Feminist youth work in the North West
By Jess McCabe | 5 December 2008, 12:13
This sounds like a great project:
From a base in Manchester, and with a focus across the North West, a collective of academics, youth work practitioners and young people have come together to ‘do something’ about young women and girls’ youth work.“When OFSTED came into the youth club, the boys we playing on the pool table and the girls were hiding out in the toilets”
“In the session there were young women who had never worn make-up in their lives, and they had all been given by their youth worker a ‘Girl’s world’ head to practise putting make-up on… and I thought… have we stepped back to the 1950s?!”
The increasing emphasis on crime and disorder within youth work has meant that agendas, focus and, inevitably, funding, is being directed toward work which is diversionary, targeted at young men, and starts from an ideology of ‘prevention’.
Good youth workers on the other hand, start from a position of possibility, creation not consumption and participation. But the support for ‘progressive’ work is patchy.
In youth work settings, the inevitable dichotomy emerges therefore, of boys at the pool table or playing football, and girls doing make-up or creating raunchy dance routines.
An end to sexism…. are we nearly there yet?
So this is what we have done: we have created an online archive and resource for young women and girls’ work from a feminist perspective at www.feministwebs.com which includes ideas, session plans, tools and levers for change. We are now in our phase two (or ‘second wave’ if you will!) in which young women from across the North West are being trained in oral histories and are going to go out across the north west collecting archive materials and stories from older feminist youth workers that were active in the 1970s-1990s. So spread the word, get involved, and urge young women you know to go out there and learn how to fly a plane instead of always doing their hair and nails… it’s time to bin the beauty box!
How can you help?
Join the feminist webs facebook group to find out whats going on.
Donate to the cause through the ICA:UK donation page.
…if you are a young person or a youth worker then get in touch and let’s see whats possible!
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JENNIFER DREW said:
Excellent news that feministwebs.com are challenging the now widespread perception that reducing crime means the central focus is on boys and also enforces sexist and grossly outdated notions of what femininity and masculinity supposedly comprises.
Such outdated and sexist ideas are all part of the backlash against women's and girls' rights which are constantly being eroded and dismissed as irrelevant in our pseudo post-feminist world. Girls are more than just boy's sexualised toys. Likewise boys are not all identical wherein it is presumed all boys play football, or engage in playing pool.
Posted on 05 December 2008 at 4:03 PM
Sarah said:
I'm still a student, in Birmingham, but I work part-time for an alternative education provider - www.hybridarts.co.uk. I teach geeky stuff like photoshop, flash, and other creative/computer stuff. We don't have many girls in my current class, but there is something I've been promised which is still in the applying-for-funding stage, which will be a course designed to improve the self esteem of young women, designed to target the rape reporting rate in Warwickshire, which is apparently the lowest in the country. There is certainly still a bit of a shortage of girls interactive media, technical design and animation, and I think it's important for them to know that they can do it as well as anyone else. Young people have a tendency to give up and say they can't do it.
I'm not an expert in these pieces of software, I'm currently studying general graphic design, but I can do it.
The problem with this stuff is equipment - computers and software.
Don't know where I was going with that, thought I'd post it :) Might move to Manchester at some point in the future.
I was certainly hiding in the toilets at summer schools. it was bloody awful. I thought it was just me!
Posted on 07 December 2008 at 9:53 AM