When Words Wound: Navigating Moral Disengagement Associated with Documented Institutional Abuse
This partnership has roots in long-term research on the structural conditions of violence endured by intellectually disabled people who survived forced institutionalization. These survivors spearheaded a string of class action lawsuits against provincial governments for negligent facility management resulting in widespread and severe neglect, and physical and sexual abuse, documented through administrative records. These records catalogue years of extreme violence, but also violence that becomes quotidian, borne out in the dynamics of total institutional culture and made possible by staff who learned to disengage. Concomitant with these efforts, Canada’s Community Living movement advocated for the closure of large-scale facilities and fostered care in quasi-institutional spaces such as group homes and day programs. When Community Living chapters worked with institutional survivors to read the records accessed through lawsuits, the work exposed frontline staff and managers to damaging accounts of harm, while simultaneously demanding that they continue to provide care within spaces that themselves may foster forms of disengagement.
This presentation documents a project wherein researchers worked alongside frontline workers and managers from a local Community Living chapter. Drawing from a series of focus groups with CLB staff, we explore salient differences between on the one hand the vicarious trauma, burnout, and compassion fatigue felt from reading documentation of abuse; and on the other the moral residue, distress, or injury experienced when the institutional conditions depicted in records resembled current community living conditions. While facilities at the centre of class actions may have closed, alternative forms of disability care have work to do to resist the re-entrenchment of institutional violence.