Switzerland's Apology for Compulsory Government-Welfare Measures: A Social Justice Turn?

AT THE END OF THE FIRST DECADE OF THIS CENTURY, THE OFFICIAL governments and churches of several countries--as diverse as Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and United States--apologized in unprecedented numbers to former and youth in these Western states' and to their once-considered undesirable and/or non-conforming families. Universities, pharmaceutical companies, and business federations have also started to acknowledge their complicity in historical exploitation of in care. Often, these official acknowledgments of mistreatment are accompanied with or preceded by a growing number of other reconciliatory actions. Currently, at least 18 Western countries have reviewed or are in process of reviewing abuse and neglect in institutional and/or foster family care for children, youth, and young adults (Daly 2014, Skold and Swain 2015). The extensive responsibility taken by governments, churches, and private organizations testifies to magnitude of past injustices inflicted on and their families and indicates far-reaching and innate these practices are to Western societies. Research into systemic nature of these injustices demonstrates need for a new interdisciplinary field of study devoted to long, diverse, and international history of (former) and youth in who were un-familied through heterosexually, patriarchally, and ethnoracially structured compulsory government--elfare measures. Research into this new field remains scant and primarily focuses on officials' responses to institutional abuse and on conceptualization of those reactions. Johanna Skold (2013,6), for example, questions how a historical understanding of past abuse and neglect of in out-of-home care is framed and what knowledge abuse inquiries produce. In a coauthored collection of articles, Skold and Swain (2015, 4) frame the inquiries into historical violations of children's rights as a new area within broader scholarship around transitional justice. collection of articles traces similarities in children's rights violations by including findings from different countries without erasing national particularities. Another scholar, Kathleen Daly (2014a), questions emergence of institutional abuse as a social problem and reasoning behind authorities' responses to it. Daly develops a classification system that organizes abuse cases according to whether authorities failed to protect and care for children (core cases), and practice wrongs were committed against certain groups of children (core-plus-one cases), and and practice wrongs against were embedded in a more general discrimination against a political minority (core-plus-two cases) (Daly 2014, 25). These three categories allow for institutional abuse cases (case studies) to be organized into groups, mapping international data accordingly. She focuses her research on redressing institutional abuse primarily on a comparison of Canadian and Australian processes (Daly 2014 a,b). Carol Brennan (2007) provides an in-depth view of Ireland's redress policy, focusing on Laffoy period, and draws some comparisons to policies of Australia and Canada. However, analysis of Switzerland remains essentially absent from current scholarship. This article examines Switzerland's redress policy in hopes of filling this gap. This article focuses on Switzerland's 2013 apology, Fursorgerische Zwangsmassnahmen und Fremdplatzierungen (FZ+Z; Compulsory Government-Welfare Measures and Placements with Strangers), and examines history of children's rights violations that warranted apology as well as other reconciliatory actions, paying special attention to terminology used. It is important to note that Swiss apology uniquely focuses on historical compulsory government-welfare measures and addresses all victims of these measures regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age (yet without erasing group-specific differences). …

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