NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED

What is Youth Work anyway?

I am not going to pretend that I will use this blog to share airy fairy stories. I am fed up of people thinking that Youth Work is a career that anyone can do. Really!? Sometimes I wish it was easy, sometimes I wonder why I am so fond of young people when they can so often be complete self-centred, pain in the backsides!

I have been involved in a range of projects and have even completed the Youth Work Degree (which will probably no longer exist soon) and what is apparent to me is that Youth Workers seem to share a few of the same qualities. Feel free to disagree but this is what I have personally experienced:

• We have often had a challenging upbringing ourselves which drives the passion for working with young people. We probably have negative views about the educational system too
• Youth Workers are often the most passionate about their jobs and will often identify as a Youth Worker, even when they are no longer in the field
• The skills to be a Youth Worker are broad and transferable to a wide range of roles
• We are often ignorant of the wider issues i.e. policy, funding and ask us to measure the impact of Youth Work and we all roll our eyes or imply that is an impossible task
• Youth Workers have a lot of patience and the ability to see the potential in the toughest of young people. Even the ones who call us a C*** for saying “Hello”
• The ones who are desperately fighting for what is left of Youth Work are not trying to cling on to a lost cause. We fill in the gaps, we genuinely provide person-centred support for young people, we care and we need to be getting better at backing up the argument that Youth Work is important!

Let me start with one of the stories I like to share if someone says, “I could do your job”. In all honesty, yes, anyone could call themselves a Youth Worker if they wanted to BUT I fail to understand why they would want to!

Story One – The Shock Factor

It is not unusual for young people to want to try and shock us. I think I am relatively unshockable since being a Youth Worker for ten years but there are still some that manage to get a reaction out of me if they are lucky.

So on a usual night at our weekly youth club, there was a large group of young people attending. It was a warm and light evening and we were milling about playing a consequences to action game. I knew this group very well, they had been coming for about a year and I would like to think that they had gone past the point of trying to shock me after many failed attempts. But of course, there is always one. One young person who takes it as a challenge and will never give up. This is our relationship now, I made a rod for my own back by not shutting down her attempts earlier but instead I thought I would allow her to ‘shock’ me on a couple of occasions and to feign ignorance so she could teach me about the subject she was trying to shock me with. This is it now, no going back.

So back to that evening, I was thinking how well the session is going. Multiple different friendship groups managing to be in the same room as each and maybe even throwing the odd fond insult to each other until I bore them with the appropriateness of their language. Then at the door, there she is. Grinning from ear to ear and a slight mischievous look in her eye. I know that look and I am prepared for anything she has in store for me……….

I start first, “Hello, how are you? How has your day been?” whilst eyeballing her to see what she is up to. She is good at this game, you can never let your guard down whilst she is around! She goes straight in for the kill as her smile fades, “I am really upset, I have just had a row with my boyfriend………..” My guard is down, instantly wanting to console and let her vent what has happened. In the my head I am stamping down the thought that he was no good for her anyway but of course I do not say this, she needs to realise this herself. Ok ok she has every right to be who she wants to be with.

She moves closer to me and asks me to hold something of her boyfriends as she doesn’t know what to do with it. I nearly took it, my fingers were millimetres away before a recoiled in horror at the sight of a cock ring. A used cock ring she delightfully told me, just now, up the road and you could see that.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        This isn’t in my job description, this isn’t in anyone’s job description! I calmly ask her to go wash it and put it away. Why I don’t know, it was all I could think of and I needed a few minutes to think of a tactical plan of action.

I was ready for her on her return, my plan was to bore her to death with discussions around safe sex, the law, STI’s and appropriate times and places to hand people sex aids………

The moral of the story is: Would a teacher hold these kind of open conversations with young people? Maybe she wouldn’t dare do that to them anyway but due to this incident the good but tough outcome was that she disclosed the controlling nature of her relationship with her boyfriend and was supported to do what was right for her. In a safe environment with a person she trusted enough to hand a used cock ring too.

Let me know what you would have done!