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Abstract
This paper critically assesses the contemporary mainstream state-led youth work tradition in England. Its particular focus is possibilities within this tradition for engaging disadvantaged young people in activities that facilitate resistance to oppression. The basic thesis presented is that the current framework for youth work policy and practice is closing off opportunities for progressive ways of working with young people and, as a corollary, is stifling their capacity to overcome the constraints limiting their life chances. The data were gathered in 2010 while the author worked at an open-access youth club in a deprived inner-city district of an English city. While the majority of the young people using the club suffered severe social disadvantage, both the macro and micro political frameworks for state-led youth work worked against imagining strategies of resistance and social change. The paper draws on Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic violence’ to shed light on the way the operations of social institutions often conceal the power relations behind the violence of oppression and thereby add their own symbolic force to those relations. In the case of contemporary youth work practice, the force of this symbolic violence is having profound material consequences in the form of denied dreams and aspirations.
Notes
1. Available at http://www.video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3719259008768610598#.
4. Walter's asbo had been reported in dramatic terms in the local newspaper (‘Gang leader's reign of terror’) and displayed widely on posters in local shops and on glossy flyers circulated to every household in the area. It had been reportedly served due to his intimidating behaviour as leader of a gang of local youths whose actions included using people's wheelie bins as sledges and giving out verbal abuse. He was prohibited from entering the neighbourhood in which he lived (with exceptions for travelling on public transport and medical appointments) and from associating there with named friends. Walter's breach of the order, which was to last for 2 years, would risk him being arrested and possibly imprisoned. So whilst asbos are civil actions that lack due process, their breach can lead to a prison sentence of up to 5 years. ‘At its simplest, it would appear that people could, in principle, find themselves incarcerated for behaviour that began as uncivil rather than unlawful’ (Rodger 2008).
5. For clarification, it is important to state that Giroux is operating in the context of the US and Canada, and largely in the field of school education, but his analyses translate easily to youth work.
6. An example of such symbolic violence was revealed during a conversation I had with Peter (not his real name), aged 19, one of the senior members at ORYC, on a group trip to an adventure park. Peter expressed his lack of ambition – he had no expectations of a decent job or career, due largely to his lack of educational qualifications. This had led him to make alternative (rational) life choices to have a ‘decent’ existence – consistent with Merton's (Citation1957) ‘strain theory’. My concern was that these alternative choices would lead to Peter being entrapped within the mainstream criminal justice system. When pressed, Peter did express an interest in becoming a professional youth worker, although didn't believe this was feasible. We discussed the options (e.g. access courses into community and youth work studies), and how further and higher education differed from the negative schooling experience Peter had had. As Beck and Purcell (2010) argued, through dialogue it becomes possible to enable people to overcome their ‘fate’, alienation and structural oppression, and attain greater well-being. They offer a case study of inner-city youth education amongst black males in New York to illustrate how this process might be possible:
The study describes how the young men in the study possessed what Freire calls ‘submerged consciousness’. This means they create their own interpretation of the dominant ideology as the best way of surviving life in a poor community; in this case through…selling drugs. Gramsci would have said this was an example of how hegemony operates to promote activity that in reality is counter productive to the objective needs of the people concerned. (Beck and Purcell Citation2010, p. 57)
Addressing this development effectively would, of course, require inter alia far more time than I had on this placement. ‘In effect it requires time and skills to become involved in the local culture, and…be seen as acceptable to it’ (Beck and Purcell Citation2010, p. 57).