This article addresses the Swedish state’s process to provide redress for historical abuse in out-of-home care. The aim is to illuminate how the current state’s responsibility for past child abuse is negotiated in such processes. In Sweden, a temporary financial redress scheme was in effect 2013-16, which compensated fewer than every second applicant. The article demonstrates that the political ambition to recognize symbolically and acknowledge the victims’ suffering and the past society's betrayal of them resulted in unintended consequences when translated into a legal bureaucratic process. The logic of a court assessment is based not on recognition but on establishing legal liability. In the end, redress came to focus on what the state could be deemed responsible for in the past and how modern legal principles could be harmonized with a compensation scheme designed to compensate those for wrongdoings which cannot be redressed by current tort law.