Introduction

A key contribution of Christie's has been to show that the category of the ideal victim is an expression of societal attitudes and values. In order to qualify as an ideal victim, a person's characteristics and ‘their’ crime must resonate with established social norms and values. They cannot threaten established social hierarchies. Examining the details of who can(not) be an ideal victim in a particular society and for a specific crime illuminates the hidden values, assumptions and norms of a society that underpin these categories.

This chapter examines the relevance of the ideal victim to understanding the discursive construction of the figure of the non-recent childhood sexual abuse survivor in Ireland. Since Ireland ‘discovered’ non-recent childhood sexual abuse as a problem in the 1990s, child abuse survivors have succeeded in gaining public sympathy and societal responses in the form of criminal prosecutions, changes to civil law and official inquiries. The chapter argues that while the categorisation is helpful in exposing the operation of power in relation to how some people come to gain legitimate victim status, to focus exclusively on the ideal victim as an explanatory framework is to omit an important part of the story. The notion of an ideal victim is of limited applicability because it fails to account for the threat posed by such people to the established order of Church and state, and the entrenched culture of denial around sexual violence against children. The ideal victim trope erases from analysis the victim's agency in deciding to disclose the abuse after years of silence. Further, it ignores the importance of the context in which a victim's story is made audible to the broader political community; in this case, the role of the broader violence against women and children movement in amplifying the voices of adults who were abused as children. Finally, it fails to account for the enduring ambivalence of the Irish state's response to survivors’ claims for justice and commemoration.

The chapter first examines the ways in which Christie's typology of the ‘ideal victim’ helps to explain how the figure of the non-recent childhood sexual abuse survivor came to prominence in Ireland in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.