New International Frontiers in Child Sexual Abuse by Ben Mathews

Author:Ben Mathews
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319990439
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusion

Overall, then, a jurisdiction’s legal system is an essential mechanism to protect fundamental human rights and liberties, and promote individual and public health. A legal system is the dominant social system that can provide publicly-sanctioned formal means for criminal punishment. It is also the method by which a society chooses, or does not choose, to confer remedies on individuals who have suffered breaches of their rights and liberties, and damage to their health. A legal system embodies a society’s systemic approach to the obligations and duties imposed on individuals and organisations, as set out in both civil law and criminal law. It also confers formal individual entitlements in both civil law and criminal law, and remedies for breach of these entitlements, and systems of independent oversight. It establishes penalties for individuals and obligations for individuals and institutions who breach their obligations, again set out in both civil law and criminal law, which have multiple purposes ranging from punishment, to ensuring compensation of those harmed, to deterrence. It can establish mechanisms to prevent, identify, and respond to child sexual abuse, applying in different settings of individual and institutional conduct. The principles in a society’s legal system embody the recognised individual rights and preferred principles of individual life and social organisation. In forming a system of expected behaviour, duties and entitlements, legal systems create a set of social norms.

As will now be shown in Chaps. 5 and 6, this dynamic nature of legal systems endows society with a capacity to rapidly create substantial change in how that society responds to prevent, identify and respond to child sexual abuse. The choice to create this change sometimes takes generations to develop and must overcome entrenched social and legal norms of discrimination and violence against children generally or girls in particular. In other cases, however, these choices can quickly crystallise in response to shifts in social attitudes and a demand to end clear injustice, especially when supported by courageous lobbyists and survivors, politically powerful individuals or groups, public inquiries, women’s voices, and the media. Such change can overturn centuries of injustice, as we will now see.

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