Children have been abused whilst under the care of the state or other non-governmental bodies (charities, religious organisations) across the world for many years. Some countries are now acknowledging their past failures due to the work of survivor groups, lawyers and others pressing for change in how children in care are looked after and how we address historical wrongs.

However, for many survivors of historical child abuse whilst in-care, the route to justice is not easy. In many cases, evidence of what happened to them is not readily available (records have been lost, destroyed, were poor quality or never kept), witnesses have passed away or are unable to give testimony, perpetrators have died or the organisations that looked after them as children have been closed down or taken over. This makes getting justice for their abuse through the courts difficult, potentially very traumatic and, in many cases, unlikely to succeed.

To address this, some countries and organisations have set-up redress schemes to provide an alternate route to justice for survivors. These tend to be less adversarial than the court system. Each redress scheme tries to address the specific issues of abuse and context and consequently, they vary widely in outcomes such as amounts of redress awards and the proportion of applicants that receive a redress award.

This dashboard seeks to:
Give an overview of Redress schemes across the world that have publicly available data, to give a view of the differences and patterns that are driving the availability of redress for survivors and the size and scope of redress awards from both geographical and time perspectives.
Look in detail at Scotland’s Redress Scheme and, specifically, how Redress Scotland is performing in its role as the independent decision making body and how the organisation is trying to meet the needs of survivors of historical child abuse.

Content Warning: This dashboard makes reference to historic child abuse.