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Youth Gangs in an English City
A research team, led by Dr Judith Aldridge at the University of Manchester, has found evidence which directly contradicts the core assumptions of government policy on gang and knife crime. Based on two years’ work with members of six gangs in an English city, the research finds that in reality, gangs are loose, messy, changing friendship networks – less organised and criminally active than widely believed – with shifting and unstable leadership. The guardian has published podcast interview online with the researcher. here
“A Letter to a Young Activist” by Thomas Merton
Dear Jim,
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…
…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.
The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion…
The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand…
Enough of this… it is at least a gesture… I will keep you in my prayers.
All the best, in Christ,
Tom
Torn
I have been after this clip for ages since seeing a snipet on the telly, and a mate sent it via facebook.
Three Way movie
The scope of the voluntary youth work sector
The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs one in three of the total voluntary and community sector workforce and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year, according to new research published today by NCVYS and the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations (NCVCCO).
Every Organisation Matters is the first ever mapping of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sectors and was undertaken by a team from the University of Hull led by Professor Gary Craig as part of NCVYS and NCVCCO’s Speaking Out project.
Speaking at today’s launch Deputy Director of Strategy and Communications at the Office of the Third Sector, Juliet Mountford called the research ‘ground breaking’ and thanked the partners for providing an ‘excellent piece of research’. She also announced that Birmingham University will lead the new Third Sector Research Centre dedicated to analysing the impact of the sector’s activities.
Janet Moore, Third Sector Team Leader at the Department for Children, Schools and Families also commended the work and expressed the government’s commitment to taking on board the research findings, to shape future thinking and policy making.
Amongst the report’s key findings are:
The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs over 160,000 people in England – as many as 1 in 3 of all those employed by voluntary and community organisations – and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year.
Small organisations, many of whom work with highly vulnerable children and young people, are under threat because of the government’s shift towards commissioning services.
Children aged 7-13 appear to be poorly provided for, with an emphasis on early years provision and a growing government agenda around services for young people leading to this transitional age group missing out.
Effective understanding of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector is currently hindered by poor quality data.
Voluntary and community sector organisations need to be doing more to measure the long-term impact of their work.
The report calls on the government to invest in further research to better understand the changing nature of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector, to prioritise support for small organisations who often work with those most in need and to provide sustained investment in workforce development.
The research team and representatives from the voluntary sector who attended the launch emphasised the importance of ‘valuing what is valuable above valuing what is measurable’.
For more information and to access the full report go here 100 Tears the movie Code Name: The Cleaner full
Info via CHYPPS and NCVYS
Post Christendom
Life is mad at the moment so little time to think or blog, off to the launch of youth work after christendom tomorrow in Brum then leamington spa, with south west travels next week. very much looking forward to holiday at the end of the monthState of Play movie Code Name: The Cleaner rip
Gordon Brown backs skate parks
Gordon Brown is aware of the need for youth facilities in promoting comuunity cohesion and particularly mentions skate parks State of Play buy Click movie download
Highwaymen movie . on the whole this is good news but it still begs the question why do communities usually put them right on the edge of town when most young people dont have transport. Having just taught on community cohesion is worth noting that the government use the word community to conjour up fluffy feelings associated but the reality of funding long term workers to help build communities that reflect the warmth of the word, still remains a long way away.The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie
Subverting the empire
Good day yesterday at the CMS blah on Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire with Brian J. Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat. Lots of interesting correlations with where we are, and Flow particularly around the use and practice of Targum Highwaymen movies in synagogues. It raises questions about the approach we should take to using what until now we have called re-contextualised bible stories. In the traditional approach to targum the original is also read, however I have questions about how obsolete our christian language has become because of Christendom and the corruption of the christian stories through the ages.
For me this was a weakness of the targum that Brian and Sylvia had written, as it contained quite lot of christian language. There is the question of who are you talking to, and in the main their targum based on colossians was to believers, but in our context, even though it was well written and eloquent, I still think people will hear it through their cultural lenses. Brian mentioned it was longer than the original texts, and this was in part to try and convey the real meaning behind the text. I wonder if keeping it shorter but using a new language would be more helpful, as then people would need to dialogue with you around the meaning, and you are less in control of truth and meaning is discovered together.
Flow chi
Jonny has an article in the Lausanne World Pulse published and mentions Flow. One image he uses is a group engaged in what looked like tai chi, although I can’t be sure. Maybe I was reading too much into the image but it caught my attention as I have been exploring the idea of adapting tai chi as way to explore Flow. I used to use Anthony de Mello Sadhana Christian mediation in eastern form quite a bit with young people, and am interested in adapting tai chi in a similar way to help the skaters develop a more reflective way to engage Flow. Still working things out and trying to get my head around it but there may be some mileage in it.
Guardian article-
According to a new report from the UK’s children’s commissioners, our young people are not becoming increasingly criminal; our society is simply treating them like they are. The report states that whilst crime committed by children fell between 2002 and 2006, the numbers being criminalised went up by over a quarter.
This clampdown might be justified if the offences were actually causing harm. But many young people are now being subject to authoritarian interference before they have actually done anything tangible. They are, for example, chastised for “hanging around” certain areas or wearing hoodies. In Essex, “forward intelligence teams” allow police officers to follow and record young individuals who might engage in antisocial behaviour. Being perceived as a threat, it seems, now constitutes an offence worthy of police intervention.
Moreover, instead of being punished as individuals for specific acts, young people are now being penalised as a homogenous whole. The commissioners’ report criticises mosquitoes, devices which drive all young people away from public areas regardless of what they are actually doing there. The message these generalised “solutions” send is a dangerous one. How can we teach young people not to judge people by the colour of their skin – or dismiss all adults as unworthy of respect – when they are targeted in such a blanket way?
Looking at the media, “British young people” come across as something akin to rats. They’re all the same, and they all need fixing. In 2005, a media survey found that 71% of stories about young people were negative, with one third focussing on crime. But 70% of our young people’s behaviour is not negative, and our perceptions have become skewed.
Criminalising young people doesn’t just lack principle; it lacks pragmatism, because it can perpetuate the problems it’s trying to solve. Putting people into young offender institutions doesn’t “teach them a lesson”, it teaches them new tricks, and encourages them to define themselves as criminals.
The same applies to those young people who suffer from discrimination and stereotypes outside the prison walls. Authority and adults come to be seen as “out to get you”, rather than something to respect.
Discrimination also makes young people apathetic. If a potential employer has already labelled you a troublemaker, what’s the point of applying for the job? If you don’t think the police will trust you when you say that you were merely loitering outside the newsagents to check your shopping list, what’s the point of trying to have an honest dialogue with them?
If you lock young people up – be it behind metal bars or psychological labels – you lock a mindset in. Instead of assuming the negative, we should have better hopes and higher expectations for our young people – we need to have faith in our young people if they are to have faith in us.
Instead of blaming young people for the rise in offences, let’s have the courage to listen to the experts we’ve appointed. Let’s make an effort to see the subtlety behind the stereotypes, and question whether young people really have become more antisocial to the rest of society, or whether society has simply become more antisocial to them.
About this article
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday June 09 2008. It was last updated at 17:53 on June 09 2008