The Credibility Barrier: Why Silence on Perpetrator and Victim Data Fails Abuse Research
The Credibility Barrier: Why Silence on Perpetrator and Victim Data Fails Abuse Research Methodological Radicalism: The Necessity of Disclosing Perpetrator and Victim Data for the Scientific Analysis of Institutional Abuse The scientific analysis of historical and systemic child abuse faces a fundamental conflict between the protection of personal data and the demand for empirical truth-seeking. The method of radical openness , applied to the documentation of individual life histories, offers a decisive solution. 1. The Deficiency of Anonymization in Research In previous literature concerning institutional abuse, the names of both victims and perpetrators were typically anonymized or withheld. This practice, while ethically motivated by data protection, leads to a critical credibility deficit and severely restricts scientific usability: Lack of Verifiability: Anonymous reports cannot be embedded within the historical, political, or sociological context , which makes empirical v...