The fact that young people were able to enter freely into relationships with youth workers and choose whether to attend projects or not helped to distinguish it from most other services.
Letting young people have the power to decide whether to participate or not placed an onus on youth services to develop programmes that are attractive to young people. If they failed to do so, young people simply wouldn't attend.
Now this characteristic of youth work is coming under threat. Increasingly, youth workers are expected to work with young people who have not asked to be there or, more to the point, might not want to be. In schools, on youth offending programmes and in custody young people are being "referred" to youth workers without expressing any willingness to do so.
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