Interview by Nick Manning
Steve is a street worker in western Sydney. Nick Manning asked him about young people who have high advocacy needs.
Steve: I think most young people in society have things to fall back on. If a young person is in school and they have parents and they come from a family structure that is paying for their school, clothes, their education, their books, their shoes, everything else, as well as encouraging them to do homework and giving them a support base, then they have the advocates, the advocates are their parents. I would think that most people in a family structure situation have their appropriate advocates which are their parents.
Most of the people who are either kicked out of home or come from abusive relationships with their parents ideally need someone, they grow up quickly and they start taking responsibility at an early age but they still need someone at times to be a kind of a surrogate parent without having the responsibility of a parent. Somebody to give, not guidance, but explain the pros and cons to different decisions that they make for them and so therefore, they have the ability to understand really what's happening to them, that a parent would do as a child goes through high school for example. So with the vocational choices for future years, a young person doing Year 10 or 11 would be thinking about all the different range of options they have at university or whatever it might be to further a career in the future. That role will largely be done by the school and by your parents.
But a young person living either in a refuge or in some sort of residential care if they're lucky, or living on the streets or going from home to home, from mate's place to mate's place, living under the bridges or in parks or in clothing bins. For a start, a lot of them have given up their education because there is no support base for it whatsoever. Their primary needs are just meeting their food needs each day and so therefore, if they do want to get an education, if they do want to better their lives in any way, they just need a bit of assistance to do that. And that quite often will come in the form of advocacy on that person's behalf. Just standing up and letting them know what their rights are and helping them to gain their rights.
Whereas people, I think, from a not so troubled background, if you want to put it that way, have a lot of organisations in society to meet their needs. For a lot of socially adjusted young people there's all sorts of youth clubs, there's RSL youth clubs or police citizen's youth clubs or church groups. Lots of organisations that are more than willing to help the socially adjusted because they are not a problem for them to help.
There are heaps of organisations around to be an advocate for a young person if they need an advocate in any area of their lives if they are within a higher socio-economic group or if they have a particular cultural background where they are will supported. But the people who usually end up on the streets and homeless are those who have no support base and so workers are there basically to do the job that families never did. You end up getting a healthy relationship with those people and hopefully building trust relationships so that person will know that you are a stable influence whereas, in the rest of their lives they have no stability. Most of the people they come in contact with, particularly if they're in a drug dependent lifestyle, are there to rip them off. They're only friends if they can get something from them. Mostly, their relationships last only a short time.
We had an evaluation done of our project a little while ago and one of the comments that came through on a number of evaluations from clients was the fact that Graham (the other youth worker) and I had been around for a number of years. So one young girl said we are the most stable people she has ever known because we had been here for four years. That influence in their lives, because we've taken them on camps, we've given them food parcels at home, we've helped them to get a housing commission house, all that sort of stuff. Where most of them have had no stability, or whatever home life they've had has been abusive. I think that's a benefit of our particular project and I think it's unfortunate that a lot of youth projects go through workers very quickly and don't really build up enough time to have ongoing relationships and see people change. I think workers are needed whether they're short term or long term but long term is preferable. Because then you get a chance to see people develop and have a chance to offer them more than just being around for six months then go to another job for six months.
Nick: They are young people for six years or more.
Steve: That's right. I've always been more interested in the long term goals rather than the short term immediate goals. That's just where my personal preference lies.
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Notes
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