The role of life histories in an age of apology: A presence of the past?

A sphere of political regret

Take for instance the case of the Brothers, it happened to us too. Why can they [the victims of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church in Belgium] tell their story while we cannot? And why do we have to keep silent about what happened to us as children? Our youth has been destroyed too.

In this way, the contemporary attention to life histories is to be situated not only on an academic level but also on a political level. The sharp critique raised by the former orphan in the above quote, for example, refers to ‘Operatie Kelk’ (Operation Cup of Sorrow), a criminal justice inquiry into historical abuse of children by members of the Catholic Church in Belgium. In 2013, a panel of experts was subsequently commissioned by the Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Family Affairs to investigate the alleged historical abuse of children in publicly funded welfare and educational institutions (see Flemish Report (FR), 2013). On 22 April 2014, the Flemish Parliament finally issued a formal apology, addressing all the victims of historical violence and abuse in Flemish child welfare and educational institutions in the period from 1930 to 1990. The efforts made are parallel to what is happening in many countries around the globe, where the history of residential institutions for children and young people has become an object of political discussion and inquiry by turning to the voices of former residents. Since the 1990s, there has been noticeable growing interest of national governments in the history of social work in the field of child welfare and protection in numerous Western countries. More specifically, the issue of historical abuse of children in out-of-home care has become a high priority on the political agenda (Musgrove, 2015; Sköld and Swain, 2015). This political attention generally results in the appointment of research commissions or expert panels that engage in an inquiry that deals with uncovering potentially abusive practices in state welfare institutions for children in the past and with adult care leavers seeking recognition and redress in the present (Daly, 2014).

This close collaboration between historical research and politics is reflected within the concept of ‘a politic of apology’ (Gibney, 2008) or ‘a politic of regret’ (Olick, 2007). This concept has been framed as a global project in which regret, apology and redress are central as a way of taking responsibility for the past (Brooks, 1999; Seaton, 2006; Sköld, 2015). In this context, historical inquiry usually takes on the function of an investigation of the past in search of what truly happened, resulting in a common historical narrative of the welfare state. The studies have all given rise to some kind of national apology being issued by the government in order to come to terms with a past ‘dark national chapter’.

Until now, however, little or no attention has been paid to the role of historical research in how these politics of apology are constructed. Given the specific purpose of these inquiries and the deployment of the researcher, questions should be raised in relation to the neutrality of the historical research and the objectivity of the researcher (Schwandt, 2007). In this contribution, we therefore want to question the ambition of Western welfare states to apologise for what happened in the past. Relying on research insights emerging from a research project with formerly orphaned children, we argue that it is impossible to puzzle together one common historical narrative as the history of welfare, and educational institutions cannot be considered as a closed chapter. Indeed, while analysing the different ‘truths’ in the life histories of the former orphans, we realised that the history of the Ghent orphanages is still very much debated, constructed and alive, although the last orphanage closed its doors in 1984. These orphanages do not only belong to the past, but also influence the lives and thoughts of many people in the present. The incongruity in the life histories of the former orphans evoked our interest in the current ‘apology trend’ or ‘politics of apology’ because the inquiry process ultimately leads to the creation of a historical narrative ‘derived from the work of stakeholder support groups, official inquiries and academic historians’ (Wilson and Golding, 2015: 27–42). Nonetheless, the outcome of these inquiries is always ‘a certain discourse of history’ (Bevernage, 2010: 111–113). Even though these national inquiries differ to some extent, they have inspired one another in puzzling together the shared historical narrative of welfare state arrangements (Sköld, 2013).

In what follows, we will analyse and theorise the role of historical research in these out-of-home care inquiries that are leading to public apologies offered by the state. First, we try to capture the current preoccupation with the past where the central aim is to uncover what ‘used to be’ and explore where ‘the idea that societies should redress injustices committed long ago’ comes from (Wyman, 2008: 128). Second, based on our experiences of the complexities emerging during our oral history research project about the Ghent orphanages (1945–1984), we explore the disagreement and conflict in the life histories about ‘how it was’ growing up in a Ghent orphanage, which shows that the past has not simply passed. In this way, the authors argue that the history of welfare and educational institutions should be considered as never-ending contested spaces, making the idea of creating ‘a common historical narrative’ no longer tenable. Third, we attempt to reorient the quest for a common historical narrative that is pursued by governmental authorities while addressing public apologies. We therefore explore the relevance of the notion of ‘presence’ to rethink the relationship between the past and the present (Bevernage, 2007; Bos, 2010; Garrett, 2010). We will argue that the notion of ‘presence’ can enable historical researchers and policy makers to make sense of the history of social work and welfare services today, as this frame of reference enables us to reveal how the past can be relevant for contemporary social work research, policy and practice.

A preoccupation with the past

Accusations of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church are not peculiar to Belgium. In many other Western countries with a strong catholic heritage, albeit at a different pace, a wide-ranging inquiry into historical abuse in out-of-home care has been conducted (Sköld, 2015), and the history of residential institutions for children and young people has become an object of political discussion and inquiry. Countries such as Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and Belgium have instigated such inquiries in the past decades. ¹ In all these countries, the starting point of the inquiry is situated in signals and complaints about violence and (sexual) abuse made by former residents of child welfare and educational institutions. By turning to the voices of care leavers, several media have drawn attention to the national history of child welfare services since the 1990s. In this way, Western welfares states and social work services ‘re-discovered sexual abuse and other forms of ill-treatment and neglect’ within their national history (Wilson and Golding, 2015: 33). Based on a cascade of complaints and accusations made by former residents, expert commissions were established in these countries, investigating alleged violence and abuse in state welfare and educational institutions.

Even though ‘the structure and format of these inquiries varies, they share a commitment of listening to the testimony of victims/survivors and making recommendations about redress and reparation for past harm, as well as identifying and addressing the systemic issues which allowed such abuse to persist’ (Sköld and Swain, 2015: 2). Löfström (2011: 94) gives an overview of various models of explanation for this trend and concludes by stressing that ‘one factor that almost all the analyses see as having conduced to the development is the increased political mobilization and visibility of minorities and oppressed groups wanting to have justice for their collective memories and experiences of the past’. These inquiries are established to satisfy the public concern, and researchers engage in an exploration of oral and, in some cases, written testimonies in their aspirations to reveal ‘what really happened’. As Bevernage (2007: 184) asserts, ‘policymakers truly feel the hot breath of the past on their neck as civil society forces them to make an official apology, give symbolic or less symbolic reparation fees or establish truth commissions’. The researchers are required by policy makers to determine a consensus about ‘what ‘really happened’ based on the life histories of former residents within a specific institution.

Framed within the context of the memory of the Holocaust, this ‘politic of apology’ can be seen as the Western version of the truth and reconciliation commissions since ‘saying sorry’ is, specifically in Western cultures, a symbol of regret (Bos, 2010; Brooks, 1999; Gibney, 2008). Within this ‘politic of apology’, finding out what truly happened is important as the research (reports) of these inquiries is commonly presented as a kind of ‘truth commission’, introducing ‘redress’ and ‘reparation’ as important concepts to deal with these histories (Brooks, 1999; Cunningham, 1999; Gibney, 2008; Rushton, 2006; Thompson, 2000). This strand of research originates from a growing focus on the concept of trauma, initially mainly associated with the memory of the Holocaust, as part of a so-called broader ‘memory wave’ in our contemporary culture (Bos, 2010: 12). In that vein, many scholars assert that memories of traumatic experiences are perceived as so-called ‘carriers of the truth’ about the past (Sköld, 2013). The historical abuse inquiries in the realm of the politics of apology cherish the clear ambition to create a national historical narrative as ‘a way of making sense of the past based on a selection and ordering of events’ (Wilson and Golding, 2015: 27). As many reports of national inquiries reflect, these researchers or experts are also assigned the mandate to elaborate and underpin the conclusions and policy recommendations. The studies generally result in some kind of national apology issued by the government in order to come to terms with a past ‘dark national chapter’. As Sköld and Swain (2015: 1) conclude, ‘testimonies from care leavers, collected by inquiries and truth commissions, have created a substantial archive for the study of historical abuse, and several states have rendered official apologies and offered financial compensation in an attempt to provide redress to the victims’.

Never-ending contested voices of life histories

This conceptualisation of historical research, in which it is possible to capture ‘the past’, was exactly our initial interest when we started our historical research in our case study. We aimed to examine the history of the Ghent orphanages and get a scientific viewpoint of what ‘used to be’. Histories of institutions often focus on a clearly defined period in time and space. Historical researchers usually look at institutions as finished projects, attempting to (re)construct their history by contextualising it against the background of a specific era. We intended to analyse and contextualise the case of the three remaining orphanages in the city of Ghent after the Second World War. In that period, the two remaining urban orphanages – one for boys and one for girls – fused in November 1962. Both groups of children were allocated to a new home called ‘Prince Philip’, where the girls and boys moved into separate wings of the building, and this would last this way until the last Ghent orphanage irrevocably closed its doors in 1984. Our research project mainly draws on intensive qualitative in-depth oral history interviews conducted with 40 of the former orphaned children and five former staff members. Based on the personal narratives or biographies of both former orphaned children and their educators, we tried to reconstruct the last chapter of the history of the Ghent orphanages.

However remarkable, in the light of the current dominant politics of apology in Western welfare states, we discovered that the former orphans fiercely disagree and quarrel about ‘how it was’ and how the Ghent orphanages should be remembered today. In sharing their individual life stories during the interviews, we were confronted with many different ‘truths’ or narratives of the former orphans about life in the Ghent orphanages. Former residents disagreed about the little details, whether or not they got candy, celebrated birthdays or got presents for Christmas, but also about more disturbing events, for instance, which educator was ‘the worst’ in using physical punishments or if any sexual misconduct occurred between educators and children or amongst the children. An outstanding example of dissension concerns the issue of identification. Our research participants ascribed themselves simultaneously one or more different roles and identities when they were questioned about ‘being an orphan’. Roughly, three different roles can be distinguished. The first role refers to being a ‘victim’. However, this is often not related to what happened within the orphanage, but to the fact that they were ever labelled as an orphan when they were admitted to the orphanage as a result of their familial circumstances. As one of the former orphan expressed:

Of course, as a child, you are the victim. It was actually my mother who had quarrels with my father, but we were the victims. […] Come on, it wasn’t our fault that we were placed there. We have been ashamed and cast out. […] I’m beginning to realise that we are the victims. They always made that very clear at Prince Philip [Ghent orphanage 1962–1984], we were nothing, so they told us that we should be very happy to be there because neither our mother nor father wanted us.

Our research participants seemed to be entangled in a life-long struggle with a mixture of feelings, interpretations and memories of what happened in the orphanage during their childhood. It appeared very complicated for them to look back at their time in the orphanage and come to one conclusion. In an attempt to make sense of their tumultuous past, the former orphans try to contextualise – up to the present day – their own experiences in time and space. One of the former orphans addresses this sharply:

We were punished because we did not listen or because we talked back, but the punishment was not in proportion. We only had so little. Such situations. Yes, they also hit. Yes, that happened quite often. The educators, did not actually have any education. They couldn’t handle certain situations and it was resolved with hitting. Some were former orphans who had stayed there. And others… applied for educator without actually having any educational background. In hindsight I can say this. At the time, not. But afterwards you realise that… people who do things like that aren’t capable of handling their job. Those were the ones that reacted with floggings or punishments.

This struggle of the former orphans embodies not only a fierce disagreement and even conflict about ‘how it was’, but it also embraces the issue of how the Ghent orphanages should be remembered today. As we have argued elsewhere (De Wilde and Vanobbergen, 2015a, 2015b: 102), ‘the disagreements among the former orphaned children are actually a matter of conflict on the representations of their “mutual” past’ in the present. By interviewing so many involved actors, we realised that the history of the Ghent orphanages is still an ongoing construction process in the present, in which the former orphans play a crucial and central role. Many former orphans are in search of redress and recognition in some way or another and considered it impossible to ‘close’, in the sense of forgetting, the memory of their childhood.

Our research project reveals how the memory of the Ghent orphanages has been shared, transmitted, and expressed in various and complicated ways during the last decades. In the 1990s, the Bureau of Social Welfare of the city of Ghent decided to allow the former orphans to consult their personal files. Nobody at that time could foresee the impact of this decision. During our interviews, it became clear that quite a lot of former orphans took the opportunity to consult their file (De Wilde and Vanobbergen, 2017). And, once a couple of them started doing this, very soon many others followed. The existence of several Facebook groups of former orphans also played a central role in this. A respectable percentage of former orphans started to assemble in different (sub)groups in order to express and share their ‘own history’, claiming that what happened in the Ghent orphanages should never be forgotten.

In other words, the history of the Ghent orphanages is still very much alive, and it is impossible to see it as a closed, in terms of finished, chapter. On the contrary, more than 30 years, after the last Ghent orphanage closed its doors, (the history of) these institutions takes multiple different shapes through a number of sites and ways of remembrance. Our research has taught us that the history of welfare and educational institutions should be considered as a never-ending contested space rather than as a closed chapter (De Wilde and Vanobbergen, 2015a, 2015b). As Douglas (2010: 236) has argued in relation to young people, our analysis shows that, for former orphans, ‘these online declarations of social life, tastes and accomplishments have allowed […them] to exert greater control over cultural representations’ of their past. We experienced that the past cannot simply be considered as ‘past’, and therefore the history of the Ghent orphanages seems to be caught in what Ignatieff (1996) calls an eternal present.

In the next section, we therefore further problematise the construction of a common historical narrative within the politics of apology and explore the relevance of the notion of ‘presence’ to rethink the relationship between the past and the present in order to determine how life histories can play a role in contemporary welfare states.

A presence of the past

During the recent years, memories and life histories have become an increasingly important topic of research, both within the field of academia as well as on a political level. In inquiring into historical abuse in child welfare and educational institutions by turning to the voices of formerly institutionalised children, Western welfare states seem to consider it as possible and desirable to determine what really happened and then to close a dark chapter in their national history. Historical research appears as a process that will finally describe the past as it really was. In this way, research into historical abuse is predominantly approached by governments as something that belongs to the past. In the Open Letter of the Flemish Parliament that was issued on the 22 April 2014, for example, we can read that the public apology for historical abuses covers the period from 1930 to 1990, and a commitment is made to provide the much-needed help for the victims of abuse. A year prior, in 2013, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a clear commitment to the future by promising in the national apology for forced adoption that this practice would never happen again. Through this perspective, past child welfare and educational institutions are regarded as closed spaces, using ‘closed’ in terms of ‘finished’. This belief leads to the assumption that ‘that kind of abuse’ is a part of the past and does not belong to the ‘now’ (Arvidsson, 2015). As these inquiries and official apologies claim to deal with the past, the political consequence entails a ‘sharp demarcation between the dark past and an enlightened present’ (Arvidsson, 2015: 80).

For several decades, it has also been the predominant belief of historians that the past was considered to be distant and absent from the present and therefore the object of historical research. As Froeyman (2012: 13) asserts, ‘historical distance refers to the fact that there is a rupture between the present and the past and that the past is therefore different from the present’. Since the nineties, nonetheless, questions about the meaning of history and the historicity of the existence of our relationship to the past have gradually received greater academic attention (Bos, 2010). Historians slowly began to consider the idea that the past, perhaps, is not simply gone (Bevernage, 2007), or as the title of Luc Huysse’s (2006) book suggests, ‘everything passes except the past’. The focus or appreciation of historical research shifted in these years from ‘an obsession with the past’ towards the possible significance data from the past has, or can have, for the present. The implications of this shift in thinking about the past and the present meant a great deal in light of what used to be the only certainty for historians, namely that the past is past only because it has passed, because it is gone, and therefore no longer present (Bevernage, 2007).

In recent years, the idea of a ‘presence of the past’ accordingly found its way into the domain of the theory of history as well as within broader societies (Bevernage, 2008). Although Western welfare states have come to perceive ‘the past’ rather than ‘the future’ as an area that can be evaluated and mended (Torpey, 2006), it could be argued that Western societies seem to realise that ‘the past’ is not gone by publicly apologising for it. These societies try to acknowledge the past under the influence of various appeals by victims of historical injustice, claiming that the past is not ‘passed’. While issuing public apologies, governments underline that ‘the past’ is still somehow existing in the present day. Moreover, the out-of-home care inquiries attempt to give the past a place in the present in some way or another. In pursuing the politics of apology logics, however, the intention to acknowledge the past is potentially immediately undermined and discredited due to the fact that a public apology is seldom used to mark the end of a discussion, discontent or controversy, instead stimulating a dialogue. In that vein, life histories are reduced to a source of finding out what truly happened. The pursuit of a common historical narrative, in the words of Runia (2006), suggests that ‘meaning’ can be given to the present by constructing continuity with narratives about the past. Due to the fact that these inquiries into historical abuse in out-of-home care result in a common historical narrative, based on the assumption that it is possible to evaluate and capture the past, an apology does in fact little more than acknowledging nothing new:

Depending on the nature of the conflict, the narration of the past in official reports frequently takes the form of a procedural articulation of the known, which does little more than acknowledge officially what might be called public secrets (Bevernage, 2010: 112).

In that way, this apologising practice in itself could announce the end of the dialogue instead of creating a public forum for debate about contemporary issues (Garrett, 2010). Rather than situating the value and power of these life stories as a ‘reality check’ of the past, these storied realities can offer us an opportunity to (re)think the past, the present and the future of Western welfare states. We therefore argue that researching life histories should attempt to do exactly the opposite by conceptualising the past as an open and ambiguous chapter. In other words, the real challenge for the historical researcher as well as policy makers inquiring into the past consists of finding a way to reveal and embrace the different truths, both on an individual as well as a collective level. In order to do so, we should rethink notions of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’.

In search of a way to capture and incorporate the ambiguities and (dis)continuities of historical injustices done to the victims of abuse while opening up the dialogue, the present paradigm seems to embody a significant contribution. According to the Dutch historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit, the notion of presence provides unique insights into the limits of historical representation (Bos, 2010) since it entails that history is more than one version of the past. This implies that ‘interpretation should be attentive to inconsistency and ambiguities in stories rather than assuming one story and a simple receptiveness of the audience’ (Roberts, 2002: 7). Runia (2006) argues that the term ‘presence’ can break open the issue of discontinuity between the past and the present, as he puts forward the idea that it is ultimately not ‘meaning’ we are looking for, but ‘presence’. As we learned from the life histories of the former orphans, it is impossible to understand and give meaning to ‘what happened to them’; however, they all stress the importance of finding a way to remember the Ghent orphanages as part of their reparation and healing process. As Arvidsson (2015: 72) points out, ‘focusing on coming to terms with the past and moving on can affect what is possible to express in public’. We therefore argue that the history of out-of-home care should be considered as incoherent and ambiguous, which might enable us to develop a way of interpretation and representation in which it is possible to read the history of child welfare and educational institutions in multiple ways by the different actors involved. Therefore, contemporary social work research, policy and practice should ‘focus not on the past but on the present, not on history as what is irremediably gone, but on history as ongoing process’ (Runia, 2006: 8) and go beyond the current apology trend.

Making life histories present

It’s short [the interview] to tell your entire childhood all at once. So it's a good thing that there are several [interviewees]… You do not want to remember it all, but you don’t get rid of it either.

The analysis of the life histories of the former orphans therefore urged us to rethink the notion of ‘presence’ in relation to the past. In order to make a representation of the histories of these institutions conceivable, the way we think about notions of ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ became a pivotal discussion in our research. The major challenge for both academia and policy makers is to make the past relevant for the present. If we embrace the idea that historical representations cannot simply be true or false but should be considered as proposals to review historical realities in a certain light (Froeyman, 2012), raising a multiplicity of interpretative repertoires by giving the past a place in the present through various ways is pivotal. In that sense, Lather (2009) argues for dialogical representational practices that reside in contradictory and constantly shifting and changing interpretations between the researcher, the research subjects, policy and practice. As such, Ritchie (2001: 2) emphasises that particularly life histories ‘have benefitted from a truly interactive methodology, from which they have learned to listen to conflicting opinions and to incorporate multiple viewpoints into their public presentations’.

In that vein, we represented the complexity of the life histories of the former orphans in various ways as we launched an interactive exhibition and a book with the aim to give the history of the Ghent orphanages back to the former orphans who participated in the research project, as well as to a wider audience. Based on our research insights, we staged an interactive exhibition in 2011 entitled Open secret: Diary of an orphan, in collaboration with the archive of the Bureau of Social Welfare and with the support of the Department of Education of the city of Ghent. This free exhibition was initially set up for the fifth grade of all elementary schools in the city because the former orphans repeatedly mentioned ‘nobody knows anymore’ what happened in the orphanages all those years ago. A year later, we reopened the exhibition for a broad public and published a book entitled Can I tell this? Voices from the Ghent orphanages (1945–1984). The intention of both the book and the exhibition was to create a space for the history of the Ghent orphanages. By representing the perspectives of the formerly institutionalised children that were often unheard in the past through their life histories, we could go beyond the dominant politic of apology by making their history present in the contemporary city of Ghent.