Words have power. Choose them wisely.

Anne-Marie Douglas

20/05/2013

I find the term ‘Participation’ relating to young people’s involvement in service provision patronising by its very definition. It aspires to the notion that children and young people are allowed to participate or offer their views on services that adults run, some of the time, and when it suits the adults who make the decisions about services designed to meet their needs.

I could talk about theories and degrees of participation, and of course tokenism, but it is all meaningless if service users don’t understand it; language used to demonstrate service user involvement is exclusively the language of professionals and so incorporates the power imbalance inherent within. If you ask a 16 year old attending a Youth Offending Service they may or may not know what ‘Participation’ means, especially to Professionals, but they will know the reasons why they (and their families) will or won’t engage with services. They will also likely have some thought provoking and insightful ideas into ways to increase engagement, and in our experience, will often want to help others who face similar circumstances. However, they will probably have to trust you to tell you what they know and therein lies the challenge.

We know from our own experience that trusting support agencies isn’t easy for some young people and families. I could tell you stories of staff, young people and families involved with projects at User Voice that you’d never forget, but they have been forgotten and failed by the many, many agencies that have been in their lives, not being listened to, not having a voice, feeling betrayed and not having consistent, trusted support at the times they most needed to help them to navigate and access these services. Professional service providers often call some groups of young people and families, ‘hard to reach’ and ‘disaffected’ (there seems to be a need to define the complexity of their situations from an external perspective). I can tell you that this is the very group we find ‘easy to reach’, and it is the professional service providers who can be ‘hard to reach’!

It is not enough to be ‘experts by experience’ though; we know, (because service users tell us) that we have to create the conditions that support young peoplein their journeys to self-discovery, (rather than simply counting reductions in re-offending as a measure of success) and to support them to access professional help. We do this by developing trusted, secure and consistent relationships, individual care and offering a choice based ‘open door’ approach that allows individuals to opt in and out as they wish, when they wish and to engage for as long as they need.

We could talk theoretically about attachment, inherent person centred approaches incorporating congruence, empathy and positive regard that support how we engage young people in the criminal justice system. But let’s keep it real (this is a User Voice blog after all!), this isn’t rocket science; many people instinctively know about this because it is the way we should look after and nurture our children; they need to know you care. So I ask, and will keep on asking, “Why is it still not happening in services designed to meet the needs of our most damaged and vulnerable children and young people”?

Involving service users meaningfully is a movement toward integrating service users into co-producing services, in partnership with professionals, designed to meet their individual needs. When we extend this into reaching and giving voice to our most vulnerable children and young people in society it will be a revolution in their service provision.