“High-Risk” labels in the Social Sector need to go… / A.J. Hendry
No young person is too "at-risk" to love... often we just haven't designed our services to serve them!
Language is important.
The way we speak about people, the language we use, plays a huge role in the way we interact with others, and also the internal narratives we create about them.
In the social sector, we often grade people by "risk levels".
We talk about people being high risk, or medium to low, the idea I guess is that it’s a shorthand for a range of complex needs. The hope perhaps is to ascertain what level of "risk aka support needs" specific people have, in order to identify whether we have the capabilities to support them or not.
Personally, when speaking about young people I find this language incredibly unhelpful. In practice I've seen it create unnecessary fear about a young person, conjuring a mental image that becomes a barrier to acceptance into service.
It can also be dehumanizing. Rather than starting first with a person's humanity, we start with a subjective scale we call "risk".
It is not mana enhancing, nor is it strength based, and basically encourages services to view young people through the lens of their worst moments, rather than meeting them as they are, where they are.
The” high-risk” label also obscures what is going on for that young person, placing the blame on them for not being able to access the service we are providing. Rather, than truly acknowledging the depth of need, care and support the young person or child in front of us has.
When we call a young person too “high risk” for our service, I believe it’s important that we are clear about what we are saying.
Basically, when we boil it down, we are saying that our service, our people, our organization, do not have the capacity, resources, or knowledge to serve the young person in front of us. The young person in front of us has been underserved, in many cases harmed, is hurting, and is in need of care that we are unable to provide. The needs they have exceed our capability to care for and hold safely. Now acknowledging this doesn’t need to come with a judgement on your service, or your practice. But this distinction is important to name.
Often Youth and Social Services are underfunded and under resourced. As a result, many services that have a desire to serve structurally marginalized and underserved communities, do not have the resources to adequately care for people who are in great need of much love, care and support.
This lack of resources also means, that many of our services aren’t designed and structured in a way that can provide for the needs of young people and whānau who have been largely under-served for much of their lives.
Naming this is important though, because as we name the reality (that many of our services aren’t designed or resourced to serve some of our most structurally marginalized communities), we shift the focus. Away from naming the young person, or whānau in front of us as the problem (which can in a way result in a form of victim blaming), and towards the systems and structures we have designed and built.
By acknowledging that it is our services, our organizations, our communities, that need to be redesigned and more adequately resourced, we place the emphasis and responsibility where it should be.
Not on the traumatized, hurting, child in front of us, but upon the gaps and resourcing within the systems and structures which hold the responsibility to care for and love them.
This is where the emphasis needs to be.
At the end of the day, it is not the responsibility of a child or young person to fit the box that either our funding constraints or our own organizational capability have created.
It is up to us as adults to build services, structures and communities that can serve those within our community who have been structurally marginalized and historically underserved.
And we totally can. Yes, sometimes it’s funding, and in those cases, it is our role to advocate and articulate to our funding partners (whether they be Government or philanthropic) in order to unlock the resources needed to design the service our young people need. At other times it’s about reviewing our services, and where we can, redesigning the service we deliver in order to build capability within our kaimahi and organization, so that we are prepared to care for and love those young people who come before us in need of the most aroha and awhi.
Rather than assigning "risk levels" to young people, I wonder if it would be more helpful to talk about what support a young person needs, what resources they require to heal and recover, and what strengths they have within them which have empowered them to get to where they are today?
Love is always a risk.
But, this is what our mahi is about.
It’s about love. About caring for those who have been largely neglected and abandoned. It’s about turning up, showing up, it’s about never giving up.
At the end of the day, those of us who serve young people from structurally marginalized communities are here to do just that.
To Love our young people.
To stand beside them.
To Embrace the Messiness of their lives, standing so close to them, that the muck of their reality gets on our own shoes.
And when we do that, when we love unconditionally, when we see our role as being one of service to our rangatahi, and shape our services and supports to meet their needs, that's when we see change.
A.J. Hendry is a Laidlaw College graduate, and a Youth Development Worker and rangatahi advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He is also the Director of Kick Back a Youth Development organization that’s central kaupapa is to serve rangatahi experiencing homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.
Thank you for this. It has so many echoes in the disability service community. I will share this among some of my colleagues. It is an important korero. "There by the grace of God go I" we are all human made in God's image.