Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Summit

Over two decades of worldwide inquiries have highlighted the failure of past and present recordkeeping regimes and archival access frameworks to provide answers to fundamental questions – Who took me from my family and why? How were decisions made about where I ended up? How were decisions made to keep me in care? What about my family? What was I like as a child? – and of their propensity to heal rather than harm. A mountain of testimonies and submissions have described how those who have grown up in orphanages, children’s Homes, foster and/or other forms of statutory care have found government, organisational and institutional archives wanting when they have turned to them to make sense of the dislocation, disconnection, neglect, trauma and abuse suffered during their childhoods. While current standards for out-of-home care emphasise the need to put the physical, emotional, spiritual and social health and wellbeing of children and young people at the centre of service provision, they are being implemented on recordkeeping infrastructure built for previous eras of child protection and welfare. Current frameworks, processes and systems put the rights of the organisations, institutions and governments providing and responsible for out-of-home care ahead of those of children and their adult selves. They exclude children and young people from participation in decision-making about their records and continue that exclusion throughout adulthood (see Figure 1). The recordkeeping needs of a child-centred model of out-of-home care cannot just be incrementally added onto existing infrastructure designed for a different age, different values, different principles and a different technological paradigm. The archival and recordkeeping needs for childhood in out-of-home care are part of one of society’s wicked problems, namely how to ensure that the systems set up to protect children from abuse and neglect do not themselves cause harm? Wicked problems are pressing social policy challenges, resistant to easy resolution owing to complex interdependencies, and requiring new kinds of collaborative and innovative responses that transcend organisational and jurisdictional boundaries.1 Envisioning, designing and building an integrated archival and recordkeeping infrastructure for child-centred out-of-home care is such a major social design challenge. The scale, depth, breadth and complexities involved require ‘smarter and more agile responses to how problems and opportunities are identified and framed, and how new solutions are generated, explored, prototyped, resourced and realised’.2 On 8 and 9 May 2017, 180 participants gathered for the Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Summit at the Deakin Edge Federation Square, Melbourne to address this challenge.3 Representing a range of community, organisational, government and professional perspectives, we came together with a common concern that recordkeeping and archiving, despite improvements flowing from the inquiries and apologies over the past two decades, continues to let down children caught up in child welfare and protection systems.