The Foundation of the Good Shepherd was set up by Mother Marie-Euphrasie in the XIX!h century. The specificmission of the order was to take care of the poor, and particularly of women and children, to ease their distress, givethem support and encourage them to make their way back into society. ln the UK, the Good Shepherd institutes were known as Magdalen Asylums, for the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene, a repentant sinner who became a disciple of Christ; the vocation of these Magdalen institutions was to shelter prostitutes and single mothers. They quickly came to specialise in laundry work- a symbolic task, as these women had above all to wash away their sins. During the reign of Queen Victoria, puritanism became more severe, and the figure of Mary Magdalena came to embody the "whore", the "fallen" woman. Three Acts of Parliament were passed to curb the expansion of prostitution and venereal diseases. Il was only in the late 1990s that voices were raised to denounce the abuse and ill-treatment committed in some of these institutions, voices that were soon picked up and amplified in a number of films, and in particular Peter Mullan's The Magdalena Sisters. The aim of this study is to understand why such things happened, and to study the role played by the media in the process of their exposure and to what extent they can be said to make History.