The word "survivors" appeared twice in the opening section of the resignation letter of Ms Justice Laffoy, in which she outlined the facts leading up to the establishment of her tribunal.
The two uses occurred in the same sentence, referring to "the issue of compensation for survivors of abuse, first raised in July 2000 by a group of solicitors acting for a substantial number of survivors". Elsewhere, she referred to "complainants" and "victims of abuse".
In dealing with those accused, she referred to "respondents" or "individuals against whom allegations have been made".
The language of this matter is tricky. The word "survivors" is associated chiefly with Jews who escaped the holocaust suffered by six million of their brethren at the hands of the Nazis. In this context, it refers, literally, to those who survived something incontrovertibly established to have occurred. Only a handful of far-right extremists maintain that the holocaust did not happen - the rest of mankind is united in believing it was probably the most horrific episode in world history.
Used in connection with alleged abuse in residential institutions a generation ago, the word "survivor" has acquired a usage and connotation that we should find disturbing. Nothing has yet been established in a court of law to confirm the widespread accusations of abuse made about these institutions and those who ran them.
The word "survivor" arrives here via feminist discourse concerning rape and sexual assault, as an alternative to "victim", which feminists insisted should be used only to describe someone who had died in the course of an attack. The problem with the word in relation to any such offence is that its use assumes the episode at issue actually occurred, more or less as alleged.
It is, therefore, questionable as a way of describing someone who alleges they have suffered something as yet unproven.
In this we have an illustration of the complexities of dealing with events that, by virtue of saturation reporting of one side of the story, have been accepted at face value. It has been hazardous for anyone seeking to call into question any of the allegations made concerning residential institutions. Assumptions of truthfulness on the part of complainants are balanced only by assumptions of guilt in relation to the accused. For several years, there has been no place in the public debate for the voices of those who plead not guilty, or who wish to give different accounts of life in the institutions in question.
This self-sealing process is rendered more inscrutable by the language in which these matters are spoken of. Although most of the allegations relate to alleged ill-treatment and physical abuse, the general sense of the church's disgrace in relation to past episodes of sexual abuse has led the public conversation into a self-fulfilling acceptance in respect of the raft of accusations which confront the abuse tribunal and redress board.
Societal attitudes to sexual abuse are wholly different to most other crimes. It is not merely their horrendous nature or the breach of innocence they involve, there is also an issue of ideology, of which language is critical. In addition to "survivor", there are several other words in common use in this connection, which, in seeming to presuppose that the facts are already established, render investigation superfluous and, in effect, invert the presumption of innocence on which our system of justice depends.
One such word is "disclosure", used to describe what, in relation to other types of offences, would be described as "allegations". Another staple of the ideology of abuse investigation is the concept of "denial", which, in its post-Freudian application, equates denial with guilt, and emphatic denial with unambiguous guilt.
When survivors make disclosures and the guilty issue denials, due process can often seem like a cumbersome and costly inconvenience. And so, although the purpose of establishing a tribunal was, presumably, to establish the facts, the public discussion, concerning compensation and other matters, continues as if the facts are beyond question. Attempts to outline reservations about the process or its language are subject to massively hysterical responses.
Last Saturday, Patsy McGarry wrote in this newspaper a disturbing account of the experiences of two former Christian Brothers who say they have been wrongly accused. One stands accused of abuse that would have to have occurred when he was two years old. And yet the article was shrouded in scepticism by its headline - "Ex-Brothers concerned at 'false' claims" - the quotation marks around "false" imply a raised eyebrow of doubt about the Brothers' claims of innocence.
Isn't there something we need to examine when even our sub-editing stylisms conspire implicitly to withhold from the accused the benefit of doubts automatically extended in our language to their accusers?