Ethical Issues in Youth Work

Sarah Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136954832
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This fully updated new edition of Ethical Issues in Youth Work presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of a range of ethical challenges facing youth workers in their everyday practice.

The first part offers a clear outline of the nature of professional ethics, relevant ethical theories and an overview of the policy and organisational context of youth work. The second part is grounded firmly in practice, with experts in the field exploring specific issues that raise ethical difficulties for youth workers, such as:

• when to breach confidentiality

• information sharing in inter-professional contexts

• the ethics of youth participation and active citizenship

• how to balance the roles of control, empowerment and education

• negotiating personal and professional values, interests and commitments in youth work

• dilemmas for faith-based and black and minority ethnic workers

• issues for practitioner researchers.

Ethical Issues in Youth Work offers a timely and unique insight into both the dilemmas of youth work practice and some of the more recent challenges faced by youth workers and all those working with young people in the light of current public attitudes and government policies towards young people.

Part 1
The ethical context of youth work

Notes

1 I have used the term ‘flourishing’ instead of ‘well-being’ or ‘welfare’ in order to encompass environmental sustainability within the subject matter of ethics. ‘Flourishing’ is a contested concept, normally associated with virtue ethics, with connotations of wholeness, living well and fulfilling a purpose.

2 This list is a modified version taken from Banks (2001: 4).

References

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1
Ethics and the youth worker

Sarah Banks

Introduction

Case study 1.1

While out on a trip with a group of young people, I [a female youth worker] saw one of the participants, a young woman, stealing sweets from a shop. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. The young woman had recently returned to the youth club following a long absence and her behaviour was often challenging. I felt I was just beginning to develop a relationship of trust with her, and therefore decided not to mention the theft. Afterwards I wondered if I had done the right thing: by not mentioning the incident, I was condoning the theft and passing on the value that it was acceptable.

This case was given as an example of an ethical dilemma by a female student studying youth and community work in Britain. It is an account of an everyday incident, probably remembered because the youth worker at the time was relatively inexperienced and questioned whether her response was the right one. All youth workers can give examples of similar incidents and dilemmas – of cases where they have had to make a difficult choice about what to do, and wondered afterwards if what they did was right.

Ethical issues are endemic in youth work. As an activity or practice, youth work involves working with participants who have fewer rights than adults, are often vulnerable, lack power and may be suggestible – hence giving scope for their exploitation, harm or manipulation. As an occupation working within the welfare system, youth work shares with social work, nursing and medicine the classic tensions between respecting individual choice and promoting the public good; and between empowering and controlling its service users. Like social work, it has to work within societal ambivalence towards its service users (young people are often regarded as threatening or undeserving) – balancing the roles of carer, protector, advocate and liberator. Insofar as it is an occupation concerned with providing a service, youth work shares with a broad group of occupations, commonly classed as professions, concerns about the professional integrity, trustworthiness and honesty of its practitioners.

These features of youth work suggest that there is plenty of scope for examining and debating the ethical issues, problems and dilemmas that arise in practice. In setting the scene for the rest of the book, this chapter will examine the nature of youth work and consider debates about the boundaries of the work and its status as a ‘profession’. It will then consider what we mean by ‘ethics’, briefly distinguishing two broad theoretical approaches to ethics and their implications for professional ethics in a youth work context.

The nature of youth work

‘What is youth work?’ is a perennial question debated among practitioners and in the literature. To answer the question I will first examine different uses of the term ‘youth work’ before discussing its substantive nature (purpose, values and activities).

The concept of ‘youth work’

‘Youth work’ is used in several different ways. It may describe: (1) an activity or practice (what people do); (2) an occupation (a practice undertaken by qualified or recognised workers within a culture of norms); and (3) a discipline (an identifiable area of study and practice) – as summarised in List 1.1.

List 1.1: Three senses of ‘youth work’

1 Youth work as an activity (work with young people). ‘Youth work’ in this broad sense describes a range of different types of work with young people undertaken by volunteers and people professionally qualified in a variety of professions or disciplines, including:

a) Generic work with young people using a range of approaches and purposes. This is a wide category covering the practices of school teaching, police work with young people, social work with young people and sports coaching, for example, as well as specialist youth work undertaken by youth workers.

b) Work with young people with an informal educational and/or developmental focus. This is a slightly more specialist category of work that takes into account the approach to the work and its purpose (informal education and/or personal and social development). The work may be undertaken by paid workers (sometimes professionally qualified) or volunteers. ‘Informal education’ entails young people learning through participation in activities; ‘personal and social development’ has a more specific focus on young people maturing and taking roles as responsible citizens. This category may include the work of teachers when taking young people on a sporting trip or police officers when working with a group of young people on the theme of knife crime, as well as the work of specialist youth workers in a youth pr...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction to the second edition
• Part 1 The ethical context of youth work
• Part 2 Ethical issues in practice
• Index