Listen to thisNearly a decade ago, Kiaras Gharabaghi wrote a book chapter entitled “The Purpose of Youth Work”. In that chapter, he addressed what he saw as a disjunct between what the literature in the field of CYC indicates as the purpose of what we do and common practice in the field. One of the key problematics he identified is the continued focus on young people’s behavior as a central concern for workers to address. He stated,
Fundamentally, the purpose of youth work remains static; it is to seek desirable behaviours, defined in the context of conformity and compliance, and to reinforce such behaviours through the manipulation of the balance between rewards and consequences. (p. 7)
He argued that this focus on behavior, as the major indicator for success in our work with young people, is at odds with the relational foundations of the field of CYC. I would concur and add, that to center our work on manipulating young people’s behavior so that they are less disturbing to adults is at some profound level dehumanizing. It is to reduce the young people in our care to the things they do, while in many respects obscuring or erasing the relational coordinates of who they are as fellow human beings. One of the most exciting and compelling things to me about the way that CYC approaches young people, is that it takes a holistic approach which sees young people and workers as complex living sets of relationships that always exceed what we can know and what we can predict.
When we focus on something as facile and transitory as a set of behaviors that we find troublesome or annoying, we miss so very much about what makes the work worthwhile. In a very real way we miss life itself as a field of infinite and compelling creative production. Indeed, to focus on moderating or eliminating behavior is to forcibly narrow our own perspective nearly to the point of blindness. It is to reduce young people to functions and ourselves to functionaries. I would argue that this reduction does a grave injustice to the entire enterprise of intergenerational relations.
Gharabaghi also noted, that work that focuses on behavioral change erases so much of what CYC has tried to articulate as ethical practice. He notes that such a focus is not at all what the wisdom of the field would desire in terms of what CYC workers should seek to learn or practice. So then, where does such a broad impetus arise? Gharabaghi locates it in,
what employers want them [workers] to think about, and it very much corresponds to what funders are looking for. Fundamentally, all the major stakeholders in youth work, except for young people themselves, are looking for ways to make troubled young people less troublesome for the rest of us. (p.7)
I have noted before in this column that the founder of deinstitutionalization and patient rights activist Franco Basaglia defines a class of workers as what he calls technicians of practical knowledge. These are workers whose allegiance is to the institution where they work, rather than to the people they are nominally designated to serve. Such workers focus on the smooth operation of the institution and see success as the acquiescence of the patient or the client. These functionaries, or what Stengers and Pignarre call minions, become experts in the application in technical practices of control and discipline. They are the masters of routine, uniformity, and conformity. In a term, they are the enemies of the chaos that is a necessity of living transitions. They work to freeze frame all those they encounter into repetitions of what they deem appropriate behavior.
Basgalia spent his life and career fighting to free psychiatric care from such practices and yet, here we are some 50 years later having to acknowledge that our field of CYC is saturated with just such technicians. Perhaps, we have always carried with us the edge inherited from the residential schools, orphanages, and workhouses that existed at the inception of our work with young people. But like Basaglia in psychiatry, we have also had those who have fought tirelessly to free ourselves and the young people we work with from such tyranny.
However, as Gharabaghi notes, such efforts have had to contend with the remarkable expansion of bureaucracy in the field of non-profit institutions over the past 50 years and accelerating in the latter half of the 20th century. As we have entered the 21st century, there has been a growth in what is sometimes referred to as the non-profit industrial complex. This complex derives its force from the imposition of corporatist models of management into the non-profit institutions where CYC is most often practiced. The model of corporatist governance brings neoliberal ideologies of the primacy of bottom lines and budgets as the drivers of practice. Rather than having ethical practice as the defining characteristic of a successful non-profit, we have institutions defined by their capacity to draw and sustain funding from the corporate sector. To do this, non-profits often structure themselves administratively to mimic corporate forms of management. This can include the corporatist rank ordering of boards, executive directors (now often CEOs), human resources, finance managers, clinical directors, and program directors/supervisors. I would argue that these forms of management structures in combination with fiscal imperatives to please corporate funders operates in clear contradistinction to any effort to build actual living sets of relational engagements.
Corporations are generally not designed for the people who work within them. They are designed to perpetuate and expand their range of influence and control in a given segment of the capitalist economy. To the degree, that CYC institutions take on this model as the structure for their work, the institutional necessities for survival will always trump the needs of the people within it. All of the people employed by such an institution are expendable, replaceable cogs in the machine. There is little or no respect for their labor outside of occasional lip service to the importance of “our” staff.
Of course, this disregard for the dignity of workers can also extend to the young people, their families and communities seeking service from the CYC institution. Instead of having any actual voice in what services they desire and how those services are delivered, the living constituency of people seeking service are often reduced to outcomes and deliverables. The definition of successful service delivery is predetermined by researchers who first define what success looks like and then how it will be achieved based on large scale empirical studies. This approach leaves out both the individualized experience of the worker and the service recipient.
In its worst instantiations this neoliberal corporatist model of “care” can be result in acts of brutality and even death.
Writing in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, Maia Szalatitz referred to what she calls the billion dollar Troubled Teen Industry. She described this industry as encompassing programs that work with youth across the United States. The focus of such programs is strictly behavioral. She references residential treatment programs, boot camps, wilderness therapy, Christian and therapeutic boarding schools as the sites for the troubled teen industry. She notes that these programs claim “to vanquish teen psychological problems like drug misuse, depression and defiant behavior.”
In the article, she references hundreds of thousands of young people who have experienced “therapy’ that includes years of daily emotional attacks by staff and peers, food deprivation, forced labor and sexual assault. In the case of one young woman who has had the courage to challenge this system, reported being “raped by a kitchen employee, … Then, as punishment for ‘lying’ about it, she was bound in a blanket with duct tape and left in a boiler room for eight days.” This level of abuse for scores of young people has led to accounts of deaths and suicides such as,
The Family Foundation School, which Ms. Ianelli attended, appears to have had a student population that ranged from about 30 to 200 kids when it operated, from the 1980s until 2014. But she has documented roughly 100 deaths, largely caused by suicide and overdose, among alumni, including approximately 20 people she knew personally. This seems like an extraordinarily high death rate, even if all of the teens admitted initially had serious addictions and psychiatric disorders (which some did not). Survivors of other programs have kept similarly gruesome lists.
While there are no doubt programs who use behavioral programming with appropriate care and diligence, the fact that Szalatitz asserts hundreds of thousands of young people in the U.S. alone suffering from these brutal regimes of “treatment” is deeply concerning. The fatal echoes of this institutional abuse across hundreds if not thousands of young people in suicides, overdoses is unconscionable. And indeed, Szalatitz, her colleagues and survivors of these programs are working diligently to pass legislation that would curb these practices and open investigations into these programs. While I applaud these efforts at accountability and reform, I have to wonder if such efforts are enough.
Certainly, these programs highlight some of the worst things that can happen in the name of care, but what of the term Szalatitz uses in the description of the overall system of brutality: The Troubled Teen Industry. I worry that efforts at reform and accountability will not adequately address the commodification of troubled teens; that it will rightly focus on stopping the worst kinds of brutality, while missing the big picture. I must wonder if these kinds of excesses arise because of a sense that troubled teens are not real people.
In the HBO series Succession, there is a very serious scandal within a media conglomerate called Waystar Royco. The conglomerate is owned by the Roy family, whose indifference to human decency and compassion are stunning. At one point, the patriarch of the family is discussing the deaths of staff (both by suicide and possibly murder) who had suffered sexual harassment and assault by Royco upper management. He says casually that such deaths shouldn’t concern the family too much, because after all, “they weren’t real people.” The implication is that if you don’t belong to the 1% wealthiest class, then you are expendable. You are not real people.
Such a viewpoint might appear to be extreme, until we see the way in which young people are treated across the globe. The way that we treat children and youth in a wide range of contexts can only be described as indicative of extreme indifference to their health and well-being. Certainly, the Troubled Teen Industry is but one example of how we commodify and dehumanize young people’s suffering in the name of profit. They become simply a means to an end for an ever more corporatized non-profit sector determined to show “results” to their funders regardless of the human cost. In this sense, young people are not real people at all, they are simply points on data sheets to show how well our agencies are doing in controlling and managing their behavior.
When Gharabaghi wrote his chapter ten years ago, he accurately pointed out the contradictions between the purpose and practice of CYC. I would argue that those contradictions have escalated since that chapter was written, amplified by the growth of the non-profit industrial complex. While there is no doubt that we should do everything we can do to stop the worst abuses of this system, it may not enough. I would argue that we need to go further and dismantle the system itself and its logic of de-humanization. We need to rehumanize our practices and re-engage the key tenets of CYC as a field of human relations and care. I fear that if we do not the price will be the unnecessary deaths of many more young people in our care and those deaths will be on us. We can stop it and we can build an alternative system of real care. The question is, do we have the will?
