The Role of Social Support in the Transition From Foster Care to Emerging Adulthood

Many youth leave foster care with disrupted relationships with their family and others in their social networks. Previous research has documented the severe adversity that former foster youth face in the transition to young adulthood. Perhaps some difficulties are at least partially related to a lack of social support that results from frayed relationships. This article reviews the literature on social support, particularly as it relates to foster youth, for the purpose of examining the role that formal and informal supports play in the transition to adulthood. The implications of this literature for successful transitions for former foster youth are discussed, as well as ways child welfare workers can engage youth and their families, and help them develop supportive social networks.     

Street Life–Oriented African American Males and Violence as a Public Health Concern

This article discusses concerns pertaining to the impact of continued exposure to violence for African American street life–oriented adolescent males as a public health concern and the importance of social work and human services to address this issue. Youth interviewed in this study discuss issues of exposure to violence and the navigation of multiple systems involvement, including child welfare, juvenile justice, educational systems, and their neighborhood life. Implications for social workers include the development of community-centric interventions that provide opportunities for youth voice and access to relationship building with trusted professionals and mentors.     

Integrating youth participation and ecosocial work: New possibilities to advance environmental and social justice

ABSTRACT

This article reveals possibilities to expand the role of youth within ecosocial work practice. The Where I Stand Youth Summit held in Chicago, Illinois, provided a safe space for young people to reflect upon their understanding of, and roles within, social and environmental justice movements. Drawing upon critical youth empowerment theory and participant observation, we note that youth shared experiences of oppression across unique social identities, while displaying authentic communication, acceptance, and desire for solidarity. Re-defining what knowledge matters, along with intention and self-restoration, also emerged as critical to building young people’s agency and power to effect social change.     

The journey of dually-involved youth: The description and prediction of rereporting and recidivism

Dually-involved youth refers to youth that are simultaneously receiving services from both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. The current study focused on a sample of dually-involved youth (N = 1148). The study examined the characteristics of dually-involved youth and reported and predicted the incidence of subsequent maltreatment and re-offending. We found that 8% of dually-involved youth had at least one arrest before entering child welfare system, 32% experienced new reports of maltreatment referrals subsequent to arrest, and 56% were charged with a second offense (i.e., recidivated). The court outcomes received in delinquency court were associated with both rereporting and recidivism. These findings support the development of a shared services model for child welfare and juvenile justice systems.     

Resisting and Reinforcing Neoliberalism: Youth Activist Organizations and Youth Participation in the Contemporary Canadian Context

This critical qualitative research focused on a group of youth engaged in social justice and critical education activities in a youth activist organization. This article explains how neoliberalism as governmentality provides insight into the ways in which the interrelated macro, local, and micro contextual layers mediate youth activist organizations and youth participation. Three participation narratives are woven together with two key themes: the ethos of individualism and market-focused discourse. This work aims to provide insight into how youth activist organizations can effectively engage youth in social practices and relationships toward social justice in an increasingly neoliberal era.     

The Impact of Extending Working Lives on Youth Employment in Great Britain

ABSTRACT

The article investigates the association between youth and older workers’ employment participation in the United Kingdom using yearly data provided by the Labor Force Survey. Presenting a short state of the art, the paper shows that, with few exceptions, empirical analyses usually assume that increasing the labor market participation of the older workers does not affect negatively youth employment. Nevertheless, testing several variables and three different statistical models, the empirical part of the article nuances this evidence. The association between youth employment participation and older workers’ employment participation tends to be significantly after controlling for public policy outcomes.     

Conflict Resolution,Restorative Justice Approaches and Bullying in Young People’s Residential Units

Restorative justice has been an increasing feature in the discourses within adult and youth justice criminal justice systems in recent years. This article examines interpersonal conflicts arising from crime, bullying and antisocial behaviour in residential care, and the advantages and disadvantages of utilising such approaches in relation to these forms of conflict, based upon an evaluation of restorative principles and approaches from the perspectives of young people, residential workers and managers. The article sets out how the staff in the units studied modified restorative justice approaches to take into account the specific relationships within group care settings.     

Child welfare workers and social justice: Mending the disconnect

While professional social workers are clearly obligated to pursue social justice, controversies abound surrounding what that means in theory and practice. Perhaps nowhere are the paradoxes inherent in practice for social justice seen in sharper contrast than in the field of child welfare. Intended to protect the rights of children, child welfare systems themselves have been characterized as instruments of oppression. This article hopes to enrich that discourse through an examination of how these issues are conceptualized and acted upon by front-line child welfare social workers. Through in-depth interviews with 25 child welfare workers, and 3 focus groups, in two Canadian provinces, and employing grounded theory strategies for data collection and analysis, we have explored understandings of the social justice mandate and how it is expressed in practice. Participants in this study conceptualized social justice in terms of both wider societal goals of fairness and equality, and of the quality of interactions and relationships between social workers and those with whom they work; conceptual emphasis on one or the other of these we found to be associated with differences in practice. We reflect on the implications of each of these emphases for effectiveness in advancing social justice aims in the child welfare context, and make recommendations regarding a grounding for educators and practitioners in theoretical orientations that includes attention to the linkages between macro and micro opportunities to advance social justice.     

Tagging Walls and Planting Seeds: Creating Spaces for Youth Civic Action

Youth civic spaces are environments in which youth participation in civic action is fostered—the pathways, structures, and vehicles that provide opportunities for young people to engage in critical discussion, dialogue, and action. The concept of youth civic space includes the formal and informal places in which youth civic engagement can occur and how the lived experience of those places contributes to young people's development as civic actors. It extends discussions regarding the physical locations of youth civic engagement to include the activities, perceptions, and interactions within them. Drawing on archival materials from 2 multiyear projects, this article explores the role of community-based organizations in mediating youth civic action and understanding the characteristics and qualities of the organizations that facilitate youth engagement in community action and social change. We use this analysis of empirical examples to develop a conceptual framework for strengthening practice.     

Women in corrections: A call to social work

As governments continue to spend more money on law enforcement and prison construction, social workers will be increasingly faced with clients who have connections with the criminal justice and correctional systems. Despite the increasing numbers of women entering the criminal justice system, they continue to be one of the most marginalised groups in Australian society. This article reviews the social work literature concerning this population and proceeds to argue that social work has a significant role to play with women in corrections. Using a conceptual model based on an ecological systems framework, the author examines the mutuality of various social work practice principles at different levels of intervention and the roles that social workers may engage in to enhance the lives of women in corrections.     

The NEET concept in comparative youth research: the Nordic countries and South Africa

The NEET concept has become widely used internationally since its emergence in the UK almost two decades ago. This article reviews the adoption of the concept in two extreme contexts in terms of NEET rates, youth opportunities and youth welfare: the Nordic countries and South Africa. The article discusses the situations of NEET young people in the two contexts, and how the concept is used in the wealthy and relatively homogenous Nordic welfare states and in relatively poorer and racially divided South Africa. While the concept has been problematised in different ways in Nordic youth research, it has been more readily accepted by South African researchers. We argue that, in both contexts, the NEET concept can be taken as an invitation to look beyond individual life situations and biographies, and to focus on how structural forces such as the political economy shape young people’s lives. The NEET concept provides a way of discussing changing opportunity structures and how global social forces such as globalisation and neoliberalisation shape young people’s lives in different contexts. The NEET concept is useful in comparative youth research.     

西方青年的“先进性”初探——以青年在新社会运动中的角色为视角考察

2008年起席卷全球的经济危机为资本主义制度下的普通民众套上了沉重的枷锁,在这一背景下,不少西方国家的工人、群众甚至包括大量青年发起了多次社会运动,旨在表达对资本主义制度的不满,为自己的权益进行斗争。本文通过分析青年在"阿拉伯之春"、"占领华尔街"运动、法国"反对养老金改革"运动等社会运动中的角色,认为西方青年已经成为当代社会运动的重要参与者,并发挥着积极作用,体现了一定的先进性,具体表现为:通过合理利用网络媒体为传统左翼政党和组织进一步开展社会运动提供新的思路;反抗资本主义制度;在社会运动过程中目标明确等。此外,青年参与社会运动对资本主义社会价值观的重建也具有一定意义。     

Youth Perspectives on Social Insurance in Egypt: Qualitative Insights on the Gap between Legal and Effective Coverage

A gap between legal and effective coverage rates is a common challenge facing social insurance systems in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries. This article draws on an exploratory qualitative study with youth in Egypt to examine how labour market dynamics and worker preferences contribute to this gap. Labour market factors, particularly instability of employment and job mobility, were found to reduce the perceived value of social insurance. Poor understanding of how social insurance works was another contributing factor. However, youth displayed a high level of trust in the public social insurance system and saw pensions as valuable in the abstract. In combination with awareness promotion, eliminating penalties to discontinuous labour force participation could make social insurance more attractive to youth.     

Policy-practice in social work and social work education in Israel

Policy-practice is a form of social work intervention that is intended to influence social policy. It is linked to an understanding of the role of social workers which places the struggle for social justice at the forefront of social work activity. However, this form of social work intervention has remained on the sidelines of social work practice and education in most welfare states. This paper seeks to understand the role that policy-practice and social policy play, and have played, in social work and social work education in Israel. The findings indicate that, despite a growth in interest in the political role of social workers in Israel during the 1970s, policy-practice has remained a mode of practice adopted by a minority of members of the profession in Israel. An empirical study of the curriculums of the schools of social work in Israel indicates that this is the case for the study program in most of the schools. The reasons for this can be linked primarily to the overwhelming influence of American social work upon the development of the Israeli profession and to the process of liberalization and privatization of the Israeli welfare state in the last two decades.     

青年公益事业的发展与创新

在社会转型过程中,社会分化是青年公益事业发展的外部条件.在政府和市场之外逐渐形成的第三领域为青年公益事业的发展提供了新的发展空间。多元化的需求和青年群体的参与促进了青年公益事业的发展。但是,目前青年公益事业仍然面临着制度困境、资金困境和人才困境。通过社会创新、完善的制度设计、建构多元的融资机制以及公益组织的自我完善等途径可以有效促进青年公益事业的发展。鼓励和发挥大学生的自我教育,树立"四位一体"的消费观教育体系,是考量"90后"大学生消费观教育的现实路径选择。     

In a different mindset: Critical youth work with marginalized youth

Critical youth work is based on a dual focus, on individual psychosocial development on the one hand, and collective critical consciousness and the promotion of social justice on the other. Although in practice, critical youth work is gaining popularity as an alternative to person-centered youth work, the theoretical and empirical literature has not kept pace. This paper proposes a theory based practice model that expands the vocabulary of critical youth work. The model is grounded in the work of an innovative Israeli intervention program for marginalized youth and in poststructuralist theories. The model comprised of a three dimensions: the streets as a physical and political place, the use of counter narrative, and the role the youth workers take as social capital agents.     

Strengthening youth citizenship and social inclusion practice — The Australian case: Towards rights based and inclusive practice in services for marginalized young people

This article provides a framework for understanding disadvantaged young people from a youth citizenship perspective that includes social inclusion principles and a rights based approach to service delivery. This paper will argue that a rights based and inclusive practice approach can help to enable the self-confidence, resilience and capacities of marginal youth in efforts to counter social exclusion. A social inclusion strategy that is derived from the European Union helps frame inclusive practice and is explicitly linked to an emerging national human rights and inclusive agenda for marginalized youth in Australia. Elements of inclusive service practice include youth participation in services, issues of access and equity, service responsiveness, joined-up services and user-led accountability. These elements provide a basis for bringing a citizenship framework into services, and for professional learning and education in work with marginal youth. A framework is suggested that seeks to recognise and respond to highly disadvantaged youth that includes the marginalizing ‘intersections’ of gender, racial and disability identities. Brief excerpts of secondary qualitative data on two highly vulnerable youth populations-homeless youth and Aboriginal youth-are used to highlight the need for a citizenship approach that listens and responds to these vulnerable young people in both research and practice.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

Engaging Youth in Municipal Government: Moving Toward a Youth-Centric Practice

Youth councils are one mechanism to engage youth in community governance; yet, there is scant research to guide practice. This study examined the extent to which youth are engaged in the origin, structure, and activities of municipal youth councils. Interviews were conducted with 24 adult stakeholders involved in the operations of youth councils. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results demonstrated that youth-centric practice builds upon theoretical frames of positive youth development, social justice, and civic engagement. Youth-centric practice consists of youth representation, leadership, initiative, and decision-making. Results can assist practitioners and policy makers in engaging youth in municipal government.     

Transitions to adulthood in contexts of economic crisis and post-recession. The case of Argentina

The possibilities that are available to youth in contemporary Western societies are highly sophisticated and related mostly to the transition between secondary school and higher education, the first job placement, independent housing, lifestyle construction and the consumption of goods produced by cultural industries in a globalist world. Secondary education represents a main factor in terms of socialisation, training, access to employment, citizenship and youth identity construction, making it a key for public policies aimed at youth in Latin America. The article presents the initial results of a research project on transition processes from secondary school to employment in Argentina. The findings are based on statistical information and the empirical analysis of data gathered in two very different economic and social contexts: the first was one of the worst social and economic crisis in the country's history (1999–2003), and the second was a long period of economic growth and increased social welfare (2004–2012). The data are presented in response to the following question: How do different economic contexts influence the transitions of youth in different social class contexts? By answering this question, the significant role of public policies in generating better living conditions for youth becomes clear.