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Sibylle Artz

Location: School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria

Biography
I have been involved with Child and Youth Care since 1971 when I first began to work in the field. For more than 20 years, I worked with children, youth and families as a group home worker, a Youth and Family Counselor, a Child Life Worker, a Special Care Foster Parent, an agency based supervisor and a counselor in a program for abuse survivors. I am now a Full Professor at the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. I focus on community-based collaborative research projects that have included: a five year project, entitled A Community Based Violence Prevention Project that was instrumental in reducing school based violence in the participating district by 40-50%; A Community-Based Approach for Dealing with Violent Under Twelve Year Old Youth; collaborative work with undertaken with service providers entitled, Developing Girls’ Custody Units: A Project in Two Phases; a project that involved three Vancouver Island communities entitled, Developing a Gender-Sensitive Community Needs Assessment Tool for Supporting At-Risk Girls and Young Women; a project entitled, Homelessness Outreach Project for Single Parent Families, a CIHR Institute of Gender and Health (IGH) in partnership with the CIHR Institute of Human Development, Child Youth and Health (IHDCYH), Newly Emerging Team Program. Entitled, Aggressive and Violent Girls: Contributing Factors Developmental Course and Intervention Strategies, and two projects involving collaboration with a local alternative school entitled, Implementing innovative strategies for reducing aggression and violence in at-risk mothers and their babies, and Documenting an Integrated Childcare Program’s Ability to Support At-risk Young Mothers and their Children. I’ve published more than fifty refereed articles, written two books, Feeling as a Way of Knowing (1994) and Sex, Power and the Violent School Girl, (1997) and co-edited, a third book Working Relationally with Girls, (2004), with Dr. Marie Hoskins. I was chosen in 1998, as Academic of the Year by the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia, and in 2004, received the Award of Distinction for Research from the McCreary Youth Foundation of Vancouver. In 2008, she was selected for a Leadership Victoria Award for my many years of community-based research. I’m currently participating in the International Initiative to end the Use of Child Soldiers led by Senator Romeo Dallaire and working with three German academics, who work in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Spain, on a cross cultural analysis of data on girls who use violence.


How I came to be in this field
I did not start out in life to become an academic, I had very different plans. After graduating from high school and traveling, although I was taking courses in education, I was really interested in art and design and for a time, believed that I wanted to work in the fashion industry and even attended an applied arts school, but while I pursued these interests, I was almost inadvertently inducted into what for me, became a more compelling calling.

In 1969, while studying at a college in Edinburgh, Scotland, and working in a trendy boutique called Angel's, I became distracted from persuading people to try the latest in fashion and consumer goods, by an odd assortment of children and young people that congregated near the door to the shop. On a regular basis, a group of about ten or so children from an infant in a stroller through to a seventeen year old boy, appeared in front of the boutique to spend their time in the street and to take shelter under Angel's awnings. I soon got to know these children and found that they were members of three families whose fathers I never saw, and whose mothers worked and left them in charge of each other until the mothers returned at the end of the work day. These children were far more interesting than the clothes, and they seemed to need involvement and help more than the customers did. I only realized later that when I became more concerned with those children than with selling clothes, I was in fact choosing a profession and a life-long vocation. In Scotland, where I lived for two years, the foundation was laid for the work that I am doing today.

As part of my unsolicited volunteer effort with the children from the Cowgate (the name of the part of town in which I worked), I became involved in helping one of the adolescents sort out his problems with the police, and through that experience, had my first encounter with a young person who lived in a world where deviance made sense. I also saw how poverty and life style set these children up, and how they could learn, indeed were eager to learn, to take charge of their own lives in ways that were different from those they had previously been exposed to. When I returned to Canada, I did, as I said, attend an applied arts program for a time, but my heart wasn't really in it. I found my passion when I found work in a group home in 1973, and I have never really looked back.

A favorite saying
I don’t really have one, but I do like various lines from many songs that seem to come into my head during the day. Lines like, “Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters” (Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues) or “If I were young again I’d pay attention to that little known dimension, the taste of endless time. It’s just like water, it runs right through your fingers, the flavor of it lingers like a rich red wine… “(Chris Smither, Leave the Light On).

A few thoughts about child and youth care
For me, it’s noble work and sometimes, when I feel discouraged and overwhelmed by the gravity of it and the current political abdication of any commitment to children and youth, I remember how important it is to take this a day and a child at a time. I remember them all, the kids that I worked with over the years. Their faces are in my memory and they act as my beacons.

These are pictures I took near the Gold Coast where African slaves were held in Ghana. Being there had a profound effect on me.

Last thing I read, watched, heard, which I would recommend to others
A number of books about girls and crime: Take a look especially at Margaret A. Zahn, Editor: The Delinquent Girl*. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. It provides a state of the art overview of the current understanding of delinquency in girls. Alone the fifty-one pages of references are worth reading because they offer a ready-made inventory of much of the relevant English language scholarship on girls and delinquency published in the last four decades.

A favorite Child and Youth Care experience
Laughing while playing with kids.

A few thoughts for those starting out

• A sense of humor will help, so will a sense of proportion.

• Get that Child and Youth Care degree, it will prepare you well for a life long journey

• Thanks for coming aboard, we need you with us.

I find it a bit difficult to write down advice. I’d rather talk things over.

And that’s all for now folks!