PROJECT DESIGN
The project design arose from the experience of the Archive and Study Centre over two decades, in consultation with former children and staff as well as Trustees and practitioners currently involved in the field, and through discussions with others engaged in similar areas and related projects. The fundamentals came from a set of agreed understandings about the nature of the heritage.
2.1 The Nature of the Heritage
The basic issues addressed by the project and fundamental to the final project design - the "Why do we want to do this project?" - were set out in the "Overview" produced by the Working Group of 2006/2007, a later version of which is reprinted in full in Appendix 9.3:
“[This area] is characterised by the invisibility, by the inaccessibility, and by the destruction and loss of records, of memory, and of objects of memory relating to the children and the places and people who looked after them, as well as of the wider work itself.”
“This absence, loss and destruction of memory and heritage is reflected in the lives and memories of many of those children and young people themselves, who, as adults - and however creative and productive their lives may have become - retain a part of themselves which does not belong to the mainstream community around them, or have a safe and valued place in the wider heritage. In the absence of memory by, about, and for them, their personal histories remain hidden, or protected, or simply unspoken, unknown and unarticulated; but in any event detached from the mainstream history and heritage of the community.”
“For many former children and young people the loss, invisibility, and inaccessibility of records about them, of people who remember them, and of significant places in which they lived, translates into a corresponding lack of personal foundation and certainty about themselves and who they are.”
These statements of "Why" were followed by the "What": The characteristics of the communities, the people, and of the memories and records relating to them, which would shape and define the project design and the Activities through which the design would be realised:
- The therapeutic environments concerned were, and continue to be, genuine communities, many of which are now closed, with their surviving members - former children and young people, as well as staff – scattered all around the country, and indeed, the world.
- By definition the majority of the members of those communities, former children as well as staff, will have had complex early lives, characterised by combinations of disruption, disturbance, trauma, and possibly delinquency and abuse;
- Growing up, perhaps having children of their own, as well as jobs and careers and successful family lives, will not in itself have necessarily resolved mysteries, lacunae, or personal and emotional knots and whorls of various kinds;
- Their experience within the therapeutic environment or of the community itself -in the past, or as it is in the present - may not necessarily have been or be experienced by them as helpful or good, and some might have experienced it as damaging;
- Even very good experience in a therapeutic environment would not necessarily translate into uncomplicated adulthoods, "healthy" lives, or the resolution of deep-seated trauma and/or emotional needs.
- Many of the archival records of this area of the heritage have been broken up, lost or destroyed; the records and other items and objects which survive – photographs, films, letters - are scattered among various holders and repositories, some public, but many private; and much that survives is not readily accessible to members of the heritage, nor to the public as a whole;
- If records exist and can be located in the first place, full and open access is restricted by special as well as general provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998, and other legislation; and by misunderstanding, uncertainty, and even fear among record holders, of what they can legally and ethically make available, and how.