Question

Discuss what historical/economic changes occurred to create the concept of ‘youth’ and in the same process ‘youth work’.

Answer 1

Politicians and policy makers in Britain and Northern Ireland currently tend to talk about young people in three linked ways – as thugs, users and victims. As thugs they steal cars, vandalize estates, attack older (and sometimes, younger) people and disrupt classrooms. As users they take drugs, drink and smoke to excess, get pregnant in order to jump the housing queue and, hedonistically, care only for themselves. As victimsthey can’t find work, receive poor schooling and are brought up in dysfunctional families. Yet so many of the troublesome behaviours associated in this way with young people are not uniquely theirs. As the opening quotations indicate truancy may indeed be a ‘youth problem’. After all to be a truant one must be absent from school. However, if it is more correctly seen as absenteeism (unauthorized absence from work), then it becomes merely another example of a phenomenon that crosses ages, classes and backgrounds. Likewise, the classic linking of youth with soccer hooliganism does not make sense when we examine the profile of those appearing in court for ‘soccer-related’ offences. Yet a view of ‘youth as a problem’ continues to drive policy discussion and, in the UK at least, is linked to notions of social exclusion. Certain groups of young people are seen in deficit, as a problem – and the ‘answer’ to this behaviour is to impose more control on the one hand (Jeffs and Smith 1995), and, on the other, to direct ‘remedial’ resources and interventions at those deemed to be in need.