Hope Street: From Voice to Agency for Care-Leavers in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

In the early 1980s, one of the authors became an adolescent ward of the State of Victoria, Australia, and went into out-of-home care. While in care, repeated encounters with researchers, journalists and policy-makers left her disillusioned as to the efficacy and relevance of their activities, in that although she was sporadically provided with a ‘voice’, this did little to bridge the divide between their world of privilege and the non-privileged world of the subject of their attentions. The article argues that this divide is perpetuated long after people leave care as adults, and that a mere ‘voice’ is not enough – what is needed is agency, in the design and execution of research. This can be achieved through extended education, depending in turn on an inclusive culture shift within institutions of higher learning. The article utilises the author's personal experience as a brief case study.

KEYWORDS:

• Care leavers
• insider research
• academic privilege
• power
• youth homelessness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Jacqueline Z. Wilson is an associate professor in the Centre for Collaborative Research in Australian History at Federation University Australia. She is a graduate of La Trobe University, where she was awarded the David Myer University Medal, and Monash University (PhD History). She has authored over 40 scholarly publications and is the sole author, editor and/or co-editor of five books, with research interests that broadly focus on heritage, activism and the representation of Australia's historic welfare and justice systems. Jacqueline is currently a chief investigator on several collaborative research projects funded by the Sidney Myer Fund and the Australian Research Council Discovery Awards. Her most recent work is that as the lead editor for the Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (2017).

Dr Philip Mendes is an associate professor and acting head in the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash University, and is also the director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit (SISPRU). He has published widely in peer-reviewed academic journals (over 100 publications in total), and is the author or co-author of 12 books, including most recently Young People Transitioning from Out-of-Home Care: International Research, Policy and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Australia's Welfare Wars (UNSW Press, 3^rd edition, 2017). He is currently preparing To Empower or Control the Disadvantaged: A Critical Historical Analysis of the Modern Australian Welfare State for publication by Routledge in late 2018.

Frank Golding, OAM, an honorary research fellow at Federation University Australia and a life member of the national peak body, CLAN, is a social historian with a deep interest in the institutionalisation of children stemming from his childhood inside Victorian orphanages and foster families. After a career in education, he became a researcher/activist in child welfare, and was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 2018 for his service in this field. Frank has contributed to formal inquiries dealing with the institutionalisation of children and to projects with the National Museum, Find & Connect, the National Summit on Rights in Records, and the National Library of Australia. He has presented papers on child welfare in Sweden, Italy and Spain. He has written more than a dozen books, as well as book chapters and refereed journal articles.

Notes

1. The term ‘homeless youth’ as used here refers to young persons (generally between the ages of 12 and 18) who, for reasons of abuse, neglect, poverty or absence of supportive family, are unable to reside in their usual home environment and who receive minimal or no support from their family or guardians to maintain themselves in alternative accommodation. For our purpose, ‘homeless youth’ therefore also embraces those in ‘out-of-home care’, i.e. those in temporary facilities or long-term institutions. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012b) notes that, over and above the officially reported population of homeless youth, a probably large but indeterminate number of youth who are for practical purposes homeless do not show up reliably in census data due to the ‘masking’ effect of them maintaining irregular living patterns (such as ‘couch surfing’) and reporting a ‘usual address’ on census collection day, even though that address may be false or one to which they cannot actually return.

2. Under section 92 of the Social Welfare Act 1970 (Victoria), youth hostels were for the ‘accommodation of young persons who have been placed under the control or supervision of the Department or have been inmates of a youth training centre, remand centre, children's reception centre, or children's home’.

3. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997; SCARC 2001, 2004; Royal Commission, 2013–18.

4. Studies in the UK, initiated by social work academic Sonia Jackson and her associates (Jackson and Ajayi 2007; Jackson, Ajayi, and Quigley 2005), have led to support under the Buttle UK Quality Mark scheme; Jackson has led similar studies in Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Hungary, and in each case the pattern of poor education outcomes and very low university attendance among care-leavers has been confirmed (Jackson and Cameron 2012; Cameron et al. 2012). Similar results have been obtained in American studies (Barth 1990; Blome 1997; Zetlin, Weinberg, and Shea 2010), where a number of support programmes and legislative measures have been implemented over the past decade.

5. CLAN launched the Garry O’Neill Research Grants Project at its Annual General Meeting in Launceston on 18 November 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170100198, “Rights in Records By Design”.