Child Social-Care Recording and the Information Rights of Care-Experienced People: A Recordkeeping Perspective

Victoria Hoyle, Elizabeth Shepherd, Andrew Flinn, Elizabeth Lomas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Recent reports by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) emphasised the critical importance of records throughout the lives of care-experienced people. Records not only contain information about what happened to a person in their past, but also have long-term effects on memory and identity. Research emerging in the context of analogous national inquiries into the systemic abuse and neglect of children in care—particularly the Royal Commission in Australia and the Shaw Report in Scotland—have highlighted the significance of records to campaigns for reparative justice. This article introduces MIRRA: Memory—Identity—Rights in Records—Access, which is a participatory action research project co-produced with care-leavers and researchers based at University College London (UCL). This ongoing study seeks to deepen our understanding of the creation, use and management of care records and protocols to access them. In this article, we consider the practice of social work recording with children and families in England since the 1970s from a ‘recordkeeping perspective’, importing theory from the information studies field to provide a new perspective on the information rights of care-leavers.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1856-1874
Number of pages18
JournalBritish Journal of Social Work
Volume49
Issue number7
Early online date15 Dec 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers.

Keywords

  • Access to records
  • Care Leavers
  • Child social care records
  • Data protection
  • Information rights
  • Recordkeeping

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