Uncertain Legacies: Resilience and Institutional Child Abuse - A Literature Review - Research Findings

Conclusions

Resilience is most helpfully seen as an ongoing, long term process rather than an inherent personality trait or a definitive outcome: it is a complex journey, rather than a destination. Resilience draws our attention to the fact that negative outcomes are not always an inevitable consequence of encountering adverse events or experiences.

Much of the literature reviewed related to young people's experiences in institutional care, but institutional child abuse is a significant and under-researched problem. There are aspects of this form of abuse which merit further attention, including the distinctive public dimension to disclosure which is often absent in other forms of abuse. This has implications for the type of support offered to survivors who take part in public inquiries and investigations.

Nurturing individual resilience, both among children currently in the care system and for those adults who experienced abuse as children in residential institutions, means focussing on strengthening resources available to an individual at personal, social and environmental levels, and this chimes with other contemporary policy strategies in Scotland, namely assets based approaches in health. Resilience is a useful concept when focussing on children who experience abuse in residential care for two reasons: it raises awareness of the needs of children who are currently in care, and for whom much can be done to nurture and develop longer term resilience as they grow into adulthood; and it offers a meaningful frame for understanding the diverse experiences and support needs of survivors who have already disclosed or who are likely to emerge in the future.