The National Youth Agency: Comment - The wrong kind of show

I blame Dr Barnardo. This pioneering Victorian philanthropist from Dublin so deservedly influential in child welfare, hit upon the device of selling before-and-after pictures of waifs and strays to aid his work.

It is not just individual donors or foundations that like this sort of thing. So does the State, with its relentless demand for youth work to demonstrate its impact, especially on at-risk groups (and often in a ludicrous time-scale). We can see it, too, on Comic Relief - a young African boy sobs with grief in his sister's arms on the death of their parents. We need to hear the voice of the young; we need, too, to demonstrate youth work's beneficial impact on their lives. But is it really right, or genuinely respectful, to be asking individual young people to parade their poverty, their distress, their earlier false steps?