Ethics of Youth Work Practice in the Twenty-First Century: Change, Challenge and Opportunity

Our editorial introduces this Special Issue devoted to exploring the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century. The call for papers for this Special Issue went out in October 2022 with an aim to provide a specific focus on youth work and its shifting relationship with ethics in light of contemporary developments and precarities such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, the intensification of neoliberal policy agendas and concerns about the silencing of youth work values in certain policy contexts including the UK and Ireland (Coburn and Gormally 2017; Kiely and Meade 2018; McMahon 2021). For us, the call sought to move beyond the structural and neoliberal logic that emphasises codification and standardisation of ethics, to attend to everyday ethical dilemmas and related messiness. Our desire was to interrogate the dominant view surrounding youth work ethics that tends to construct youth as objects of policy intervention and without voice, expression and agency (Wadhwa 2021). In doing so, our interest was to create a space for re-imagining the ethics of youth work that takes into account the complex multi-layered navigations of specific socio-cultural contexts and involves both dialogue and contestation within its practice.

In the call, we sought to delineate youth work as a particular type of approach, different from more generic forms of ‘work with young people’, by referencing youth work as informal or non-formal education. This carried a focus on the personal, cultural, social and political development of young people, underpinned by core values including voluntary participation, partnership and the active inclusion of young people in decision-making, empowerment and the promotion of rights, and negotiation of schedules of ethics.

In highlighting this approach, however, we recognised that youth work can be predominantly informed through an epistemological positioning that continues to privilege western, modern, colonial and scientistic knowledge frameworks. This standpoint often constructs young people in deficit, in need of care and protection, and produces a normative universality which is singular and culturally hegemonic, ‘Western’ and ‘Eurocentric’ (Idriss 2022; Idriss, Butler, and Harris 2022). It inadequately captures the participatory discourse that focuses on young people’s agency. Functioning within these knowledge frameworks then risks the imposition of binary notions of right/wrong or good/bad youth work, something that this Special Issue seeks to explore and disrupt.

Guided by the calls for decolonisation emerging from within contexts of postcoloniality, where more embedded understandings of social relations operate (Chilisa and Ntseane 2010; Smith 2021; Tikly and Bond 2013), we argued for a more expansive view of ethics. This enabled us to reconfigure youth work practice as relational and socially situated, in recognition of its everyday surprises and unexpected dilemmas. This also allowed us to counter an increasingly individualised and, as such, neoliberal emphasis which works to ‘fix’ young people through policy interventions or related solution-focused responses to issues faced by youth today, as well as to trouble the category of ‘youth’ itself as contingent on context.

In this Special Issue, we also sought to respond to the urgency of climate change and its implications for young people’s lives and youth work practice. Youth work theory and practice are mainly anthropocentric in nature and have been relatively slow to engage with the climate crisis, but there are emergent threads of conceptualisation that draw on ideas about human relationships to ethics and morality in the context of the nonhuman world. Complex and differentiated, these conceptualisations derive from poststructuralist thought and include posthuman, post anthropocentric and new materialist perspectives which are relational in nature and seek to ‘look beyond social systems and human-centred modes of understanding to map out alternative strategies of care, inheritance, preservation and stewardship’ (Sterling 2020, 1038) between the human and nonhuman worlds. This new ethics is boundary-crossing and seeks to encompass and overcome binaries such as ‘North/South, human/non-human, nature/culture and subject/object’ (Sterling, 2020). This has profound implications for the consideration of youth work ethics and knowledge and how youth work is imagined and practised. Amongst other considerations, it requires a re-evaluation of who the ‘subject’ is in moral and ethical thinking and a recognition of ‘young people as material individuals, with biological, evolving needs, living in a complex world shared with the animate and inanimate’ (Pisani 2023, 706).

Moreover, emerging into a ‘post’ Covid era, we felt a palpable sense of change, challenge and opportunity in youth work and sought to capture this shift, in particular its implications for ethics in practice. Our invitation offered scope for contributions to explore ethics in youth work practice from a range of perspectives including recent and exciting developments in theoretical and conceptual understanding of ethics in youth work; the experiences of practitioners and consideration of everyday ethical dilemmas; the ethical issues presented in working with young people, particularly those experiencing inequalities and minoritised young people; the ethical challenges or opportunities presented by policy shifts and the intersection of policy and ethics in practice; developments in professionalisation processes and the increased production and promotion of codes of ethics for youth work practice; and the ethical issues associated with the organisation and management of youth work services.

This Special Issue contains eight articles which address many of the perspectives mentioned. However, for the purpose of this editorial, we introduce the contributions using the themes of the call, those of change, challenge and opportunity for the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century.

Change

Published on the eve of this century, the groundbreaking books Ethical Issues in Youth Work (Banks 1999a, 1999b) and The Art of Youth Work (Young 1999) were the first of their kind to explore youth work issues using a moral and ethics lens. Sarah Banks (1999a) began the discussion about the relationship between ethics and youth work professionalisation. Her edited book offered youth work practitioners a new way to think about their work, in particular the ethical dilemmas encountered in practice including dealing with state funding as well as those that arose in the myriad of potential roles taken up by youth workers. Banks (1999a) also introduced ethics theories to youth work and illustrated how they might be applied in practice. The two main theoretical approaches introduced by the book at that time included ‘principle-based’ and ‘character and relationship based’ ethics perspectives, both of which might now be broadly aligned with a humanist approach to ethics. Principle-based approaches referred to Kantian and Utilitarian perspectives that emphasised the need for a youth worker to consider duty, rules and consequences in their actions. Character and relationship-based approaches referred to virtue ethics and ethics of care perspectives that emphasised the character of the youth worker and the ethics embedded in relationships between the youth worker and the young person. In The Art of Youth Work, Kerry Young (1999) focused on the use of moral philosophy and its emphasis on virtue ethics as a frame to explain the purpose and methods of youth work and the role of the youth worker as an informal educator facilitating the moral education of young people through relational pedagogy and ethics. Young’s (1999) work paid considerable attention to the youth work relationship (and conversation) as the basis for facilitating the personal, social and moral development of young people.

Since those seminal publications, what has remained influential and what has changed? In the intervening 25 years, the interest in exploring youth work using an ethical perspective has increased significantly with many more contributions on youth work ethics literature in books (e.g. Corney 2014; Roberts 2009; Sercombe 2010; Sercombe 2018; Spier and Giles 2018), and journal articles including articles in this journal (e.g. Bessant 2009; Evans 2015; Fox 2019; Murphy and Ord 2013; Pope 2016). More recently, funded research has resulted in the development of youth work ethics curriculum resources (e.g. Cerovac 2020; Hickey 2021), toolkits (e.g. Kiilakoski 2022; Petkovic 2022), discussion and practice papers (e.g. Corney et al. 2022) generated through European and Erasmus projects including the EU-Council of Europe Youth partnership and the Youth Work eLearning Partnership (YWeLP) (e.g. The Art of Ethics in Youth Work Project 2019–2022; Strengthening the Professionalisation of Youth Work through Codes of Ethical Practice 2019–2022; YouthWorkAndYou Project 2017–2019). A significant proportion of this literature has focused on the professionalisation of youth work with an interest in, and some debate about, the promotion of codes of ethics and standards. Many of these recent outputs are practical in nature and provide resources for discussing the importance of professional ethics in youth work. Compared with the ‘principle-based’ and ‘character and relationship based’ frameworks for youth work practice first explored in Banks (1999a) and Young (1999), the recent literature has featured relatively little discussion of the theoretical implications inherent in the arguments and practices surrounding professional ethics in youth work. Within this discussion, an invisiblised perspective has been that of the climate emergency, its impacts on young people and implications for youth work practice. By contrast, the articles in this special issue challenge these narrow positions, seek to restore and revivify a focus on the relational dimensions of youth work practice and offer new and emerging perspectives in theorising youth work practice ethics in this time of social, cultural, political and environmental upheaval.

In their article on working ‘towards an ecocentric ethics for practice’, Jamie Gorman, Alison Baker, Tim Corney and Trudi Cooper include both decolonialism and posthumanism as theories influencing their call for a newly expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work that can respond to the eco-crisis faced by humans and nonhumans. They argue that these ideas have relevance for youth workers given the particular resonance that the climate crisis has for young people and the ‘ethical responsibility’ youth workers bear in accompanying young people in their activism for change. In rejecting traditional, liberal humanist approaches, they explain why previous ethical frameworks like utilitarianism, Kantian ethics and virtue ethics are not suitable to deal with the challenges of environmental crisis, given their human-centric perspectives. Instead, they argue for an ecocentric ethics that ‘recognises rights of species and ecosystems regardless of their value to humans’. Calling upon decolonial theory, the article points to the potential of Indigenous knowledge that emphasises relationality and interdependence ‘between human, non-human and spiritual worlds’. The article also explores the implications an ecocentric ethics might have for practice, such as revising existing codes of ethics; the inclusion of eco-social youth work perspectives in the education and training of youth workers; deeper critical reflection on the part of youth workers on the goals and methods of the work; and the need for youth workers as ‘quiet activists’ engaged in locally based actions for change.

Judith Bessant and Rob Watts also focus on the changes required in ethical theorising in youth work ‘in a time of planetary crisis’. They propose a new ontology for youth work – a new materialism perspective that if engaged with will lead to changes in how youth workers ‘see young people, in their practice and in their ethical coordinates’. The new materialism perspective is, they suggest, an interdisciplinary approach drawing from feminism, sociology, quantum physics, science studies and democratic theory with a focus on ‘decentring the human and rediscovering “matter” as the basis of metaphysics and ethics’. They use this perspective to bring ways of knowing associated with modernity into question and with that they also bring key knowledge traditionally associated with youth work (as a modernity project itself) into question, particularly categorisations of young people based on developmental theories of adolescence. They describe how a ‘new materialisms’ ontology as an emergent paradigm can be put to use in examining youth work in new ways to encourage deeper and more critical thinking about ethical practice in youth work and how to think anew about ‘practices that are good, what are bad, and how they should act ethically ‘in the midst of planetary crisis’. Their contribution also takes older virtue-based ethics and stretches the conception of relational ethics, moving away from a human centric emphasis on ‘ethical engagement with the world’ to ethics as ‘the relational practice of “response-ability” towards all beings’. Their paper calls for a revisioning of youth work ethics as one that is more relational, more situated and more embodied. They propose that the implications of adopting a new materialisms perspective in youth work would include: ongoing critical reflection by youth workers and a ‘major reworking’ of underpinning ideas and language used particularly in the ways young people are categorised; the introduction of more radical democratic methods and practices based on ‘participatory parity’ between adults and young people and between humans and nonhumans; a reimagining of youth work education and training and relationships between teachers and students; and greater attention to developing virtue ethics and an ethic of care within youth work practice.

Martin Purcell’s paper is also situated within an ethic of care and, drawing on interview research with youth workers in the UK, the paper offers the concept of ‘professional love’ to explore the long-standing centrality of the youth work relationship in new ways. Purcell reflects on the relative paucity of youth work ethics literature that features deep engagement with relational ethics and an ethics of care and he seeks to offer a better understanding of ‘the role of love as a radical element of our practice in the enactment of a care ethic’. Hearing practitioner perspectives and voice expressed in this paper is a powerful reminder of the everyday ethical engagements at the heart of youth work practice and, by extension, of the importance of the ethic of care in regard to and interacting with the nonhuman world. The paper also offers a radical reading of the potential of love and care in youth work practice as an antidote to the often transactional accounts of youth work found in policy that focuses on utilitarian outcomes.

Challenge

The youth work ethics literature is replete with discussions of ethical issues and challenges of practice, as well as accounts of the everyday ethical dilemmas encountered in practice. The articles introduced here provide accounts of ways in which youth work is challenged to respond more adequately to ethical issues that now emerge to some extent from histories of colonisation, ambivalence or neglect and contemporarily through an associated turn to liberalism and neoliberalism.

Kathy Edwards and Patrick O’Keeffe explore the ethical challenges they face as youth work educators traversing the betwixt and between spaces where neoliberal policy frameworks and youth work values inspired by UK literature and practice converge and diverge in an Australian education setting. The paper reflects on the similarities and differences in the trajectories of youth work in the UK and Australia, both shaped by varying histories of policy formation that have impacted on the ethical foundations of practice. Taking the UK as the dominant, comparator case, Edwards and O’Keeffe seek to sketch out the unique ‘warm climate’ policy context that has shaped the character of Australian youth work where, in the authors’ view, there is a more pragmatic underpinning for youth work and where values such as voluntary participation or definitions of informal education are not as strong. They detail the ongoing influence of neoliberal policies for Australian youth work and they discuss the challenges inherent in teaching youth work in ‘our warm climate’ where the state has shifted from being relatively absent to ‘a distinctly interventionist state’ that now seeks to create youth work as a market. The contextual picture which they vividly paint acts as a backdrop to questions they face as educators about how to promote ‘good’ or ethical practice whilst navigating the contradictions of youth work history, policy and practice.

Sarah Williams and Greg Morris seek to address some of the challenges experienced by young Black Indigenous People of Colour and their identity politics. Drawing on their experiences as intercultural practitioners who work with young people in Australia, their article conceptualises and maps out the potential of postcolonial theory, Indigenous inquiry and third space approaches, with an emphasis on the co-creation of knowledge, in helping to decolonise praxis in youth work. Williams and Morris describe their use of the Pasifika methodology of Talanoa to engage in reflective practice discussion with each other in the process of writing the article and in conceptualising third space praxis as drawn from their experiences of work with young people. Their reflections, using talanoa methods and their discussions of Vā (the space in between), ‘Le Vā’ (recognise the space between), ‘Tu Le Vā’ (awaken the space between), ‘Iloa’ (explore the space between) ‘Teu Le Vā’ (nurture the space between) and ‘Punga Mai Le Vā’ (emerge from the space between) offer a rich perspective on ethical challenges and issues to consider in intercultural work with young people.

Niamh McCrea and Marie Moran take on the challenge of ‘clarifying and enhancing the role of equality in youth work ethics’ as they note the centrality that equality and egalitarian values occupy in the ethical foundations of youth work. Their conceptual paper is an integral part of this special issue but will be included in the next issue of the journal, and is already published online, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2024.2315111. It tackles the ‘ambiguity surrounding equality across much of the youth work literature’ and they draw upon the interdisciplinary area of Equality Studies to do this. The paper goes on to interrogate youth work literature that explicitly engages with the terms ‘equality’ and ‘equity’, seeking to expose the lack of clarity therein and to offer an Equality Studies approach as a means of remedying this. In particular, their contribution focuses on addressing three common problems in youth work literature – treating equality as meaning ‘sameness’; reducing equality to mean ‘equality of opportunity’ and thereby silencing alternative meanings; and a failure to acknowledge the implications of and connections between promoting equality for other youth work values. Their paper concludes by exploring the potential for radical youth work guided by egalitarian values.

Opportunity

One of the key themes in youth work ethics literature is the discussion of ethics as an opportunity for deepening our understanding of the purpose and methods of youth work practice. Youth work ethics affords the opportunity to harness ethical theories in ways that can aid the development of youth work both as a practice that engages with young people in ‘good’ or ethical ways and as a profession that seeks to ‘do good’ as a moral enterprise in itself. Beyond the theorising, discussion of youth work ethics also affords the opportunity to pay attention to devices such as Codes of Ethics, practices such as supervision and methods such as ethical decision-making that can support the everyday ethical practices of youth workers. In this special issue, two articles explore these opportunities.

Ilona Rannala, Jamie Gorman, Hilary Tierney, Árni Guðmundsson, Jane Hickey and Tim Corney offer an exciting research-based contribution exploring a cross-country comparison of youth work practitioner perspectives on ethical practice. The paper reports findings from surveys issued to just over 400 professional youth workers across Australia, Estonia, Iceland and Ireland with the aim of informing local, national and international ‘professionalisation efforts’. The article provides insights into youth workers’ attitudes towards challenges for ethical practice; it identifies the kinds of ethical principles attracting more or less practitioner support; and attitudes towards professional ethics including Codes of Ethics and occupational standards. The authors’ engagement with research in the area of professional ethics sheds new light on the opportunities that practitioners associate with the use of codes of ethics as guides for practice; the support for professional associations where practitioners can share solidarity and support for each other and for youth work; and the potential for better organisational support for ethical practice through supervision and reflective practice.

The paper by Maki Hiratsuka, Miki Hara, Kisshou Minamide, Fumiyuki Nakatsuka, Sachie Oka, Emi Otsu and Misako Yokoe offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the values and ethics of youth work can be shared amongst practitioners in Japan and more widely in society using creative approaches such as storytelling. The paper presents an opportunity for deploying storytelling as a method of sharing ethical practice amongst youth work practitioners and its implications for ethics in the context of a neoliberal policy turn. Highlighting the current policy context in Japan, the paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the impacts of the neoliberal policy on the social realities of young people, youth work practice and its associated ethics. Drawing on Ball (2003), the authors engage with the emergence of a ‘new kind of practical ethics’ and their relevance in the Japanese context. The paper posits storytelling as a participatory, dialogic, reflective and democratic space for youth work practitioners to engage with the ethics of youth work as well as a method that captures the relational dimensions, everyday negotiations and ‘the messiness’ (de St Croix 2022, 710) of day-to-day youth work practice.

Conclusion

The established and dominant view surrounding youth work ethics focuses primarily on formal procedural ethics guidelines, codes of ethics and standards which compel youth work practitioners to valourise rule-following and regulation, sometimes at the expense of more situated, considered and participative processes. Such a view further entrenches the privileging of objective knowledge frameworks and ‘principle-based’ ethical guidelines by regarding questions surrounding everyday negotiations as secondary.

Creating universalising ethical parameters for youth work practice presumes a universality of ethics that is dominated by Western, Eurocentric values which ignore or underplay the importance of relational and recognitional forms of knowledge, experience and practice. Such impetus neglects the realities of building relationships crucial for disrupting dominant discourses like neoliberalism and managerialism. Additionally, it disregards contemporary contexts of postcoloniality and precarity where young people’s rights and participation might take effect differently. In this sense, the established approaches to theorising youth work ethics can be too rigid and fail to account for the unexpected dilemmas that arise during the practice of ethics, thereby ‘trapping’ young people and youth workers in predetermined ways and categories and prioritising regulatory compliance over ethical reflection.

Contributions to this Special Issue move beyond the established approaches by suggesting a more expansive, nuanced and contextualised understanding of ethics which takes into consideration the situatedness and negotiated nature of youth work in different cultural, political, social and economic settings. This involves recognising and addressing the modern, western and colonial influences that have shaped youth work theory, practice and education, foregrounding ethical considerations that go beyond formal procedures and are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts. It necessitates acknowledging and addressing historical and ongoing power imbalances in North/South relationships, in the lives of young people from different socio-economic groups and in relationships between adults and young people.

By interrogating prevailing ideas of ethics in this Special Issue, we emphasise the need for ongoing ethical reflection, dialogue and contestation in youth work practice. This allows taking up of our ‘self’ in agonistic ways that acknowledge and encompass the plurality and diversity of youth work contexts and young people’s lives and experiences, and that problematise the impacts of youth work, as attempted through this Special Issue. This ethics begins to recognise the complexity of youth work practice contexts and to foreground the young people who inhabit them. It responds to calls for decolonisation of youth work knowledge and experience, to the discourse of young people’s participation and inclusion and to the realities and impacts of the climate crisis. As such, the Special Issue joins the call to reimagine an ethics of youth work practice for the twenty-first century by arguing for a shift away from universality towards recognition of the intricacies, messiness and richness of ethics in practice.