Why 'Younger people' not 'Young People' in younger people participation.

There's been a lot of recent interest in the power of 'framing' to build positive change for social justice. Framing, according to the FrameWorks Institute, is where we carefully consider the "words we use to emphasise, to explain, to leave unsaid, to frame our communications to build positive change". What happens though, when we use this idea of 'framing' to discuss with 'young people' what they are best called if we want to promote 'young people' participation in decision making?

That's exactly what we did. A few years ago some colleagues, including Meaghan Vosz, and I were working with a group of Out-of-Home Care advocates in a group called Care2Change. We were having a discussion that started off with the question, "If you are young people, what does that make us?" The group shouted out, "Old people!" And that kicked off a conversation about how we describe different age groups.

Those in the group who were aged under about twenty didn’t like the expression ‘youth’ because it was often associated with negative stereotypes such as ‘youth crime’ and it sort-of turned them into objects, not people: ‘youth’.  They also didn’t like it because it suggested that all people of a certain age (usually 12-25 though it keeps changing) could be grouped together as if they were the same, and that the differences and similarities they shared with some older people were less than the importance of their age.  For example, some younger people in Out-of-Home Care (OOHC), who have raised themselves from a very early age, felt they had much more in common with independent older people than they did with so-called dependent ‘children’ or ‘teenagers’.   

They liked the term ‘young people’ much better because it emphasised that they were people.  However, the problem that they had with ‘young people’ was that it always invoked another category, 'adult' and vice versa, where 'young people' was seen as the opposite of, and distinct from, being an ‘adult’. This was a problem because the term ‘young people’ is defined predominantly in a deficit frame as not being fully 'neurologically' formed, irrational, under-developed, while ‘adults’ were mature, rational and fully developed.  They pointed out that they hadn’t met too many ‘adults’ like that.   Instead, they came up with the terms ‘younger people’ and ‘older people’ because these terms emphasised that we are all people and drew attention to the connection between people without suggesting anything negative about either.   

Many writers agree with them (e.g., Cahill & Davand 2018; Kelly 2011; Tait, 1993; Thomas & Glenny 2005; and White, Wyn & Robards 2017). They point out that the meaning of age varies from culture to culture and changes across time according to class and political context.  This means that terms like “youth” or “young people” or “adolescent” or “teenager” are not fixed in stone nor do they necessarily represent a greater scientific truth about reality.   In fact some writers like Pierre Bourdieu have exhaustively shown how taken-for-granted non-reflexive science often acts in a servant-master relationship to dominant power relationships. Bourdieu argues that the non-conscious smuggling in of dominant cultural norms and assumptions into 'science', especially via taken for granted categories, words and operational definitions, like 'young people/adult', shores up ways of seeing the world, that in effect legitimise and reproduce existing socially unjust power relationships. Such as those between 'young people'/'teenagers'/'adolescents' and 'adults' where the human rights of younger people are ignored or only tokenistically respected, including the right to participation, because they are 'young' and their brains aren't fully formed. Even worse if they are 'traumatised' and therefore 'neurologically damaged'. Notably, it's the 'adults' that have the power to name these categories and their meanings, not the 'teenagers' or 'adolescents' or 'youth'. So we end up with 'young people' and 'adults' rather than say 'young people' and 'old people', where the deficits are reversed.

All of this has very practical upshots when it comes to participation. Because when we are thinking about participation and the way we 'frame' people by using specific terms we might as well select terms that work for our aim of participation and social justice rather than against it.  This turns out to be practically and critically important when trying to promote participation in decision making for younger people.  That’s because terms like ‘youth, young people, adolescent, teenager’, as we've noticed, carry with them negative understandings of people being ‘irrational-not fully formed brains-hormonal-some-time-in-the-future-not-now-adults’.  Which presents big obstacles for truly listening, appreciating and acting on what younger people say. Everything runs the risk of only being half listened to because younger people 'have underdeveloped brains' and/or 'don't really know'. Especially if the ‘adults’ are the ones that are supposed to have all the answers.

This last point is surprisingly important for the practice of participation. You may remember that we noted above that that the term 'young people' invokes the term 'adult' while simultaneously invoking all the qualities that go with those terms. Such as 'young people' means neurologically underdeveloped etc and 'adult' means neurologically complete, mature, responsible, competent etc. But these aren't just random attributes. They translate into socially mandated moral rights and responsibilities. For example, it's not just that an 'adult' is mature, responsible and competent, but also that an 'adult' has the right and morally should guide/teach/protect 'young people'. Of course, added to this, and layered over the top, are professional positions, responsibilities and expected competencies. For example, as a 'youth' worker or social worker I am professionally recognised and rewarded for competencies including my demonstrated competencies in applied developmental and trauma based theorising where I am professionally and morally expected to interpret, assess and reinterpret everything a 'traumatised' 'adolescent' says and does through these social, professional and moral, deficit based lenses. Which makes it particularly hard to relate to, let alone listen to, what younger people are expressing outside of all this reinterpretation and filtering. For example, the younger person in residential care is verbally 'abusing' a worker. Is this because they are traumatised with no impulse control or is it weeks of frustration and social injustice within the OOHC system?

The choice to 'frame' 'young people' as 'younger people' therefore represents a choice to consciously and intentionally disrupt the kinds of deficit based and non-conscious interpretative practices that prevent our ability to objectively listen to younger people. Logically, this is the first and necessary condition for meaningful participation of younger people in decision making. More broadly, and just as logically, this unconventional request by the members of Care2Change to use the term 'younger people' instead of 'young people', or 'kids' or 'youth' or 'adolescents', ends up representing the first and necessary step towards more egalitarian authentic relationships with younger people. Relationships that are free of deficit based normative discourses that ultimately serve to shore up the perpetuation of social injustice in social work and society despite all good intentions.