Break down the wall of ignorance

The stereotypical view of the youth worker is someone who spends a couple of hours a week playing pool in a youth hut. Generally, there is little understanding of the role youth workers can play in forming long-standing friendships with young people and helping them through difficult times. Neither is there much appreciation of the role they play in giving young people access to opportunities that might otherwise be denied to them.

While in some ways it is understandable that the public at large does not understand the role of youth work, it's extremely disappointing when fellow members of the children's workforce can't grasp the concept. As our cover feature on youth work in custody shows (p14), youth workers delivering programmes in young offender institutions sometimes encounter a wall of ignorance when running schemes for young people. But this ignorance is more widely spread - right from the government official who thinks youth workers are merely there to stop antisocial behaviour to the teacher who refers a difficult pupil to a youth project simply because they don't want them disrupting their class.