ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a wider cultural and political context that has enabled the emergence of victims of child sexual abuse (CSA) by clergy as political agents and the 'discovery' of CSA in institutional settings. It focuses on establishing the historical and theoretical frameworks within which victims of CSA can be understood to have become recognisable as subjects by engaging in constructing discourses of resistance within networks of power. The chapter argues that victimisation continues to be a discursively constructed and contested category and explores the significance of recognising voices of victims of CSA by clergy whose victimisation and subject position is legitimised through public inquiry. In reframing crime victimisation, relationships between victims and perpetrators have also shifted in public and academic discourses. Robert Ellias argues that "victims cannot be understood apart from their political power or their position and function generally in our political economy." The history of coming to recognise victims is a history of recognising subjects through politicisation.
