Caring about language, knowledge, rights and identity: Discourse analysis and framing the problem: a paper for the National Aged & Community Care Roundtable for Forgotten Australians
Frank Golding, On line 8 February 2023
Over the past decade or two I’ve been doing a lot of research and advocacy on Care Leaver voice and agency. My PhD thesis (on this website here) focused especially on rights to records, redress and control of Care Leaver history, and control more broadly over your life. So, you might expect that, when it comes to aged care, I take the same approach.
My theme can be summarised this way: Language matters. Knowledge matters. Rights matter. Identity matters.
All four inter-connect. Talking of language, I’ve been reading about changes in the wording of the criminal code in Queensland relating to child sexual abuse. (Other states have made or are looking to make similar changes.) No longer will Queensland police charge child abuse perpetrators with “maintaining a sexual relationship with a child’. That will be replaced by “repeated sexual conduct with a child”. The idea of a child having a sexual relationship with an abuser is offensive to victims, because the word ‘relationship’ implies some kind of willingness on the part of the child.[1] Words can make a difference.
The Alliance for Forgotten Australians (AFA) and Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN)—the two national bodies—disagree on the tags in their titles. It would be a mistake to think this disagreement is just about protecting their turf. Language matters.
As you know, the term ‘Forgotten Australians’ was first introduced by a Senate Committee in 2004 as the title of its report, sub-titled: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children. Not one person who gave evidence to the Committee used the term ‘Forgotten Australians’ and throughout their 410-page report the Committee used the term ‘care leaver’. So why did the Committee choose the title Forgotten Australians?
Several reasons. The Committee pointed out that, in their evidence, Care Leavers used a number of labels for themselves including ‘ex-residents’, ‘former residents’, ‘Homies’, ‘wardies’, and ‘foster kids’. Some said some of these terms were offensive, others said they were positive, and still others said the terms were neutral.[2]
No matter what tag they preferred, many described their unshakable feeling of abandonment, of feeling deserted as children. The report referred to children being “hidden in institutions and forgotten by society” both while they were in institutions and again after being released to the outside world. “These people”, the report said. “… have been the forgotten Australians. Until now”.[3] Please note the final two words of that quotation in the discussion that follows: “Until now”.
That tag ‘Forgotten Australians’ remains important for many who use it, consciously sharing a collective sentiment of belonging. The label engenders a sense of ‘us’ with a common experience of institutions, who survived united against ‘them’—those authorities, states, churches and charities that ran children’s institutions.
Reservations about the label ‘Forgotten Australians’ began to emerge after the National Apology in 2009. One group, in fact, then labelled itself ‘Remembered Australians’ probably in the knowledge that labels can change how people understand themselves and how they are understood and treated by others.[4]
Much depends on the interpretation of the label. Some survivors regard the adjective ‘forgotten’ as a weak summation of what they experienced as children. ‘Forgotten’ misrepresents their history.[5] It frames the problem as relatively benign—being overlooked or othered—and deflects attention away from the more damaging features of the experience: physical and sexual abuse, emotional humiliation, exploitation, neglect of health and education, lack of love and affection, the fracturing of families.
There are many of us who were told all our childhood that our parents had abandoned us, shoved us in a Home and forgot about us. Then we find late in life that we were lied to as children. Many of us find in our records evidence that our parents repeatedly tried to have us returned to them, but their requests were rejected time and again. In many cases, parents were actively discouraged or forbidden to visit their children.[6] In the 1960s, more than half the cases where parents wanted their state ward children returned to them were rejected.[7] In 60 per cent of cases in the 1960s in Victoria, brothers and sisters were separated by being placed in separate institutions, sometimes in different parts of the state making it hard for impoverished parents to visit all their children.[8] In many instances, family life was never regained, and we remind ourselves that if we were forgotten in institutions, it was not by our parents.
On a more practical note, apart from insiders like us, the term ‘Forgotten Australians’ also fails ‘the pub test’. People don’t recognise the brand. Simon Gardner then Manager of Open Place, a support service for Forgotten Australians in Victoria, wrote in a metropolitan newspaper in 2017: “Mention the stolen generations and child migrants and eyes light up in recognition…No such light shines for the forgotten [sic] Australians”.[9] Simon’s observation is supported by recent research. For example, Coram and associates in South Australia found that “For stakeholders from housing and aged care sector organisations…the term ‘Forgotten Australians’ generally had little meaning …”.[10] And I see evidence of the same problem in in Aged Care system and the National Redress Scheme.
We have competitors—past and present—who use ‘forgotten’ as an emotional shorthand to spruik their cause. Bob Menzies used the term ‘forgotten people’ as a political campaign slogan back in the 1940s;[11] David Hill (in 2007) used ‘Forgotten Children’ in the title of his book on child migrants;[12] and in 2014 the Australian Human Rights Commission (2014) used the same ‘Forgotten Children’ in its report on children in immigration detention.[13] I get regular Google Alerts, using the search term ‘Forgotten Australians’, and hardly a month goes by without reading examples of the diverse and competing use of the term. My eyes light up, but more often than not the news item is about another group of Australians calling itself ‘forgotten’: Vietnam veterans, people with disabilities, people on elective surgery waiting lists, western suburbanites with inadequate public transport … the list goes on.
The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse had a comparable discussion about the terms ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’.[14] The Commission recognised that some people prefer ‘survivor’ when they are sharing their story or accessing support because of the resilience and empowerment associated with the term. Does the term ‘Forgotten’ carry unsolicited overtones of victimhood?
That brings me back to that two-word sentence that followed the first time the 2004 Senate report mentioned Forgotten Australians: “Until now.” I draw your attention to the sustained advocacy and lobbying since the Report was tabled in the Australian Parliament. While there is still much to do, much has been achieved including:
- apologies in the Australian Parliament and other state parliaments;
- memorials erected in each state;
- some old orphanage sites salvaged by heritage activists;
- a National Museum travelling exhibition;
- a National Library’s Oral History project;
- the Find & Connect support services across Australia;
- much improved access to childhood records;
- a national summit of rights in records and wide support for a Charter of Lifelong Rights in Records;
- an Australian Orphanage Museum established and run by Care Leavers;
- more than 150 Care Leavers known to have published memoirs about their childhood;
- recognition of Care leavers as a special needs group in the Aged Care Act;
- redress schemes—although redress is a work much in need of progress. I’ll come to that.
Is the adjective ‘forgotten’ a handbrake on progress to better services in Aged Care? Aged Care workers and managers need to know that childhood institutional experiences do live on in the psyche of many of us. The dread of losing control over our lives in an institutional regime in our last decades is intensely real, and there are many triggers that service providers should be attentive to. But should we be focusing not just on the childhood trauma that lives on, but equally on what happened to Care Leavers through their adult life before they reached the stage in life when they need to access aged care services.
We know from study after study that Care Leavers were more likely than other citizens to have been unemployed, homeless, involved with the criminal justice system, experienced social isolation, loneliness, poverty and mental health concerns.[15] That all goes to things like distrust of institutions, self-image, self-confidence, social skills, personal or family support, and not least, capacity to cope with authority figures and, ultimately, ability to understand and afford aged care fees.
Adults who grew up in orphanages, children’s Homes, and foster care have a perfect right to protect their personal histories—or to disclose whatever details they decide—especially if the Aged Care service provider was a provider of out-of-home care in the past. If they do disclose their personal histories, they have a right to expect to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of what they disclose. In any training program for aged care managers and workers, it’s is critically important to avoid stereotypes by imposition of a label—whether it be Forgotten Australian or Care Leavers. Labels alone explain nothing about the people wanting a service.
In dealing with the aged care sector—and I myself have been doing that as a user for more than a decade—I was keen (and still am) to tell the system what I wanted and only what I thought they should know about my background. But knowledge is a two-way street. I needed someone to teach me how to find my way through the complicated maze that is the system—explained to me in plain language, with clear details about my options and rights.
I wanted to be treated not just a Care Leaver or a Forgotten Australian. After all, I am not just an adult who grew up in three institutions and three foster families, carrying the lived and living experience of that childhood. I have been—and am now—other things too: husband, father, grandfather, teacher, academic, policy adviser, researcher, footballer, traveller, advocate, avid reader and writer, and I have a disability. Like many people my age with similar biographies, I’m a round peg that is an awkward fit for a square hole.
Having said that, there is one stereotype that is accurate. We were all once voiceless children, unheard or deliberately silenced. Silence was the sound of powerlessness meeting unrestrained authority in children’s institutions. I had rights as a child but nobody told me about them and, even if they had told me I had rights, I doubt they would have let me exercise them. But I am no longer a child with no voice, and no rights. Now I’m an adult in the medical system, the pension system, the aged care system, I refuse to be silenced or passive. I insist on the right to define my experiences and problems in my own words and terms. With rights comes dignity.[16]
I was asked to make some comments today on the National Redress Scheme. What I have to say reinforces my earlier comments about labels, but also touches on the use of knowledge in decision-making, and the importance of data.
When you apply under the Redress Scheme you are asked whether you identify as an Aboriginal Australian or Torres Strait Islander Australian, and if you have a disability, or are a Child Migrant.[17] On the basis of the ticked boxes, the Redress Scheme can track the numbers of applicants in these categories—and their aggregated progress in the Scheme, and report on outcomes for these named cohorts. They can also allocate resources to ensure support is provided as and when it is needed—as was the case recently when the data showed that there was a major gap in support services in rural areas for these cohorts.
However, whoever designed the Redress application booklet demonstrated a woeful understanding of this vast, diverse group called Forgotten Australians and/or Care Leavers. At Question 36 on the Application form, you are asked to tick a box—or boxes, it’s not made clear whether you should tick more than one box. Here are the options they give you: a state ward, a foster child, in relative or kinship care, under other court ordered care, an unaccompanied child migrant; and then just to confuse things, they add three more options: a military cadet, apprentice in the Defence Force, or none of above.[18]
Of course, many people could tick multiple options, but Redress seems not to have known that. If they had bothered to ask people with direct experience, we could have told them that many children were moved in and out of categories. In many cases, they would not know their legal status at the time, or why they were placed in ‘care’. Some were placed ‘voluntarily’ by their parents. In other cases, if records exist, or if they can be found, they don’t necessarily show the child’s legal status.
So, as a result of poor data collection, the Redress Scheme has a very shaky grasp on how Care Leavers are tracking through the Scheme. Questions abound.
- Are they doing as well as those who grew up with their families and were abused in schools, churches, sporting clubs, etc?
- Are their redress payments higher or lower?
- Do their applications take longer to process?
- What sort of support would help in making their applications?
- How many start an application, but find it too traumatic to complete?
- How many are rejected as ineligible?
The Scheme can’t give reliable answers to any of those questions.
We also know that many applicants are re-traumatised by the processes used by the Redress Scheme. And this is partly because the so-called Independent Decision Makers do not know enough about the history—the lived and living experience—of the people they are dealing with. They are inconsistent. For example, some applicants who submit details of having virginity tests whilst entering the ‘care’ of the Child Welfare Departments are awarded the highest amounts of redress payments; others with the same experience are told virginity testing is not sexual abuse. It depends on how well or poorly each Decision Maker understands the way in which many young girls were inducted into ‘care’. The Redress Scheme claims to adhere to the axiom, ‘Do no further harm’. But it is harming people.
We have made multiple submissions to the Redress Scheme and to inquiries to get the labels, definitions and data-gathering processes right—and to better train the Decision Makers; but to no avail, yet. Is the Aged Care sector more sensitive and knowledgeable than the National Redress Scheme when it comes to using evidence and co-design as the basis of its services?
There is also the matter of personal records. We have been very unhappy with the way Redress is making, using, keeping and sharing records. We know that access to historical childhood records, and their contents, and uses, have been a minefield for Care Leavers. We have fought a hard battle to win back our rights in childhood records, and have learned to talk back to those records that are inaccurate and misleading.
The lesson from that sorry history should be that if Redress is making, using, and archiving records, the person subject to the records has a right to know who is recording what, and why, and to what use records are being put. Above all, the person about whom records are being made has a right to participate in the process of making those personal records. No more secret dossiers, no more gratuitous insults, no more inaccuracies, no more unrelenting casting of the person as a bundle of problem with few or no positive attributes.
What’s happening within the aged care sector with records? New records obviously are being made, used, stored and shared? In that regard, then, there are questions to be asked about rights.
Coda
In discussion time, I was asked if I had any suggestions about terminology. I replied that a title that everyone will agree to was unrealistic. In the UK the term ‘people who are care experienced’ has become popular, but is not universally accepted; and ‘care leaver’ is still used by government to define eligibility for services.
The Australian Aged Care Royal Commission described Care Leavers as “being people who spent time in care as a child, including institutional and out of home care arrangements”, the language being adapted from the definition used when Care Leavers became a ‘special needs group under the Aged Care Act.[19]
Without prejudice, I suggested that a preferred term would be simple and descriptive. For example, we could refer to people who grew up in the out-of-home ‘care’ (OOHC) system. That’s a term which is in common use and understood in government and non-government sectors. Indeed, it was used in the subtitle of the Forgotten Australians Report of 2004. Many of us adopt the convention of using inverted commas around ‘care’ or a capitalised Care to indicate a sense of misgiving or conscious irony.
On a personal level, if asked, I am happy to say simply that I am a person who grew up in orphanages, children’s Homes and foster care. People seem to understand what I mean.
References
[1] ABC News 27.10.2022 at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/queensland-child-sexual-abuse-laws-wording-changes/101535210
[2] SCARC (Senate Community Affairs References Committee) 2004, Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians whoexperienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia: 110, 209, 326.
[3] SCARC 2004: 6.
[4] Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In Baigioli, M. (ed.). The Science Studies Reader. New York, NY: Routledge; Hacking, I. (2007). Kinds of People: Moving Targets”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 151: 285-318.
[5] I refer here to: Bacchi, C. (1999). Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems. London, UK: SAGE Publications; Bacchi C. & Goodwin, S. (2016). Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
[6] SCARC 2004: 95.
[7] Tierney, L. (1963). Children Who Need Help: A study of child welfare policy and administration in Victoria. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press: 56.
[8] Tierney 1963: 39-40.
[9] Gardner, S. (2017). Royal commission can shine a light on ‘forgotten’ people. The Age (Melbourne) 5 August 2017.
[10] Coram, V., Tually, S, Cornell, V., Zufferey, C. & Lovell, F. (2020) Forgotten Australians and the housing system. Adelaide, SA: Australian Alliance for Social Enterprise, University of South Australia: 15. see also Cations M, Browne-Yung K, O’Neil D, Smyth A, Putsey P, Walker R., Crotty M. (2020). Safe and inclusive care for Forgotten Australians: Recommendations for aged care providers. Adelaide, SA: Flinders University.
[11] Brett, J. (2007). Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press.
[12] Hill, D. (2007). The Forgotten Children: Fairbridge farm school and its betrayal of Australian’s child migrants. Sydney, NSW: Random House Australia.
[13] Australian Human Rights Commission. (2014). The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. Sydney, NSW: The Commission.
[14] Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (2017a). Final Report, Vol.1:
Our Inquiry. Sydney, NSW: The Commission: 72.
[15] For example, McPherson, L. (2020). Leaving Care: What we know and don’t know about outcomes for young people, Australian Childhood Foundation. Available at: https://cetc.org.au.
[16] Denborough, D. (2014). Retelling the Story of Our Lives: Everyday narrative therapy to draw inspiration and transform experience. New York, NY: Norton: 8-9.
[17] National Redress Scheme, Application for Redress, Canberra: ACT: Questions 24-25, 37.
[18] National Redress Scheme: Question 36.
[19] Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, Melbourne Hearing Two, October 2019. https://agedcare.royalcommission.gov.au/hearings-and-workshops/melbourne-hearing-2