9 - Youth workers as negative activists
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2023
Summary
Legislation and government policy refer to the concept of âpositive activitiesâ for young people. This is different from youth work. It is a concept that can lend itself to a merely leisure-based approach to young people and in doing so denies the role of education and development. It can also lend itself to consumerist and enforced activities. This chapter critically examines this concept and why youth work has been susceptible to its introduction, and advocates the importance of negative activities.
The confusion that has always existed in society between working with young people and youth work is clearly one that penetrates the minds of even the most influential policy makers. There is a muddle about the precise nature of youth work intervention. This has been quite deliberate and ideological, and flows from the definitions of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 that began the ideological attack on youth work and paved the way for whole-scale privatisation of youth work.
In this Act, local authorities are required to secure âpositive activitiesâ for young people â not to provide them directly, but to secure them through a process of tendering services on the market. In one section there is a clear expression of the epitome of the overall neoliberal agenda â on the one hand, services are thrown onto the market fragmented and privatised. This begins a race to the bottom in respect of terms and conditions. It also lowers quality and introduces layers of bureaucracy to commission contracts and manage them.
New authoritarianism
In taking things out of direct control it adds to the culture of authoritarianism in two ways. First, it removes services from democratically accountable control and second, it tends to associate services with highly monitored crime prevention-type provision. Young people become the problem to be sorted. In this process it changes the nature of the work, transforming youth work into an activity, an event that is positive and lacking the negative, but always enlightening. Activities lend themselves to concepts of physical activity and diversion away from problematic negative activities through recreation. Youth work is associated again with leisure activity and crime prevention. âKeep them off the streetsâ becomes the repeated cliché.
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- For Youth Workers and Youth WorkSpeaking out for a Better Future, pp. 157 - 168Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2012