Responding to Youth Violence through Youth Work

Seal, Mike, Harris, Pete, Mike Seal, Pete Harris

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447323105
• eBook ISBN: 9781447323136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book draws on the findings of a two-year European research project to offer answers to the 'problem' of how to respond to violence involving young people that continues to challenge youth workers and policy makers.

'Responding to violence through youth work' combines elements of critical theory, psychosocial criminology and applied existential philosophy to present a new model for responding meaningfully and effectively to these issues, demonstrated through a series of case studies and insider accounts generated through peer research.

Part 1
Literature review, theoretical frame and researching youth violence

In this introductory part we first clarify and contextualise the two concepts that are integral to our study – youth work and youth violence. We recognise from the outset that readers who may be unfamiliar with the historical and ideological development of the youth work profession may need this set out, although we anticipate that those immersed or well versed in the management and delivery of youth work might welcome revisiting this as a way to challenge and revitalise their own practice and understanding. So we cover, in considerable depth, what we feel is distinct about youth work from other professions that engage with young people and how youth work is currently conceived (theoretically) and practised in the different geographical and cultural contexts we have spent time in. We hope this provides a conceptual basis as our arguments develop and we begin to illustrate how different national political structures can affect youth work practice on the ground. In order to augment rather than simply reproduce established theoretical perspectives, we then set out some distinctive theoretical ideas that we feel became central to our analysis, incorporating ideas drawn from other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology and criminology.

Finally, we present a detailed exposition of our research methodology; that is, how we gathered the findings that populate the subsequent chapters. We feel strongly that any meaningful response to youth violence needs to be rooted in an effort to understand how it is manifesting within people’s lives and communities. So we set out our research method in detail in order to provide both academic researchers and youth work practitioners alike with a model on which they can construct their own attempts to understand the problem of youth violence from the ‘inside out’. This is integral to our overarching case – that practitioners need to conceive of themselves as researchers too – and manifests in concrete form in Chapter Fifteen where we include a worked example of such ‘ethnopraxis’ provided by a youth worker working on a gang prevention project. Through this, we hope to show how methodological approaches to research can mirror a general stance on knowledge creation in line with the critical principles that form the bedrock of youth and community work practice.

ONE

Youth work and youth violence in a European context

Defining youth work

The study that forms the basis of this book was conducted in three European Union (EU) nation states: Germany, Austria and the UK. As such, we were keen to root our analysis in an understanding of how youth work is conceptualised in Europe and to consider the commonalities and divergence between the partner countries. Youth work policies and practices across Europe are not homogeneous but rather celebrate the rich cultural, ethnic, religious and political heritage of a diverse continent. While there is broad political recognition of the value of youth work in Europe (Davies, 2009; Verschelden et al, 2009; Coussée et al, 2010; Taru et al, 2014), there are also tensions: concerns about measuring quality, significance of the contribution to the life trajectories of young people, and legitimacy in difficult financial contexts. Ideological differences, demographic change, and rising inequality both between and within generations, contribute to a potent cocktail of potential misunderstanding.

In April 2015, the 2nd European Convention on Youth Work, sponsored by the Council of Europe, brought together 500 participants from across the EU to seek to establish some common understanding of youth work. In the preface to Finding Common Ground, Howard Williamson concedes that those unfamiliar with youth work might conclude that ‘it can give the impression of … a rather chaotic and disputed field of practice’ (2015, p 3). The declaration seeks to unify what remains a ‘contested ideological and theoretical space’ (Grace and Taylor, 2016) and provides the following definition of youth work as conceived in Europe:

Youth work is about cultivating the imagination, initiative, integration, involvement and aspiration of young people. Its principles are that it is educative, empowering, participative, expressive and inclusive. It fosters their [young people’s] understanding of their place within, and critical engagement with their communities and societies. Youth work helps young people to discover their talents, and develop the capacities and capabilities to navigate an ever more complex and challenging social, cultural and political environment. Youth work supports and encourages young people to explore new experiences and opportunities; it also enables them to recognise and manage the many risks they are likely to encounter. (Council of Europe, 2015, p 4)

Over and above this broadly emancipatory and educational conceptualisation, we want to highlight one feature of youth work that delineates this form of engagement with young people from other related professions, such as teaching. Youth work has traditionally sought to remain voluntary and ‘open’ in terms of access. Young people choose to engage or not: they ‘possess and retain a degree of power which is intrinsic to the practice … the young person can just walk away’ (Davies, 2005, p 8). This concern for youth work to remain voluntary and ‘open’ in terms of access lies at the heart of a debate currently circulating within the youth work profession across Europe and is a feature of the practice that the profession is currently seeking to defend.

Mapping out the youth work paradigm

Implicit within the European declaration, and other attempts to define youth work (Batsleer, 2012; NYA, 2013), is an ongoing attempt to set out a distinctive paradigmatic position on a number of epistemological, pedagogical and ontological questions. Youth work is strongly rooted in a dynamic, dialectical view of knowledge creation (Aristotle, 1976) and a commitment to professional practice that is reformulated as evolving praxis (Carr and Kemmis, 1989). The creation of this evolving knowledge entails ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire, 1973, p 12). This commitment to reflective practice as a means of mediating and developing praxis is an idea present in the work of John Dewey (1933) and was coined as a method by Schön (1983). Schön describes reflective practice as ‘the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning’ (1983, p 34). Many others have developed these early formulations (Gibbs, 1988; Johns, 1995; Brookfield, 1998; Rolfe et al, 2001; Gänshirt, 2007). Bolton describes it as ‘paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively’ (2010, p 56).

In this sense youth work can be conceived as primarily a critical and social pedagogic practice (Hämäläinen, 2003; Petrie et al, 2006). Giroux describes critical pedagogy as an

educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action. (2010, p 23)

A foremost exponent of critical pedagogy was Paulo Freire, who introduced ideas such as ‘conscientisation’, and favoured ‘transformative and democratic education’ over traditional ‘banking’ forms of education (1973). Youth workers, as critical pedagogues, seek to enable young people to become increasingly aware of how the ideological apparatus of the state creates a ‘common sense’ that reinscribes dominant elites’ social positions as natural and inevitable. This involves the interrogation of received wisdoms and reaching ‘beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions’ (Shor, 1992, p 125). We wish to make the claim therefore that youth and community work is, in effect, a project of the political left in that it believes that a prevailing hegemony persists that needs to be countered, and that the building of community is one of the means of achieving this.

It believes that existing economic structures maintain poverty and discrimination, and that the political state uses its apparatus, sometimes bolstered by fellow travellers such as the media, to maintain a delusion about the ethical and non-discriminatory nature of its operation. (Seal and Frost, 2014, p 124)

As a result of this ideological and political stance, youth work has primarily positioned itself within a tradition of political action. As agents of social change, youth workers seek to promote these critical and Freirian tenets of practice as being central to their primary aim of not simply re-engaging young people in the mainstream (social control) but as the means by which they enable young people to gain an insight into their limited circumstances and challenge how they are marginalised within society too (social action). Accordingly, youth workers are not just interested in doing something to solve social ‘problems’ but are also keen to problematise social issues, that is, to ask whose interests are served by solving the problem, and what has produced the ‘problem’ in the first place. The use of ‘generative themes’ (Freire, 1973) that emerge from the young people’s own reality and are raised by them is therefore both practically and ideologically wedded to youth workers’ professional identity.

Finally, but importantly, the youth work profession has traditionally privileged and sought to remain wedded to the concept of community, seeing the strengthening of communities as the means by which to build more cohesive and socially just societies (Jones and Mayo, 1974; Popple, 1995; Twelvetrees, 2001). As such, it is allied to communitarian principles, in other words the belief that the individual flourishes best through the collective, but that the collective should not be sovereign over the individual. Some within the field have argued that this has led youth work towards a tendency to somewhat romanticise community (Belton, 2015, p 12) and to underestimate the conservative, limiting and discriminatory tendencies of communities, especially as experienced by those not in the ‘in’ group, or who do not conform within the group. It is in its valuing of critique, dialogue and the importance of autonomy that youth work practice seeks to keep these tendencies in check. Youth workers therefore seek to avoid adopting a binary position towards either individualism or collectivism, for both are needed. They are in tension, and should be so.

Within these broad philosophical paradigms, a number of more specific theoretical influences are given emphasis, such as Marxist, feminist and post-colonial sociological analyses. Among favoured authors within the reading lists for youth work training programmes are those who draw on critical and post-critical theorists in their examination of culture, ideology and the state, in particular Althusser for his account of ideology and the state (1970) and Bourdieu for his concepts of cultural capital and symbolic violence (1990). Fanon (2001), Gilroy (1987), El Saadawi (1997) and the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham are also prominent. The weight given to these seminal texts has led to the development of an emphasis on anti-oppressive practice in the form of work with young women, with Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transexual/Transgender/Queer young people, black and Asian young people and latterly Muslim young people (Belton and Hamid, 2011 Khan, 2011). bell hooks’ (1994) development of Freire’s ideas into the idea of the ‘engaged’ educator has also been influential breaking down barriers between the personal and the private and stressing the need to look again at practice and everyday personal interactions, as the ‘personal is political’. A countervailing influence of postmodern and post-structural thinking has increasingly come to the fore in more recent times, redirecting youth work towards an emphasis on meaning contestation and fluidity. This corresponds with an evolving version of youth work praxis that questions all boundaries, binaries and essentialist claims, including those related to identity such as gender, sexuality, race and class (Lyotard, 1984; Rosie, 2007).

This broad sociological analysis sits alongside another pervasive influence on youth work – that of phenomenology and existentialism. Later, in Chapters Two and Seven, we develop two broad conceptualisations of existentialist philosophy that we recognise within the youth work canon, Sartrean and Christian. Common to these two is an emphasis on the primary importance of the development of personal agency, interpersonal encounter and meaning making. Key ideas include the relativity of experience and the importance of trying to understand the perspective and ‘life world’ of others (Noddings, 1984, 1992) and being ‘present’ in the moment with people within an ‘encounter’ (Buber, 1958). Baizerman (2001) notes that central to this encounter is a desire to aid young people to understand and escape their biographies and their common-sense notions, in a way that is akin to the countering of hegemony and development of conscientisation highlighted earlier. Here, though, the stress is laid on how young people have agency; that is, the freedom to create their own meanings.

This is closely related to another bedfellow of youth work – humanistic psychology (Maslow, 1968; Rogers, 1961, 1980). Maslow’s and Rogers’ analyses of human motivation and effective ‘helping’ within relationships have been important in defining the nature and conditions of youth workers’ relationship with young people, and providing a framework for what is meant by their ‘needs’. They also stress the importance of education, not instrumentally, but in becoming a fully ‘self-actualised’ human being – an idea picked up by later UK authors writing specifically on youth work such as Smith (2001) who stress the importance of association, and of understanding others and ourselves, if we are to reach our full potential.

Youth work in the UK

In the UK, the concept of ‘informal education’ lies at the heart of academic and professional discourse. This presents learning through youth work as an active, experiential and associative process and values the small group as a resource for development and learning as well as an aspect of citizenship with many potential (and potentially conflicting) contributions to political democracy. Youth work in the UK retains a desire, in theory at least, to draw on the strength of group collaboration to facilitate critical enquiry. As across Europe, youth work in the UK still stresses the importance of remaining voluntary/free: young people are engaged on the basis of informed choice and consent. They take part because they want to and can leave without penalty. This principle underpins the democratic nature of the curriculum, although there have been strong debates as to the suitability of the concept of curriculum within a youth work context (Harris, 2005).

This vision is increasingly threatened by wider strategic and political changes. To set these in some context, it is worth briefly outlining the history of youth work in the UK, which has been well documented (Young, 1999; Davies, 2008; Gilchrist et al, 2009) from its early development in the charitable, voluntary and faith-based sectors such as Sunday schools and the Scout movement, through to its gradual establishment as part of the range of state-funded ‘professions’. The basic tenets outlined so far have been subject to the changing policy imperatives of successive governments. Under the New Labour administration, funding for youth services was increased, but social policy directed towards youth work and other professions took a technocratic turn as part of the newly favoured regime of ‘new public management’ (Boston, 1996; Davies, 2008). Much has been written elsewhere with regard to this current instrumentalist, ‘performative’ policy climate within which youth workers are operating, the impact of which is not restricted to that profession alone. Several themes emerge – the privatisation of education generally, bourgeoning managerialism and bureaucratisation (Davies, 2008), an increasing focus on targets and the promotion of an outcome-based curriculum for youth work (Harris, 2005), pressure for evidence of effectiveness and direct causality of interventions (Brent, 2004) and a stifling of professional judgement (Munro, 2011).

The new coalition government and then the majority Conservative government elected in 2014 have followed this with a series of severe cuts, which in many parts of the country have radically reduced, or in some cases eliminated, statutory youth services. As argued by the campaigning organisation In Defence of Youth Work (IDYW, 2012), this prevailing culture has shaped how both state-funded and voluntary sector youth work practitioners and managers operate. While some local authority youth services have now disappeared, despite their efforts to reinvent their work in terms favourable to austerity and the new political imperatives, voluntary sector organisations have become increasingly dependent on state contracts and adaptation of methods/missions to accommodate the new funding regime. With the Conservative government’s continued emphasis on the voluntary and charitable sector as preferred service providers – the so-called ‘Big Society’ – it seems highly likely that youth work practitioners will continue to be subject to conducting and evaluating their work within these performative parameters.

Youth work in Austria

Youth work in Austria can be traced back to 1962 with the introduction of the first budget plan by the state (the Bundesjugendplan) and then 1983, when the Federal Ministry for Family, Youth and Consumer Protection was founded. This established a government department with responsibility for youth work at a national level. Current youth work in Austria is broadly divided into what is classed as ‘open’ youth work (akin to the informal education model in the UK) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Literature review, theoretical frame and researching youth violence
• Part 2: Meaningful responses to youth violence
• Part 3: Rethinking youth work practice and policy
• Part 4: Youth work responses in action: case studies of praxis
• References