Chapter 50 — Authority Must Remain Answerable

Bringing together inquiry findings, survivor accounts, published estimates and the author's earlier Estimating the Numbers research to examine accountability, why survivors continue to write, and what protections future generations still need. A consolidation of Block Five, not an end to the wider inquiry.

Correction Has to Travel

An institutional error can travel.

So must its correction.

That sounds simple until the error has already influenced other records, other people and other decisions.

Changing the original entry may correct the historical document. It does not necessarily correct what the document has already done.

Correction is not deletion.

The purpose is not to erase the historical record or pretend that the original decision was never made. The purpose is to prevent information subsequently shown to be wrong from continuing to operate as though it remains true.

That requires more than an amendment. It requires following the error.

Three Things May Need Correction

Once an error has travelled, there may be at least three different things requiring attention.

The first is the record. What does the institution now say is true?

The second is the action. What treatment, assessment, referral, restriction or decision occurred because of the information?

The third is the consequence. What happened to the person because that action was taken?

record → action → consequence

Correction therefore has to be capable of travelling in the opposite direction:

correct the record → correct the action → address the consequence

Sometimes correcting the record will be enough. Sometimes it will not come close.

Access Comes Before Correction

There is also something that comes before all of this.

The person has to be able to discover what the institution actually holds.

You cannot readily challenge information you cannot see. You cannot trace an error without access to its history. And you cannot know where a correction needs to travel unless there is some way of discovering where the original information went.

The correction process therefore begins earlier than I once understood:

access → identify → establish → trace → dispute → correct → notify → reconsider → remedy → verify

Each step matters.

Remove access and the person may never discover the error. Remove provenance and they may never establish where it originated. Remove tracing and the correction may never reach its descendants. Remove reconsideration and a decision based upon information now known to be wrong may remain untouched.

Remove verification and the person is once again left trusting that something happened somewhere inside the institution.

When the Person Cannot Correct the Record Yet

There is another assumption hidden inside systems of correction.

The person must know what is wrong. They must identify it, explain it and usually produce an alternative account.

That assumption became particularly important in my own life.

Dissociative Amnesia meant that I did not always possess my history in the form institutions expected me to present it.

There were events I remembered. There were events I remembered only partly. There were things whose significance became apparent only when another memory, document, recording or circumstance supplied context.

Receiving a name for that condition did not suddenly give me retrospective access to an entire lifetime.

Understanding it took time.

The Evidence Outside Me

That eventually changed the question I was asking.

Instead of asking, Why can't I remember everything clearly enough to make people understand?, another question became increasingly important:

What exists outside my memory against which what I remember can be tested?

Other people were there. Some were interviewed. Police created records. Hospitals created records. Lawyers accumulated files. Letters were written. Reports were commissioned. Recordings survived.

Some of those things may confirm what I remember. Some may contradict it. Some may establish dates I cannot establish myself. Some may cause me to reconsider what I previously believed.

That is precisely why I want them.

Evidence is not valuable because it agrees with me. It is valuable because it allows what I remember to be tested.

The Record as External Memory

For most people, obtaining an old record may be about confirming a date or discovering what somebody wrote.

For me, records can have another function.

They can preserve something during a period in which I cannot readily retrieve it myself.

That does not make the record true. Some of the records I have spent years pursuing are important precisely because I dispute what was recorded in them.

But even a disputed record can preserve names, dates, places, conversations, referrals and decisions. It can tell me who knew something and when they knew it. It can identify another document. It can lead to another person.

Sometimes it can return context to a memory. Sometimes a memory can expose a problem in the record.

Memory can lead me back to the record. The record can lead me back into memory. Neither should automatically silence the other.

The task is not to choose between memory and documentary evidence. It is to bring them together and see what survives examination.

A Dispute Is Information Too

There is a period between discovering a possible error and establishing whether it is wrong.

That period matters.

An institution does not always need immediately to choose between the record is correct and the record is wrong.

There is a third possibility:

the record is materially disputed.

That status should itself become part of the record.

Otherwise the original assertion can continue travelling through the institution as settled fact while somewhere else the person affected by it is trying to establish that it is wrong.

A useful correction system therefore needs to recognise a progression such as:

recorded → disputed → reviewed → resolved

Being marked as disputed does not prove the person challenging the information is right. It tells the next decision-maker that the information should not be treated as uncontested fact.

When Time Is Not Neutral

An institution can carry a dispute from one year into another. The individual may not have that luxury.

Departments continue. Databases continue. Files remain. One employee leaves and another inherits the matter.

The person ages.

Health changes. Witnesses die. Documents disappear. Financial resources diminish. The capacity to keep writing letters, obtaining records and explaining the same history can itself be exhausted.

For someone living with Dissociative Amnesia there can be another difficulty.

I may know that something happened without being able, at that moment, to retrieve every part of it. A document, conversation or apparently unrelated event may later restore another part of the chronology.

The institution can wait for another letter.

The person may be waiting for another memory.

Procedural time is measured in days, months and statutory periods. Human time is measured in what remains possible.

This is why timeliness belongs within the right to correction. A process cannot be regarded as effective merely because it eventually reaches the right answer. It must also ask what happened while the answer was being delayed.

Delay Does Not Have to Be Deliberate to Have an Effect

I remember a conversation with a nurse at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital concerning delay in matters involving Queensland Health.

I do not presently have enough evidence before me to reconstruct the conversation more precisely, and I do not want to make the memory more certain by repeatedly retelling it.

But it caused me to think about something that does not depend upon establishing anyone's motive.

Delay can advantage an institution even when nobody can establish that delay was deliberately chosen as a tactic.

The institution has continuity. The person has a lifetime.

That asymmetry should matter when correction mechanisms are designed. Where disputed information is continuing to affect treatment, rights, services or important decisions, urgency should reflect the consequences of allowing the information to remain operative.

The Person Should Not Become the Correction System

There is then a practical problem.

Once I discover an error, why should I have to become the permanent administrator of its repair?

The institution may have created the information. It may have copied it. It may have distributed it. Its systems may show where the information travelled.

Yet the person affected can find themselves having to obtain records from one institution, compare them with another, identify copied information, write amendment applications, pursue complaints, notify other agencies and then check whether anything actually changed.

The burden reverses.

The institution has the information system. The person becomes its unpaid quality-control department.

A right to correction is meaningless if exercising it requires the person harmed by the error to become the permanent administrator of its repair.

The person challenging information may initially have to identify the problem and provide whatever evidence they possess. But once an error has been established, something changes.

The burden of establishing an error may initially rest with the person challenging it. The burden of propagating an established correction should rest with the institution that propagated the error.

Correction Should Produce an Answer

The person should eventually be able to know what happened.

Not simply: Your request has been considered.

What was corrected? When? By whom? Where had the information previously been distributed? Who was notified of the correction? Were decisions materially relying upon the information reconsidered? Are there copies that could not be corrected, and if so, why?

That is verification.

Without it, the person can receive an assurance that something has been corrected while having no way of knowing whether the error is still operating elsewhere.

Correction Is Not Deletion

None of this requires history to be rewritten.

If an incorrect diagnosis was genuinely made, the historical fact that somebody made that diagnosis may remain relevant. If an allegation was genuinely received, the historical fact that the allegation was made may remain true even if it was subsequently disproved.

Correction should preserve provenance rather than destroy it.

The record might need to show:

what was originally recorded → why it was subsequently challenged → what was established → what was corrected

A correction should not destroy the historical record. It should prevent the historical record from continuing to masquerade as present truth.

When Correction Becomes Reconstruction

Sometimes the person knows exactly what needs correction.

Sometimes the first task is reconstruction.

That has increasingly been my experience.

I have brought together memories, medical records, police material, recordings, correspondence, legal files and the recollections of other people.

They do not all have to agree. Indeed, disagreement can itself be informative.

The purpose of reconstruction is not to make every piece of evidence agree. It is to make disagreement visible enough that it can be examined.

That requires discipline from me as well as from the institutions whose records I question.

An institutional record should not become more authoritative merely because it has survived for a long time. A recollection should not become more certain merely because I have repeated it.

Both must remain open to evidence.

And this is where A Life Between the Layers has become something I did not entirely anticipate when I began writing it.

I began by trying to tell my life.

Increasingly, I have found myself reconstructing its record.

I am not trying to make the evidence fit my story. I am trying to make the story answerable to the evidence.

When the Correction Has Been Established

There must eventually be a point at which investigation becomes conclusion.

An assertion was made. It was challenged. The evidence was examined. And a correction was established.

At that point, the corrected information should not remain merely an annotation competing indefinitely with the original error.

The truth must prevail.

That does not require destroying the historical record.

The original record may remain important because it shows what the institution believed, what decisions were made and how the error arose.

But its status must change.

The history should show that the original information was subsequently found to be wrong, incomplete or otherwise requiring correction, and the corrected position should become the information upon which future decisions are based.

History should preserve the error. It should not preserve the authority of the error.

Amend the History, Do Not Erase It

There is an important distinction between altering history and correcting the historical record.

If an institution recorded something incorrectly in one year and established the correction years later, both events belong to the history.

The record should be capable of showing:

what was recorded → what was disputed → what evidence was examined → what was established → what was corrected

That is a more complete history than either deleting the original entry or leaving it untouched.

It preserves accountability. It preserves provenance. And it protects the person from the original error being rediscovered years later without the correction attached to it.

The Correction Must Be Available

A correction that exists somewhere but cannot readily be found has limited value.

The corrected history needs to be available to the people who legitimately rely upon the record.

Where the original information was distributed, the correction should follow it where reasonably possible.

Where later decisions relied materially upon the error, those decisions should be capable of reconsideration.

And when the person obtains their own history in the future, they should not have to reconstruct the correction all over again.

The record itself should tell the story.

Once a correction has been established, the person should not have to keep proving that it happened.

Truth Must Be Allowed to Catch Up

There will be consequences that no correction can reverse.

Time cannot always be returned. Opportunities may have been lost. Relationships may have changed. Health may have deteriorated. People may have died.

Correction cannot promise restoration of everything that occurred while the error was operating.

But it can prevent the institution from continuing the error after the truth has been established.

And where consequences remain capable of reconsideration or remedy, the correction should reach them.

That is why the right to correction cannot end with changing words on a page.

It requires the truth to travel.

The Right to Correction

I do not expect institutions to possess perfect records.

I expect them to possess records capable of becoming more accurate when evidence establishes that something is wrong.

I do not expect my own memory to be treated as infallible either.

I want it tested.

I want the documents tested.

I want the provenance examined.

I want disagreements preserved until they can be resolved.

And where something can be established, I want the history to reflect what has been established.

That is increasingly what I have been doing in this book.

I have not been trying to replace one unquestionable record with another.

I have been trying to assemble a record in which the source of an assertion can be seen, uncertainty can remain uncertainty, evidence can alter what I previously understood, and correction can become part of the history rather than an inconvenient attachment to it.

The purpose of correction is not to make the past disappear.

It is to ensure that, once the truth can be established, the past can no longer require the error to prevail.

The history should remain. But the truth should prevail.