Young people and anti-social behaviour again: against structure

Suddenly it's yoof crime and violence again. The youth justice system, as if we didn't know it, is 'in crisis.' Elsewhere in government there is a creative and positive approach to issues to do with arson and young people.

Never thought about it much? Nor me, in spite of a clear recollection of the power of Peter Shaffer's Equus which I saw back in the seventies... According to this press release, children and young people on the lowest incomes are sixteen times more likely to die in a house fire and 31 times more likely to suffer from an arson attack. So one hopes the DCLG's proactive initiative, acknowledging the link between youth crime and arson, has a chance of making a difference.

And while I'm writing this, having been unable to get there, ippr are having a gig at the House of Commons to pump some momentum into youth policy, launching their report Freedom’s orphans: raising youth in a changing world. The press release unpromisingly introduces the word ‘paedophobia’ in its title (which helps explain why I missed it first time round) but we learn that 'British adults are less likely than those in other European countries to intervene to stop teenagers committing anti social behaviour.'

Right, we're on familiar territory. The inclination to intervene and the fear of retaliation were the key themes of the seminar I organised back in January which sparked the chapters by Jacqueline Barnes and Liz Richardson in Respect in the neighbourhood, which will be published next month. The book is really about informal social control at local level.

There have been a few surveys (including I recall this one by a certain security company, with slightly unconvincing methodology) but we can expect the ippr work to be authoritative. The press release offers enticing sample statistics about readiness to intervene. I hope when I see the report I'll find some exploration of the possibility that what young people themselves tend to fear most on the streets is not adults, it's other young people.

It seems important, and overdue, for someone influential to at last come out and show clearly that there are social shifts to explain changes in the relationships between young people and those around them, for which young people are not necessarily to blame. But had I been there, I might have raised a point, which was put to me most clearly by our publisher Geoffrey Mann (who's been working in this field far longer than I and long enough to remember Equus I'm sure), to ask who is challenging the policy insistence on structured activities?

Not ippr: their report claims 'that participation in structured youth activities is better for young people than unstructured youth clubs,' and recommends 'that every secondary school pupil (from 11-16 years old) should participate in at least two hours a week of structured and purposeful extracurricular activities.'

Most youth workers and others providing various types of informal education are not against structured activities, far from it. It's a question of balance. As I understand it, there's plenty of evidence and anecdote, from youth work and the youth justice field, that unstructured time with young people is absolutely crucial, as a precursor to structured activity such as sport, drama, or volunteering; as a precursor to the provision of advice, information and counselling; and as something very important in its own right, largely because of the value young people attach to the relationships that they build up with trusted non-judgmental adults who let them be themselves and who listen.

The theme of informality, and the resistance to the formalisers and managerialists, is a familiar one on this blog, so I'll take up this cause without hesitation. After all, much the same point can be made about community involvement and participation: in particular, people who experience exclusion often won't feel comfortable being thrust into a formal participatory role, and will need less formal, escapable fringe involvement before they are willing to commit. I can remember trying to make precisely this point, fruitlessly, on a cross-departmental government task force on citizen participation a couple of years ago, sigh. Unfortunately those who govern us have a strong instinctive resistance to informality.

Comments

[Geoffrey Mann]

Many thanks to the Neighbourhoods editor for featuring my comments on balancing provision of structured and informal work with young people. Inevitably my views are influenced by what I publish. The three books that I have found most useful in developing my thoughts on this have been Kerry Young's The Art of Youth Work, Sue Robertson's Youth Clubs, and Bob Holman's Kids at the Door Revisited. Sue's is a well-referenced defence of the role of youth clubs in communities. Bob shows how you can have powerful and positive influences on a neighbourhood's young people's lives without having a building to work from, and stresses the value of long-term commitment to a neighbourhood's young people by people who live there. Kerry calls on a range of voices from what one book reviewer disparagingly, called 'the community washing line' (What's wrong with that?) to chart the links between moral philosophy (Apologies for using big words.), building helping relationships and establishing repect based on trust. All champion space for informal time with young people. All would, I believe, find it slightly bizarre that anyone should want to champion structured activities by specifically criticising youth clubs.