Working with young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia

Social workers who are new to working with young people who are refugees may feel overwhelmed, out of their depth and inclined to defer to powerful psychiatric discourse. Arguing a role for social work engagement with young people as they face the personal, social, communal, cultural, political and economic challenges of settlement, this paper proposes a reflexive, deconstructive and dialogical approach within a broadly ecological model. All settlement tasks require mediation through the powerful discourse (language, values, constructs, social practices) of both the young person's own community and those of the new context. Creating spaces where young people can identify and negotiate the forces vying to shape them underpins and complements the urgent task of combating ethnocentricity in Australian institutions.