Aftercare, Not an Afterthought: Providing Access to Records to Adults Formerly in Care

Abstract:This article presents a firsthand account of positive affective experiences of Aftercare practitioners working with out-of-home-care (OOHC) records and adults formerly in the historical care of Barnardos Australia. The latter is an organization offering OOHC services for children since 1921, as an overseas trading arm of Dr. Barnardo's Homes in England, and since 1995 as an independent Australian Company Limited by Guarantee. It describes an individual example of providing access to records in a context typically considered not particularly joyful. The authors explore various information-seeking and -sharing behaviors and emotional patterns observed in Aftercare practice. They reveal the discrepancies between their observations and the current discourse around negative affect and secondary trauma, relying on previous scholarly considerations to theorize an explanation of what they feel. Concepts such as lower things, the pleasure of information seeking, and happy information sharing as well as higher things, positive empathy, and the emotional response in a context of caregiving are touched on, sketching a less traumatized picture of the profession. The possibility of vicarious catharsis and an activist positivity of community-based information work is explored in what may become a first tentative step toward acknowledging a caring—hence joyful—perspective of OOHC records practice.