When Governments Ask People to Retell Trauma

Editor
Aug 7
7 min read

Updated: Aug 10

Australia’s child sexual abuse Royal Commission established a trauma-informed standard. People who expose failures in other systems deserve care, continuity and protection too.

Content note: This article discusses institutional child sexual abuse, psychological injury and suicide risk.

Governments regularly ask people to come forward. They establish inquiries, commissions and reviews because something has gone wrong and the official record is incomplete. They need the people who were there to explain what happened. They need those who were injured to describe not only the original harm, but what institutions did afterwards.

Without those accounts, governments cannot see the pattern. They cannot understand where safeguards failed, how decisions were made or why supposedly protective systems sometimes made an injury worse.

Official desk with single chair, desk lamp, glass of water and notepad

But coming forward is not a simple administrative act.

It may require a person to reopen the most painful period of their life, revisit records created about them, enter an unfamiliar process and speak to people who hold considerably more power. It can affect sleep, health, relationships and a person’s sense of safety. It may revive the helplessness that accompanied the original harm.

If government needs that knowledge, it must accept responsibility for the foreseeable human cost of obtaining it.

Australia has already established a precedent for this. Not necessarily a legal precedent binding every future inquiry, but a powerful ethical, moral and administrative one. It was established by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The Royal Commission understood that truth-telling carries risk

The Royal Commission could not have understood institutional child sexual abuse without survivors. More than 8,000 people ultimately shared their experiences in private sessions. Parliament amended the Royal Commissions Act 1902 to allow those sessions to occur in a private, protected and supportive setting.

The Commission recognised that if it wanted people to disclose deeply traumatic experiences, the usual machinery of an inquiry was not enough.

The Commission designed its private-session model using trauma-informed principles. Participation was voluntary. People could bring a support person, have someone speak on their behalf and tell their story in their own way, with minimal questioning or interruption. Privacy and confidentiality were protected, the physical environment was made less intimidating and the process was adapted to individual needs.

The care around the telling was not incidental. It was part of the process.

The Commission’s documented support model included:

a counsellor-led intake service;
early identification and assessment of complex needs;
internal pathways for additional counselling support;
help preparing for a private session;
counselling support for witnesses before, during and after public hearings;
continuity with the same counsellor wherever possible, to build safety, trust and rapport;
a debrief with a counsellor after a private session;
a follow-up welfare call one week later; and
referral to further counselling or legal services when required.

The Royal Commission prioritised continuity with the same counsellor. In its later redress recommendations, it said each applicant should, where possible, have a particular contact officer to answer questions about the progress and timing of their application. It also recommended case-management-style assistance to help survivors navigate available psychological services.

The principle of this support is obvious: no person should be left alone to navigate a complex government process immediately after disclosing trauma.

Justice Peter McClellan, Chair of the Royal Commission, said effective support that maintained survivors’ wellbeing was an essential element of any humane justice system. He warned that coming forward could retraumatise people and that care might be required before, during and long after their formal participation had ended.

We believe that insight should not be confined to one Royal Commission or one form of harm. It should be applied to other inquiries where victims are required to retell their trauma.

Different injuries, the same responsibility

Institutional child sexual abuse and workplace injury are not the same experience. They should not be collapsed into one another or compared for severity. And we are by no means drawing any comparison.

But there is an important lesson that travels across both and we can learn from these inquries.

For example: people who have been psychologically injured at work may also be asked to retell distressing experiences to insurers, regulators, investigators, independent medical examiners, parliamentary committees, statutory reviews or special inquiries. Sometimes they must repeat the same account many times. They may be required to revisit correspondence, medical reports and decisions that formed part of the injury itself.

The institution asking for their story may describe the process as consultation, evidence gathering or an opportunity to be heard but for the person participating, it can involve far more.

The body remembers what the file calls “information.”

A meeting ends for the officials when the room empties but It does not necessarily end for the person who has just recounted what happened. In some instances the trauma may just be beginning, yet again as deep memories resurface. The participant may return to a hotel room, begin a long drive home or a family is left unprepared and does not know how distressed their family member has become.

That is the gap governments must close.

Applying a psychosocial hazard lens

Perhaps it is time for governments to apply a psychosocial hazard lens to every inquiry involving traumatic or distressing evidence.

Before inviting people to participate, an inquiry should identify the foreseeable hazards created by its own processes. These may include repeated retelling of traumatic experiences, unequal power, uncertainty, inadequate communication, fear of reprisals, loss of privacy and participants being left alone while distressed after an interview or hearing.

Controls should then be designed before participation begins—not introduced only after someone has deteriorated.

Governments expect risks to be identified before people enter physically hazardous environments. The same discipline should apply when their own inquiries asks injured people to revisit the circumstances of their trauma for the public benefit.

A referral list is important but it is not a system of care

It is not enough to include a crisis number at the bottom of an invitation. It is not enough to ask, at the beginning of a meeting, whether someone feels able to continue. It is not enough to offer a small, fixed number of counselling sessions after the damage becomes visible.

Care must be designed into the inquiry from the first contact. At the very beginning. Employees also working for inquiries should have a clear process of care to follow, recognising that they are not mental health professionals. Similarly, they too may require support that goes beyond an EAP telephone number referral.

For people with psychological injuries, professional support should include a named, trauma-trained support coordinator who remains available throughout the process; a written support and safety plan developed with the participant; continuity of care; the choice to use an existing treating practitioner; accessible communication; permission to pause, defer or withdraw; a support person in meetings who is themselves boundary trained; and active follow-up after difficult interviews or hearings.

It should also include practical protection: clear confidentiality arrangements, informed consent about how a person’s words and materials may be used, safeguards against reprisals, access to independent legal advice where necessary, and a transparent pathway for raising concerns about the inquiry itself.

Families and support people may need care too. The Royal Commission recognised this in its redress recommendations, which included counselling during the application process, flexibility to use an established therapist and limited counselling for family members where reasonably required.

These are not nice to have additions to any inquiry. They are safeguards against predictable harm where there is known truama involved.

Governments cannot take the evidence and externalise the cost

Too often, the burden of public-interest is shifted back onto the injured person.

Government receives the testimony, the documents, the insight and sometimes the credibility that lived experience gives an inquiry. The participant carries the activation, exhaustion, grief, fear and disruption that may follow. And it can escalate if unheard.

That arrangement is neither fair nor sustainable.

If a person’s experience is valuable enough to inform reform, that person’s wellbeing must be valuable enough to protect.

This is especially important when governments invite evidence from people already harmed by systems intended to support them. A poorly designed inquiry can reproduce the very conditions it is examining: loss of control, uncertainty, disbelief, fragmented communication and abandonment after disclosure.

The Royal Commission took seriously the danger of reinforcing helplessness. It recognised choice and flexibility as ways of returning some control to survivors. That is a profound lesson for every inquiry involving injured or traumatised people.

Trauma-informed practice is not simply speaking gently in the room. It is how the whole process is designed: who makes contact, what the person is told, whether promises are recorded, whether support is continuous, what happens when risk escalates and who checks that the person is safe afterwards.

The obligation does not end with “thank you”

In Shattered, we return again and again to what happens after injury.

The same question must be asked of every government process that invites injured people to participate: what happens after they tell you?

Who contacts them the next day?

Who notices if they have become unsafe?

Who makes sure they are not driving home alone in acute distress?

Who explains what will happen to their evidence?

Who remains accountable when the meeting is over?

The Royal Commission showed that a government inquiry can gather vital evidence while acknowledging the human vulnerability of those providing it. Its model was not perfect, and no process can remove all distress. But it established something important: care, continuity and protection are part of receiving the truth responsibly.

Future inquiries in any area involving trauma should not have to rediscover that principle. Nor should injured people have to prove, one inquiry at a time, that reopening trauma can carry serious risk.

When governments ask people to come forward, they assume more than the right to hear their stories. They assume a responsibility not to leave them shattered by the telling.