Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping

Abstract

The CLAN Rights Charter asserts rights in records for Care leavers who were taken from their homes and families and communities, and placed in orphanages, children 's Homes, foster Care and other forms of institutions. The Australian Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care is a response to the critical, largely unmet recordkeeping and archival needs of both children and young people in Care today, and Care leavers, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, young people and their families, and Stolen Generations. It focuses on their lifelong and diverse recordkeeping needs. The recordkeeping rights specified in both Charters are essential enablers for the exercise of human rights, including participatory, identity, memory and accountability rights. They provide a rights-based foundation for addressing the continuing recordkeeping failures, the major gaps in the archival record, and the weaponisation of data and records that plague the Care sector. In this article, the authors discuss the research and advocacy contexts of the two interrelated Charters, their mapping of the Charters aimed at cross-validation and identification of gaps. They then explore the challenge of translating the Charters into transformative practice, advocating for their adoption and developing guidelines for their implementation. KeywordsRights Charters in Childhood Recordkeeping; Out of Home Care Australia; Participatory recordkeeping; Children and young people in Care; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in Care; Care Leavers and Stolen Generations essential for expert advice to be available to anyone wishing to refuse to participate given the potential unforeseen risk of harm, e.g. because evidence not available for redress. vi Note: implementing access rights may involve balancing competing rights in a participatory process. vii As a result of the findings of a comparative research study and mappings of the Charter and the Refugee Rights Framework, rights regarding records expertise have been included in the Charter.

Recordkeeping, logistics, and translation: a study of homeless services systems as infrastructure

“…As Golding et al write “government recordkeeping was central to the implementation of the oppressive laws, practices and policies that denied Indigenous Australians their countries, their identities, cultural heritage and languages, suppressing the practice of culture, and breaking transmission lines” ( 2021a , p 1633). In response to calls to address legacies of violence, archival scholars have proposed multiple responses including establishing a rights-based framework for Care-leavers and Care-experienced people (Golding et al 2021a , b ; Hoyle et al 2018 ), radically expanding and pluralizing access to records (Evans et al 2020 ; Tropea and Ward 2021 ), emphasizing the importance of records for Care-leavers’ memory and identity needs (Hoyle et al 2020 ), and building more participatory recordkeeping models for care settings (Shepherd et al 2020 ). While in a different context of care, our research on recordkeeping in homeless services is informed by this body of the literature on child welfare systems.…”