multiple effects of inquiries into historical institutional child abuse

This article provides an overview and critical analysis of inquiries into historical institutional child abuse and examines their multiple functions and complex effects. The article takes a broadly international view but focuses primarily on Australia, the UK and Ireland, jurisdictions in which there have been major national inquiries. Drawing on sociological and other social science literature, it begins by considering the forms, functions, and purposes of inquiries. An overview of emergent concerns with institutional abuse in the 1980s and 1990s is then provided, followed by an examination of the response of many governments since that time in establishing inquiries. Key findings and recommendations are considered. The final sections of the article explore the evaluation of inquiries, both during their operation and in their aftermath. Policy change and legislative reform are discussed but the focus is on aspects often underplayed or overlooked, including an inquirys credibility, its role in processes of knowledge production, and the part it plays in producing social and cultural shifts. In the context of growing numbers of inquiries across Western democracies, including the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it is argued that grasping the complexity of the inquiry mechanism, with its inherent tensions and its multiple effects, is crucial to evaluating inquiry outcomes.

Education for citizenship

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine expert ideas about education for citizenship in 1930s Australia. Drawing on a larger study of adolescence and schooling during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the role of international networks and US philanthropy in fostering the spread of new psychological and curriculum ideas that shaped citizenship education, and broader educational changes during the interwar period. A second purpose is to provide historical perspectives on contemporary concerns about the role of schooling in addressing social values and student wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach – The discussion is informed by approaches drawn from Foucauldian genealogy and historical studies of transnationalism. It examines constructions of the good and problem student and the networks of international educational expertise as forms of “travelling ideas”. These transnational exchanges are explored through a close analysis of a defining moment in Australian educati...

“Help for wayward children”: child guidance in 1930s Australia

Purpose – Historical studies of the expert management of childhood in Australia often make passing reference to the establishment of child guidance clinics. Yet beyond acknowledgement of their founding during the interwar years, there has been little explication of the dynamics of their institutional development. The purpose of this article is to examine the introduction of child guidance in Australia against the backdrop of the international influences that shaped local developments.Design/methodology/approach – The article investigates the establishment of child guidance clinics in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1930s. In doing so, it explores the influence of American philanthropy, the promise of prevention that inspired the mental hygiene movement, and some of the difficulties faced in putting its child guidance ideals into practice in Australia.Findings – American philanthropy played an important role in the transnational carriage of ideas about mental hygiene and child guidance into Australia. However,...

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.

Inventing Youth Wellbeing

Calls to address wellbeing are now so commonplace and widespread that they can mean both everything and nothing. Across policy and popular discourses, improving wellbeing is offered as a solution to the myriad issues facing young people today. This chapter explores the invention of youth wellbeing as a concept and a category of concern, noting its ambiguity and changing applications. It introduces a case for defamilarizing the status and truth claims of the construct of youth wellbeing, by exploring its invention as well as its movements and productive effects. Two sets of conceptual resources are outlined for developing this analysis: the first is informed by Somers’ approach to developing an historical sociology of concept formation, and the second is Bacchi’s account of the construction of policy problems. The chapter concludes with an overview of the papers in this volume which, in drawing on a range of approaches and intellectual traditions, take a step back from taken-for-granted assumptions about youth wellbeing and provide provocations to think anew about this category, the problems it addresses and the promises it makes.

From Targeted Interventions to Universal Approaches: Historicizing Wellbeing

Concern about high rates of mental health disorders amongst young people has underwritten a proliferation of social and educational policy aimed at improving youth wellbeing. This chapter examines educational concerns with mental health through a critical analysis of wellbeing as an object of educational policy and practice. It begins by considering the construction of mental health as an educational problem, in the past and in the present, and the policy solutions that have been developed in order to address this. It then explores how rising concern with the wellbeing of young people has fostered a shift from the historically narrow educational focus on targeted interventions – for students experiencing problems or identified as being at risk of mental health difficulties – to the more recent emphasis on universal approaches and preventative programs. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the seductive power of ideas of prevention and “psychological immunization” and considers the implications of this for contemporary educational policy and practice, and ultimately for understanding and promoting youth wellbeing.

The promise of the new: genealogies of youth, nation and educational reform in Australia

The promise of the new underpins much educational reform discourse, from utopian strands and grand gestures to more formulaic rhetoric found in declarations of new policies for new times. Informed by genealogical and feminist approaches, this essay introduces some conceptual frameworks for analysing such expressions of hopefulness and newness in educational discourse. While its initial impetus is debates about the education of adolescents in interwar Australia, it extends to a consideration of relations between future-oriented utopian aspirations in the past and educational discourses and practices in the present. It calls for more reflexive problematisation of the past–present relationship in historical and sociological studies of education, and outlines an argument for taking account of the ‘untimely’ in educational discourses and practices. The essay concludes with an overview of the articles featured in this volume.

Speaking the Unspeakable, Naming the Unnameable: The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT The establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse followed years of lobbying by survivor groups, damning findings from previous inquiries, and increasing societal recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by child sexual abuse. Through extensive media coverage, the Royal Commission brought into public view the reality that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, and its recommendations are prompting organisational, policy, and legislative reform. This article explores the background to the Royal Commission, situating it within the history of previous inquiries and growing community outrage at the failure of institutions to adequately protect children and respond appropriately when abuse occurs. The article explores the ways in which the Royal Commission, more so than previous inquiries, brought child sexual abuse into public discourse. It also serves as an introduction to this special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, which illustrates how the Royal Commission has fostered new scholarship across a range of disciplines as researchers engage with complex issues related to institutional child sexual abuse, its history, causes, impacts, and the important role of inquiries in confronting it.