10 - Youth work

Summary

Introduction

‘Youth’ is often presented as a problem (Carpenter, Freda and Speeden, 2007; Giroux, 1997; Hunter, 2022), but alongside any discourses of ‘problem’ youth in the media or in policy is the lived experience of young people themselves. Youth work, it is suggested, is a highly skilled practice which seeks to raise the voices of young people and journey alongside them, while we learn and develop together (Robertson, 2022):

‘Often our field is not as valued as it could be because folks look at us and think “Well, you’re just having a game of pool with a young person”. Actually, that collaborative approach, whether it's in an informal universal setting or within the delivery of a course, that takes an incredible amount of skill: of reflection-inpractice and reflection-on-practice; and that, I would argue, has much more of an impact and value for the young person's learning as well. I mean, delivering a standard curriculum is relatively straightforward, but it's being able to adapt and weave with the young person. I think that's the key.’ (Charis Robertson, 2022, Focus Group)

We return to this focus on education as the foundation of youth work later in this chapter.

Young people are viewed differently in different cultures. So, we need to begin by asking two questions:

• • What value does your country place on youth work?

• • How does it show up in your work?

You can answer these questions by thinking about the discourses of youth present in different media and by the assumptions behind youth services and systems in your country. The following quotation from Jarman applies, we suggest, to young people as well as children: ‘The measure of a society's civilization can be judged by the way in which it treats its children’ (Jarman, 1996, cited in Roberts and Sacheder, 1996, ix).

Brierley (2021) discusses how it takes a village to raise a child, in a context of thinking about young people. He also emphasises the influence of the family on young people. For example, the children of doctors are 24 times more likely than their peers to become doctors; and for others it is just as difficult to not follow in their parents’ footsteps as a result of the social marginalisation and exclusion that goes with, for example, violence, unemployment or familial substance misuse.