Responding at the personal (P) level

Author(s):  
Mike Seal ◽  
Pete Harris

This chapter outlines how workers can respond on a personal, individual level to youth violence. The authors illustrate how the unpredictable nature of the physical and social space in which youth workers operate requires them to capitalise on and privilege spontaneous encounters and not be afraid to use them to begin to challenge or constructively confront violent behaviour. The authors show how these behaviours are meeting deep needs and that youth workers need to find ways to get young people to understand and acknowledge that, and identify how they may be able to meet these needs in other, less destructive, ways. Part of this process may involve presenting oneself as a blueprint for change, in the context of a relationship that needs to be characterised by warmth, trust and respect, but which should not collude with neutralisation of violence or abandon the young person in the face of structural forces. The authors argue that supporting young people to move into voluntary and paid roles where they can help and support others creates the opportunity for them to move into a generative phase of their own life cycle.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wortley ◽  
Ann Hagell

There have been rising concerns in the UK about the levels of serious violence between young people, especially serious physical violence and knife crime. Interactions with young people in the emergency department (ED) at the time of injury provide an opportunity for screening and intervention in order to reduce the risk of repeat attendances. However, paediatricians and other healthcare workers can feel unsure about the best way to intervene. Embedding youth workers in EDs has started in some UK hospitals, making use of a potential ‘teachable moment’ in the immediate aftermath of an event to help change behaviour. Based on a rapid review of the literature, we summarise the evidence for these types of interventions and present two practice examples. Finally, we discuss how EDs could approach the embedding of youth workers within their department and considerations required for this.


Author(s):  
Almeda M. Wright

Death, violence, oppression, and racism have become part of the narratives of all young African Americans. Parents and youth workers are challenged in navigating these realities alongside youth. This chapter asks, What type of vision calls young people out of the cycles of death and violence and into esteemed roles in co-creating lives of abundance? What might a practice of choosing life look like for young people? Considering the theological insights, public ministry, and prophetic vision of one young person, this chapter leads the reader through one example of listening and discernment with youth, highlighting the theological insights and practical strategies that emerge. The chapter then moves to outline the work of key religious educators and religious critics, and contemporary resources and limitations of religious education in the Black church. Finally, this chapter suggests goals, methods, and strategies of critical pedagogy for integrating spirituality and abundant life with Black youth.


Author(s):  
Mike Seal ◽  
Pete Harris

This chapter begins by challenging workers to critically interrogate what the authors see as archetypal youth work ‘tales’. The authors highlight how some youth workers can over-privilege and idealise their own relationships with young people and need to be wary of over-identifying with them to such an extent that challenging their violent behaviour falls off the agenda. They also argue that youth workers need to develop greater conceptual clarity, especially around notions of respect and trust. With the former, for example, workers may need to make distinctions between earned, intrinsic respect, and respect that is based around fear. The chapter explores how workers might encourage young people to reflect on self-respect and how status is constructed in their community and culture, working on alternative attainable and sustainable ways to develop it. The authors then cast a critical eye over the relationships between youth workers and professionals from other agencies, arguing that youth workers should not develop a crab mentality towards these agencies but rather seek to present the distinctive, but not unique, contribution they can make.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (12) ◽  
pp. 850.1-850
Author(s):  
Lauren Fraser ◽  
Ayia Al-Asadi

Aims/Objectives/BackgroundThe 2019/20 RCEM National QIP ‘Care of Children in the ED’ recommends use of a recognised tool (eg HEEADSSS) to psychosocial risk assess 12–17 year olds seen in the ED. Northwick Park’s ED team collaborated with the Young Harrow Foundation (YHF), a local charitable organisation, to coproduce the ED Young Person’s Wellbeing Guide with the aim of addressing this standard whilst also meeting the needs of ED staff and the children and young people (CYP) that we care for.Methods/DesignYHF’s Change Champions, a dynamic group of local 15–25 year olds with lived experience of areas such as youth violence and mental health, worked with the ED team and fed back that they wouldn’t necessarily expect (or welcome) ED staff enquiring about such personal topics (particularly if presenting with an unrelated issue) but valued access to reliable support and advice for themselves or their peers. ED staff, similarly, often felt awkward approaching such sensitive subjects with CYP if the presentation was with a seemingly unrelated complaint or when departmental pressures prohibited development of a meaningful doctor-patient rapport. The Wellbeing Guide was therefore coproduced to provide CYP with links to trusted sources of support (based on the HEEADSSS categories) as well as allowing the ED clinician to broach such conversations by asking whether any issues raised in the Guide resonated with the young person and whether further support or advice was required.Abstract 366 Figure 1Results/ConclusionsThe Wellbeing Guide will be piloted, and offered to all 12–17yo’s attending the ED, in the next few weeks. Using an iterative approach the document will be further developed through feedback from CYP. We are also developing a complementary document containing links to resources for parents concerned about their child. We aspire to an online version of both documents, accessible via the Trust’s website, in the next few months.


Author(s):  
Mike Seal ◽  
Pete Harris

The authors set out their own distinctive analytical frame that combines elements of critical theory, psychosocial criminology and applied existential philosophy to produce a practical conceptual basis for work with the young people that youth workers will encounter on a daily basis. This involves the authors seeking to augment the existing youth work ‘canon’ with some key concepts from criminological thought, primarily around the study of desistance and masculinities. The authors seek to locate the criminological subject within a social context, whilst taking psychodynamic ideas of the “defended self” seriously, and existential philosophy which serves to foreground notions of self, choice and meaning within considerations of violent behaviour and desistance. These are then linked to what the authors see as 4 possible levels of meaningful response: personal/psychological, community/cultural, structural/symbolic and existential.


Author(s):  
Mike Seal ◽  
Pete Harris

In this chapter, the authors present an outline of the philosophical underpinnings of youth work practice and discuss how youth work is conceived, organised and delivered in different member states, and specifically in those the authors encountered in their study (Germany, Austria and the UK). They then introduce their working definition of youth violence. The authors were keen to move beyond the narrow confines of conceptualisation of youth violence as ‘gang’ violence, partly because this is a heavily populated area of enquiry, but also because they recognised that youth workers will be engaging with young people whose experience of violence falls both within and outside of the bounded and contestable phenomenon of the ‘gang’.


Author(s):  
Mike Seal ◽  
Pete Harris

The ‘problem’ of violence involving young people and how to respond meaningfully to it continues to occupy the minds of policy-makers and other stakeholders across Europe. Based on a two-year multi-national research project examining youth work responses to youth violence, this book develops a unique analytical frame that presents a model for meaningful responses to youth violence at 4 levels – the personal/psychological, the community/cultural, the structural/symbolic and the existential. The authors develop a number of original themes, namely that for street based youth work to have an impact on street violence it needs to be challenging and avoid collusion with violence, and that interventions need to be aimed at individuals, their communities and the state. Additionally, the authors discuss the transformative potential of an existential approach to youth violence, i.e. one that focuses on meaning making, interpersonal encounter and the privileging of improvised ‘in the moment’ interventions. They also examine how the disciplinary split between sociology and psychology can hinder understanding of youth violence. The authors argue for a psychosocial theoretical approach such as the need to re-think the character of worker-young people relationships, emphasising the complexity of the inner and outer worlds of young people involved in violence. Creating public policy for good practice involves contesting social policy narratives that demonise young people by simplistically identifying them as a threat to others; The need for street based youth workers to meaningfully inform policy responses by seeing themselves as simultaneously practitioners and as ethnographic researchers – an activity we call ethnopraxis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 149-162
Author(s):  
Danuta Borecka-Biernat

A young person who creates and implements certain life plans is exposed to situations of conflict related to school, contacts with peers and family relationships. For such a person, a conflict taking place in these three social spheres is an everyday, inevitable, and even natural situation. For some young people, conflicts with teachers, peers and parents constitute an important source of strong negative emotional stimulation and personal danger. There is no doubt that threats cause a lot of behaviours in a person, which are messages that describe a situation this person is currently in and whether it has the features of a difficult situation or not. Some young people, in the face of a dispute at school, in relationships with peers or at home, adopt destructive strategies in the form of an aggressive reaction to a conflict, avoiding active coping in the face of a conflict by engaging in other stress-free forms of activity or giving in to a conflict. However, there are also young people who cope with a social conflict situation well, treat a conflict as a challenge for themselves, which prompts them to mobilize their resources in order to overcome obstacles that prevent them from meeting their needs.


GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 122-129
Author(s):  
Monika Bansal ◽  
Sh. Lbs Arya Mahila

Youth Mentoring is the process of matching mentors with young people who need or want a caring responsible adult in their lives. It is defined as an on-going relationship between a caring adult and a young person which is required for self-development, professional growth and carrier development of the mentee and mentors both and all this must be placed within a specific institution context. The purpose of this article is to quantitatively review the three major areas of mentoring research (youth, academic, and workplace) to determine the overall effect size associated with mentoring outcomes for students.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This chapter introduces the innovators and provides a portrait of them. The chapter analyzes these innovators at the individual, interactional, and macro level of the gender structure. The chapter begins at the individual level of analysis because these young people emphasize how they challenge gender by rejecting requirements to restrict their personal activities, goals, and personalities to femininity or masculinity. They refuse to live within gender stereotypes. These Millennials do not seem driven by their feminist ideological beliefs, although they do have them. Their worldviews are more taken for granted than central to their stories. Nor are they consistently challenging gender expectations for others, although they often ignore the gender expectations they face themselves. They innovate primarily in their personal lives, although they do reject gendered expectations at the interactional level and hold feminist ideological beliefs about gender equality.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document