Promoting Young People's Wellbeing through Empowerment and Agency

A Critical Framework for Practice

Lucy Maynard, Karen Stuart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317385097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

The terms 'wellbeing', 'empowerment' and 'agency' are common parlance in policy and practice with children, young people and families (CYPF), yet are often misused or not fully understood. Further, there is a disconnect between these abstract concepts and tangible practice with CYPF.

This book bridges the theory-practice divide, offering a clear and definitive guide to concepts and practical ways to develop CYPF wellbeing. It examines the concept of wellbeing and its intrinsic relationship to social justice both theoretically and through case study material, and locates these practices within critical pedagogy. The book highlights a range of practice with CYPF of various ages, in formal and non-formal learning situations, engaged in a range of different programmes including learning, reduction from offending, social action and tackling targeted needs. Each chapter highlights relevant policy, research and practice examples to ensure that the book is relevant to a variety of readers.

This book will benefit students and practitioners who work with young people to realise wellbeing and to embed critical pedagogy in their practice. It also provides a frame of reference to critically engage in policy analysis and is essential reading for social workers, teachers, police support officers and anyone working to support CYPF to become empowered.

Part 1
Empowerment and agency: a critical theoretical framework to support practice

1 Wellbeing and social justice

Chapter overview

Wellbeing was defined in the introduction as comprising both objective and subjective factors, viewed differently by a range of professionals. In this chapter we propose that a focus on social justice is the key way to support wellbeing – and that without social justice, there will be no lasting wellbeing – the two are interdependent. An overview and discussion of different conceptualisations of social justice is presented with their resonance with wellbeing.

Unusually we are going to start this chapter with an activity.

Reflective activity: key task

What do you understand social justice to be?

How would you describe it to a board of trustees/directors/senior managers?

How would you describe it to the people that you work with – colleagues and CYPF?

Now read the description of different types of social justice below and see how your understanding fits.

The theoretical and practical work of social justice can be seen as a response to injustice. Injustice takes a wide range of forms, and consequently, people who talk about or practice social justice can have very different foci. However, social justice is concerned with the just distribution of wealth, the right to justice through social control, the just access of opportunity, a moral obligation, and what we call functional social justice. As you might expect, amid this range, there are many definitions. For example, Chapman and West-Burnham (2010) outline,

Equality: every human being has an absolute and equal right to common dignity and parity of esteem and entitlement to access the benefits of society on equal terms.

Equity: every human being has a right to benefit from the outcomes of society on the basis of fairness and according to need.

Therefore, social justice requires deliberate and specific intervention to secure equality and equity.

Some people think that achieving social justice is a utopian dream. Neoliberal advocates will say that social justice is impossible and would destroy market forces and the global economy. It is interesting to note, therefore, that countries with a deep commitment to social justice also have the highest level of wellbeing – namely Japan, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands (Chapman and West-Burnham, 2010: 28). This is exemplified further in the vignette below.

Vignette 1.1 Social Justice in Sweden

The Social Justice in Europe Index Report (Schraad-Tischler, 2015) measured indicators on poverty prevention, equitable education, labour market access, social cohesion and non-discrimination, health and intergenerational justice in its weightings.

Some top and bottom five results are shown below. The scores are all out of 10:

1st	Sweden	7.23
2nd	Denmark	7.10
3rd	Finland	7.02
4th	Netherlands	6.84
5th	Czech Republic	6.68
23rd	Hungary and Spain	4.73
25th	Italy	4.69
26th	Bulgaria	3.78
27th	Romania	3.74
28th	Greece	3.61
European Average:		5.63

(Adapted from the Bertelsmann Foundation, 2015: 1).

Sweden, the most socially just country in the rankings, holds its position for some of the following reasons:

• It has the most diverse national parliament (45% female)

• Only 9.8% of young people in Sweden were NEET compared to a 17.8% EU average (ibid, 139–141).

• Only 1.1% of Swedes work long hours compared to 12.5% of workers in European countries

• 88.2% of the adult working age population of Sweden have completed at least an upper secondary education compared to the European average of 77.2%

• Sweden’s voter turnout stands at 85.8% compared to the European average of 68.4%

• Only 1.6% of children in Sweden are obese, lower than the European average of 2.7% (OECD, 2015).

Whilst social justice may be cited as a utopian dream that is not possible in a neo-liberal world, Sweden seems to be managing pretty well.

Whilst you may be able to compare one country to another, or one school to another and say one is more socially just than another, social justice itself is something that is either present or absent. Any given context will either feature injustice or social justice.

Nevertheless, social justice is also a highly dynamic state and is situational. It may exist in some contexts and not in others. It may exist in some countries, communities, organisations or classrooms, but not in others. How people act, minute by minute, will influence and affect social justice. The way we address young people may vary from day to day and will be an example of the equity and equality available at that moment.

However, this is not only a global, social or political agenda. It is a personal and interpersonal agenda. In our own small way we all create a greater social justice in the world around us, like casting pebbles in a pond. This is particularly important to those of us who work to support CYPF wellbeing. If we don’t consider this work within context, more specifically considering their equity and equality, then our work is at risk of being disassociated, abstract, unsustainable or redundant. This illuminates the perspective that the personal is both social and political and our work therefore needs to be considered as such.

Further, social justice is not contained as a theory or principle alone, social justice is a way of working and engaging with CYPF. This perspective urges you to combine theory and practice into praxis – the use of theory and practice together. We advocate for you to understand the theories of social justice and bring them to life vividly in your daily activities working with CYPF.

Dimensions of social justice

Having established the importance of social justice, and what is meant by the term overall, we will now explore the five dimensions of social justice.

Social Justice as the equal distribution of resources

Social justice, in one sense, refers to the just distribution of wealth and resources in society. Poverty remains a global issue, and a shocking issue even within the so-called developed western nations. For many, social justice is focused on making the distribution of wealth and resources more just.

To ensure a just distribution, many societies have engaged in the redistribution of wealth. Taxation is one example of State attempts to redistribute wealth. Taxing the rich funds social welfare benefits for those in need, along with central services such as education and health care for all. Social workers and family support workers may work within this perspective accessing welfare support for their clients and supporting them to get the benefits they are due from the State.

Whilst this redistribution may lead to a fairer society (Rawls, 1971), recent data is showing that the wealth gap is ever widening in the 21st century (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). It would seem therefore to only have a limited impact on justice. The redistribution approach also tends to ignore the conditions that led to the injustice occurring in the first place (Young, 1990).

From a global perspective the contrasts in resources and relative power bases held by organisations vary. Rich countries dominate poorer ones; those with bountiful resources call the shots when others run low and recent refugee crises push international perspectives of social justice and inclusion. These international situations really illustrate the relative power and powerlessness of the possession and control of resources on an individual level. These relative positions of power and powerlessness are replicated at a national and local level. In the UK, for example, there are projects that give free meals to young people throughout the summer holidays when they cannot access free school meals. The presence of food banks for families, free school meals and free holiday meal schemes emphasises the disparity between those that have and do not have money in the UK.

Social Justice and social control

This dimension of social justice focuses on “creating and maintaining social stability and order by exercising control over those who threaten to disrupt these” (Newman and Yeates, 2008: 13). The establishment of socially accepted norms of behaviour usually occurs through the process of socialisation. As children grow up they unconsciously notice and adhere to what is OK and not OK. This is sometimes reinforced explicitly through explanation, reward and punishment, and is also reinforced unconsciously through gossip, stories and media portrayal of ‘heroes’ and ‘demons’ within society. The judgements made within families, communities and societies become norms by which people self-regulate, and this creates a system of informal social control. This begs the question, what happens when people do not adhere to the rules?

The criminal justice system is in place to enforce social control when social norms are breached on a grand scale. The presence of the criminal justice system and its laws creates social control merely by its existence, and when those laws are breached then social control is enforced by punishment through financial fines or imprisonment. This type of social justice is for the masses. The criminal justice system is protecting the masses from the errant ways of individuals. Whilst judicial processes strive to be fair, there is a wealth of evidence on the criminalising effect of being in the criminal justice system (Whittaker, 2015) and of the over-representation of a range of oppressed and vulnerable groups (Roberts, 2016). This position suggests that the criminal justice system unintentionally can oppress and marginalise people. Policing, criminology and youth offending teams are likely to be working to this model of social justice.

Social Justice as freedom from discrimination

Nancy Fraser (1995) argues that social justice is more than access to resources, and highlights the importance of being seen as equally of worth in society. This depends on a variety of conditions, ranging from policy, access to education, to how people treat one another, and of particular relevance in today’s society, how they are represented in the media and popular culture. This can encompass three areas:

• Forms and processes of discrimination

• The provision of equal opportunities and inclusion

• Social mobility.

Each is discussed in turn below.

Forms and processes of discrimination

Discrimination comes in many forms – sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, intellectualism, size-ism, to name a few. Fraser (1995) points out that it is usually thos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of cases / vignettes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Empowerment and agency: a critical theoretical framework to support practice
• PART 2 Empowerment and agency: critical examples of practice
• Conclusion
• Index