For youth work, the legacy of the word is more problematic. More than 30 years ago, a spatch-cocked report (Milson-Fairbairn) rolled together the items into one "youth and community". It was not clear what this meant: young people's needs being handled in a community context? Professional work with community groups for their own sake? Adopting a community development approach to work with young people? Never mind, services and training courses were renamed and youth work sailed off into a policy and practice fog, from which it is only just emerging.
Yet the geographic community remains an important arena for the associative life of the young. It is their space, though often contested. The open ground is a place of display, of territorialism, of vulnerability. The street can offer an attractive, if sometimes addictive, chaos of the peer group in contrast to the family or the controlled arena of the school.
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