Paper presented at the YAPA conference Darling Harbour Sydney 13-15 September 2005
by Dr Howard Sercombe BA (Hons) BD PhD, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
On June 3rd this year, a group of youth workers sitting around a table outside Clancy's Fish Pub in Fremantle made a decision: to form a professional association for youth workers. It was the night of the closing day of the WA Youth Affairs Conference, and followed on from a workshop earlier in which we debated the various merits of a youth workers union, or a professional association, or either, or neither.
That workshop was itself a product of a long history of debate and cautious progress that began with the Youth Affairs Council commissioning a Code of Ethics for youth workers for debate at the Conference in 1977. The Code was further refined and debated in 1979 and appended with examples and a commentary in 2001. The Code was accepted as the Code of Ethics for Youth Work in WA, by unanimous vote, at the 2003 conference. The Fairbridge Code of Ethics for Youth Work is now the official standard of the Youth Affairs Council of WA, which every member affirms when they join. There is a parallel movement in very many parts of the world: in the Association of Child and Youth Care Professionals in North America, in Ireland, New Zealand, Finland, the United Kingdom, Malta, Wales and elsewhere.
The groundswell has also been growing in New South Wales. In 2003, a YAPA survey of youth workers found 80% in favour of a compulsory Code of Ethics for youth work. I have had the pleasure of spending some time with Michelle over the last day talking about what workers have been doing in the Hunter to make something happen in the same direction.
Fundamentally, as I will argue in a minute, the rest of the apparatus of professionalisation flows from this: from the recognition that an ethical standard is needed, and then that the integrity of the ethical standard needs to be protected.
The question, I believe, is not whether youth work should become a profession. It already is. If you are not a professional, you are not a youth worker, as I understand either term. It is a question of what decision youth workers will make about how to organize themselves as a profession, including the possibility of not organizing themselves at all. The sheer fact that youth work is a profession flows from a considered understanding of what a profession is, and then also from what youth work is, and if we aren't clear about what a profession is and what youth work is, its pretty hard to make progress.
So what is a profession, or a professional? You'd have to say that "professional" is one of the most used and abused terms around. If you can describe a boxer, a carpet cleaner, a priest and a real estate agent as professionals then its pretty obvious it can mean a lot of different things, and that some clarity is urgently needed.
The trouble with most analyses of the professions is that they have looked at what the established professions have in common. Typically, this has resulted in a list of attributes, such as the existence of a professional association, code of ethics, processes of registration and deregistration, recognition in law, university training, and an accepted body of knowledge. But this confuses the idea of what a profession is at its core, at its essence, as the ancients would have said, with its external features, or its attributes. Its like describing who I am by my hair colour. You don't develop a code of ethics or lobby for recognition in law in order to become a profession. You do those things to defend the profession that you already are.
So what is a profession, in its essence? For a number of years I have been interested in the work of philosopher Daryl Koehn on this issue. Koehn begins by talking about various contenders for the foundation of the professions. I don't have time to go into detail: I'd refer you to her book for that, but suffice it to say that she argues convincingly that being a professional is nothing to do with whether you get paid for what you do. Training and expertise is important, but this also, she argues, cannot constitute a profession. Nor does autonomy in your work practice.
Fundamentally, a profession describes not a particular set of practices, but a particular kind of relationship. It is a relationship in which a kind of space is created within which a person in some kind of need, classically called a client, can make themselves vulnerable, can tell the truth, can expose themselves in ways that may not be particularly flattering. The relationship is a dyad. It makes no more sense to speak of a professional without a client than it does to speak of a brother without a sibling or a parent without a child. The boxer may be good at what he or she does, but they are not a professional.
The power of the professional relationship is in the experience that this space can be transformative, that it can produce healing, or personal change, or some other quality which transforms the person. Or it can be defensive: it can serve to protect the person from some injustice or violence. The space is intimate, because secrets can be told there, inner selves revealed. And it is sacred.
The foundation of this relationship, according to Koehn, is not in the expertise of the professional, or the fact that they are paid, or on their training or membership of a professional association. Fundamentally, she argues, the professions are founded on a kind of pledge: a pledge to serve a particular client group within a certain field of service. Professionals are called professionals because of this profession, this vow, this pledge of service.
The motivation, according to the classic texts, is not status or money or recognition. The relationship is not one of contract, of fee for service. I really get pissed off by the description of the young people I work with as consumers. They aren't consumers: that describes a different kind of relationship, a commercial relationship. They are my clients. Classically, the fee was always a kind of donation that the client made to support the work of the professional. Rather, the motivation for the professional is a process of self perfection through the service of a client group.
That might sound a bit grand, a bit pretentious. But I think Koehn has something here. The professional relationship is a two way relationship, but it isn't an equal relationship. It is a relationship in which power is entrusted to us by our organizations and by our communities, and which is also given to us by the young person to act in their interest. An ethics is partly there to give us guidance on how to manage the power relationship in ways that avoid corruption. Rousseau was right when he said that power corrupts, and youth workers are by no means immune. Koehn's implicit challenge is to interrogate our motivations for working with young people, and to measure them against this classical standard.
Is youth work then a profession in this sense? I think the answer can only be yes. We have a client group in a particular state of vulnerability, caused by their extended exclusion from the common wealth and from the decision-making processes of a society. We have a profession which pledges itself to young people and to their protection, development, advancement and recognition. We have a professional practice that undeniably seeks opportunities to create the sacred, trusted space of the professional relationship so that transformation can happen.
The push for a code of ethics comes from the recognition, as youth work develops a history, that this relationship can be and often is abused: for sexual gratification, religious proselytising, career advancement, media notoriety, or political objective. It comes from the desire to protect the integrity of the youth work relationship so that it can still be reliably available for those young people who need and want it. We don't want street evangelists or shopping centre security personnel or juvenile prison wardens borrowing the designation "youth worker" for their practice. Youth work is something different.
So what is it? What is the pledge that we make? What is the field of action that we claim for our service? How do we define our client group, our commitment, and our practice?
For me, this is now simple, although it took a lot of work to get to. The pledge that we make is to serve the young person as our primary client. Among all the players that have an interest in what we do - the funding bodies, the politicians, our managers or boards, our peers, parents, schools and institutions - we take on the interest of the young person as our interest. It isn't easy, and we come under lots of pressure, and sometimes situations can be incredibly complex, but that is our goal and our commitment.
The field of action that we claim is the young person's social context. We are skilled at working out how the young person fits in to their social context, where their primary relationships are, what resources they have available to them, what institutions they are connected into. We are adept at working out what works and what doesn't in their social context, and what needs to be fixed, and where the priorities are for intervention.
So the definition of our profession, I believe, is simple: we serve young people as our primary client, in their social context.
A code of ethics is not much more than an elaboration of this, a kind of commentary on this primary self-understanding and a way of drawing a line around the professional relationship and protecting it. The rest of the professional apparatus - the professional association, mandatory training, recognition in law, practices of registration and deregistration - is simply there to recognize those people who have made this primary commitment to young people, and to hold them to the commitment that they have made. Formal entry to the profession typically requires some process where this primary commitment is formally made, and the entrant moves into the company, but also the discipline, of their peers.
It was for this reason that the WA conference decided that a union and a professional association were both needed. A union exists to protect the interests of its members. A professional association exists to protect the profession. In our case, our profession is the service of the young person as the primary client in their social context. The interests of youth workers and the interests of young people may not always be the same. The profession may, and sometimes will, act against the interests of its members in the defense of young people.
Our profession is something real, and it is worth defending. It is under attack:
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from its colonization by street evangelists and prison wardens,
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from the funding authorities who would like to see themselves as our primary clients and who will offer us all sorts of inducements for young people not to be,
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from a growing list of jaded youth work academics who look to the slow process of professionalisation of youth work, its non-recognition among the other professions, the erosion of youth work training in higher education, and the changing character of the youth category itself.
But I still know a youth worker when I see one. And as long as young people are still excluded from participation in key institutions and processes in our society, someone, somewhere, will be doing youth work.
References
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Koehn, D. (1994). The ground of professional ethics. London, Routledge.
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Sercombe, H. (1997) The youth work contract: professionalism and ethics (PDF) In Youth Studies Australia, Vol 16 No 4 December. pp17-21
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Sercombe, H. (1998) Power, ethics and youth work (PDF). In Youth Studies Australia Vol 17 No 1
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Sercombe, H. (2003) The story so far: developing a code of ethics for the Western Australian youth work field. In Interface, September
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Sercombe, H. (2004) Youth work and professionalisation (PDF). In Youth Studies Australia Vol 23 No 4.
