When the institution harms

In her landmark speech at the Second Sex conference in 1979, Audre Lorde gave us a guiding map for where to begin. Her words remain urgent — despite more than forty years passing, they stand true and poignant. What is named is that meaningful repair cannot happen through the same tools, structures and systems of power that produced the harm.

What institutions often offer as repair can become a placated attempt to restore order. A procedure is followed. A statement is made. An apology is offered. A listening space is arranged. But Lorde’s warning asks us to go deeper: whose tools are being used, whose house is being protected, and what kind of change is actually possible if the institution remains loyal to its own survival?

Institutional harm is the damage caused when an organisation, service, profession, or system causes, enables, ignores, minimises, conceals, mishandles, or fails to repair harm experienced by people who depend on it for care, safety, education, livelihood, recognition, belonging, or justice.

It can happen through direct action, neglect, silence, bureaucracy and procedures, silencing, defensiveness, disbelief, the lack of safeguarding, or the demand that the person who has been harmed behaves, or ‘calms down’, or be more reasonable.

Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s work on institutional racism is foundational. They described institutional harm as a form of racism that is “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts,” yet no less destructive than individual racism. Their analysis helps us understand that institutional harm is not always visible as one person doing one clearly harmful thing. Often, the harm is built into the ordinary operations of the institution itself: its habits, procedures, silences, hierarchies, and assumptions.

What is most painful when the institution harms is that the damage often comes from the very same place a person depended on, trusted, or hoped would protect them. In the UK, this has been named repeatedly through public inquiries and reports, including the Macpherson Report of 1999, which brought the term institutional racism into wider public and policy consciousness after the racist and brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence.

In the counselling and psychotherapy field, institutional harm can happen in the therapy room, in supervision, in training, in complaints processes, and in professional regulation.

It has its own force, in particular as the field carries the language of care and compassion. Sometimes that same language becomes one of the tools for harm — as when racism is psychologised, when Black pain is treated as anger rather than knowledge, when clients are asked to educate their therapists, when trainees are punished for naming harm, when complaints disappear into procedure, and when “repair” means restoring institutional comfort rather than changing the conditions that caused the harm.

Institutional harm is not an isolated mistake. It is a patterned failure of power. It is produced through interlocking systems of racial hierarchy, patriarchy, class violence, ableism, heteronormativity, transphobia, and colonial knowledge control.

Repair must therefore be more than apology. It must return authority, safety, resources, and decision-making power to those harmed.

The impact of institutional harm can be profound. It can live in the body, in language, in memory, in relationships, and in a person’s capacity to trust.

A person may stop speaking. They may start doubting themselves. They may look fine while privately falling apart. They may continue functioning because stopping would cost them their income, qualification, immigration status, professional reputation, community, or future.

At its most devastating, institutional harm can contribute to profound despair, withdrawal, crisis, and, for some, thoughts of not wanting to live. This must be named with care, not sensationalised or hidden.

This is why harm does not end when the incident ends.
And this is why silence must never be mistaken for resolution.

A living map. Open each phrase to see what institutional harm does beneath the surface — what harm makes people carry.

We have become used to thinking of repair after rupture. Within institutions, repair is often interpreted as: “we did all we could and followed procedures.” Sometimes repair becomes an apology. And as Beverly Engel reminds us, an apology without action is not enough.

This is why we need to be careful about the word repair. Repair can be necessary, as it can and should be relational, as well as material and protective. But repair can also be misused — a tick box to follow procedures.

Avgi Saketopoulou’s critique of repair helps us notice when repair becomes a demand for attachment to the very object that harmed us. Her work on the antireparative turn challenges the assumption that repair is always the ethical destination, especially when repair asks people to remain invested in institutions that cannot or will not relinquish power.

Institutions often use repair as a means to recover their reputation. They may want the harmed person to return, reconcile, participate in a listening exercise, accept an apology, or help rebuild trust — without the institution having to surrender the structures that made betrayal possible. Repair becomes risk-averse and counterinsurgent when it is used to preserve relations at any cost. In this form, repair becomes a moral demand placed on those harmed: stay available, stay attached, stay reasonable, stay in relation, help the institution recover its image.

That is not repair.

Real repair must disrupt the institution. It must change who has power, who defines harm, who controls the record, who is believed, who is protected, and what consequences follow.