As the Commission on Childhood Abuse approaches, it is crucial that we examine its potential contribution to the issue of institutional abuse, and reach a full understanding of its purpose in terms of justice-making and healing.

The commission is to have two strands, or committees, hearing different kinds of testimony: one from survivors of the industrial schools; the other concerning how the abuse happened.

The decision to conduct affairs in this way is eminently wise, enabling two complementary but at times conflicting aims of justice-making to be achieved: to try to establish who was responsible and why, in the interests of accountability and learning, while meeting the core aim of giving survivors an opportunity to relate their experiences of abuse.

Crucially, the sociological task of reconstructing the conditions within which such abuse could occur should be achieved without denying the reality of the abuse. It is easy to overlook the importance of an adequate context being provided.

In fact, any discussion of child abuse necessitates consideration of the very nature of the society in which it went on.

Since the RTE States of Fear series was broadcast last year, the standard explanation has become that the industrial schools were about, in Fintan O'Toole's words, "the criminalisation of poverty", as a ruthlessly punitive Church and State swooped to incarcerate the children of the poor, while an indifferent community looked on.

My own research (see Doctrine & Life, January, 2000) suggests that some children of the poor were indeed, quite scandalously, taken into care because their parents were not given enough State support to care for them. But children were also removed to the industrial schools because of child cruelty.

In the region of 80 per cent of reports to the ISPCC (the main agency to take children into care) came from the general public, which shows that child protection had significant public support, even among the poor, and that some children were taken into care because the community viewed their parents as cruel or neglectful. Some children welcomed finding a place of safety in the schools.

None of this serves as any justification whatsoever for what went on inside the schools. But it is crucial to understanding the complexity of why children were taken into care (some survivors themselves do not appear to know this), the meaning of child abuse and the concept of child welfare that were present in society, and the dynamics of perception, power and trust relations in how the schools were viewed (often wrongly) as helpful.

That some children who were abused at home experienced further abuse within the care system only adds to the tragedy, and raises huge questions as to why more of these children were not treated with compassion in the schools.

THE creation of a specific committee to hear survivors' testimonies means there can be no ambiguity in the commission meeting the first condition of justice-making, which is truth-telling.

That survivors will not be doubted by being questioned by lawyers helps to ensure that truth here means more than simply establishing the facts of the abuse, but also attending to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of their experience.

This helps to deprive the abuse of some of its corrosive power, heightened by years of secrecy and silencing. It ensures that a second dimension to justice-making can be met: that victims are not only heard but believed, with full acknowledgement that the abuse should not have happened - a process enhanced by the public accountability and witnessing of evidence enshrined in the commission.

The costs of having been abused are, in every sense, huge. A group of 20 survivors of abuse by religious who were brought together by the Centre for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seattle, which specialises in work with victims of clerical abuse, estimated that they had spent a total of 55 years in therapy at a cost of $298,000 in attempting to come to terms with it.

Then there are the social and human costs for those who were impoverished as well as traumatised through the industrial school system, but have no resources to pay for help. At a minimum, the institutions implicated need to cover costs such as therapy.

Such restitution constitutes a third crucial step in justice-making because it represents a symbolic restoration of what was lost, acknowledging the wrong and harm done and the provision of concrete means to bring about healing. Shamefully, however, the Catholic Church continues to show no interest in restitution. This refusal endangers the cause of healing in profound ways.

Survivors need to reach a point at which they can pursue their just claims for restitution without ceding any power over their present life to the perpetrator. Indeed, this is precisely what they have had to do here, as Bernadette Fahy shows in Freedom of Angels, her important account of her healing journey from abuse in Goldenbridge industrial school.

The terrible, painful truth with which the commission will face us, and with which survivors have to live day-in, day-out, is that no one can rescue them from their pain. But justice-making and healing are social processes and the commission can provide a forum constructively through which they are promoted as part of a continuing process of social and personal transformation.

A key question remains whether the religious institutions involved have the integrity to choose to take responsibility for acting so as truly to make justice a reality, and for healing the pain they have caused to others, as well as themselves.

Harry Ferguson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Social Studies, UCC