1 The transitional space of public inquiries: The case of the Royal Commission into Institutional Forms of Child Sexual Abuse Salter, M. (2020) The transitional space of public inquiries: The case of the Royal Commission into Institutional Forms of Child Sexual Abuse, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, forthcoming. Over the last four decades, victims and survivors have come to play an active role in shaping public discourse on child sexual abuse (CSA), largely due to the efforts of second wave feminism and related social movements (Whittier, 2009). Nonetheless, the public status of victim narratives of CSA remains fraught. The struggles of victims to articulate traumatic experiences are obstructed by the often indifferent or hostile responses of bystanders and communities, while their allegations face substantive evidentiary challenges in the criminal justice system (Salter, 2018). There remains a significant disjuncture between the lived experience of CSA and public and expert discourses on the subject, while policy frameworks are failing to reduce the associated human and economic costs (Pilgrim, 2018). Ongoing revelations of high profile sexual abuse ‘scandals’ illustrate the ways in which cumulative victim reports can fail to cohere in the form of collectively actionable knowledge, remaining quarantined for years or decades in the interpersonal and private domain, only to receive an unsure reception if and when they come to public attention. 1 This paper argues that the uncertain public status of victim narratives of sexual abuse has inhibited the information sharing and dialogue necessary for policy reform and transformative change. Through an integration of public sphere theory and relational psychoanalysis, this paper identifies the need for a “transitional space” (Winnicott, 2005) for the explication of sexual abuse narratives in order to bridge the gap between private suffering and public understanding. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (“the Royal Commission”) provides a case study of a transitional mechanism that attributed public significance to survivor’s stories via the co-construction of knowledge between survivors, Commissioners and experts. The paper analyses the instantiation of a “therapeutic politics” (Whittier, 2009) within the Royal Commission, and its resultant synthesis of the rational-critical dimensions of public speech with the emotional depth and substance of traumatic catharsis. The paper concludes that public inquiries are uniquely positioned to act as transitional spaces between the personal and political dimensions of traumatic experience, while recognizing the challenges posed to this space by the contemporary bureaucratic state. The fragmented public sphere In contemporary societies, the process of collective articulation and the social construction of problems has been located within the “public sphere”, generally 1 For examples, see Greer and McLaughlin’s (2013) study of the accusations against Jimmy Savile, Cockbain’s (2013) analysis of the social construction of the racialized “sex grooming” scandals, and Author’s (2018) discussion of two generations of sexual abuse allegations in an Anglican diocese. The recent British scandal regarding Carl Beech, sentenced to 18 years in prison for perverting the cause of justice and fraud after falsely accusing a range of prominent figures of child sexual abuse, further underscores the troubled transition of private accusations into the public domain (Murphy, 2019).