Be Aware of the Barriers: The Continuing Need for Intersectionality in Youth Services
//vol.15-3 Overview
Be Aware of the Barriers:
The Continuing Need for Intersectionality in Youth Services
by Stella Chen
In an ever changing and multi-faced post-pandemic world, young people, more than ever, need a positive and enabling civic space to take collective action for their future development. They need platforms to articulate beneficial policies and where they can avail themselves of services to meet their needs. They also need to access opportunities that enable them to reach their full potential. But what does this environment look like?
In an ever changing and multi-faced post-pandemic world, young people, more than ever, need a positive and enabling civic space to take collective action for their future development.
They need platforms to articulate beneficial policies and where they can avail themselves of services to meet their needs. They also need to access opportunities that enable them to reach their full potential. But what does this environment look like?
The American poet Audre Lorde wrote, “There is no such thing as single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” This could well serve as a clarion call to all youth-serving organisations to recognise the complex challenges young people are facing now.
We all know how pandemic protocols altered the way we study, work and socialise, tethering us even tighter to technology. We understand these upheavals have resulted in issues of wellness and anxiety, exacerbated by the contradictions of living locally and having to act globally. And we very clearly see how social stressors of employment, education, gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity, social media and perceptions of “perfection” can impact lives.
The need, therefore, is applying a deeper and intentional, continuous intersectional approach in the provision of youth services, that takes into account the points of view, experiences and struggles of young people. And perhaps nowhere is this more needed than in the areas of digitalisation and wellness.
Digitalisation
Digitalisation, led by tech companies, has manifested its social and economic power everywhere, including in youth work. In this tech-influx era, new digital applications and automation tools, especially AI-driven technology, are changing many aspects of young people’s lives.
The rise of ChatGPT urged educators to reconsider the challenges and opportunities of students’ use of AI applications in studies and exams. The landscape of social media is constantly evolving and young people are often at the forefront of this space. From posting on Instagram and scrolling on TikTok to filming on Snapchat, young people’s reliance on digital tools makes their online world fully integrated with the offline setting. According to Pew Research, there are an estimated 4.9 billion people using social media across the world and the usage shows a younger demographic where 84% of those aged 18 to 29 use at least one social media site.
And that leaves a critical question for youth workers and youth service providers, which is how to be digitally skilful to be connected to the full reality and actual needs of young people.
The Federation has attempted to address this issue through several of its programmes, including its Media Counselling Centre uses uTouch Portal, an online chat forum that offers online counselling till midnight to be present and engaged with young people in the digital space. The Centre also arranges online outreach service on different social media platforms such as Facebook to locate young digital natives who show signs of distress and actively connect with them.
There is also Open Up, a 24-hour online texting service, run in conjunction with other NGOs, for young people who are stressed about life problems such as family issues, interpersonal relationships and academic stress. With various digital platforms available to provide companions, the purpose is to create a safe space for youth with doubt to share their feelings in a comfortable way.
However, with the rise of digitalisation and the ever-changing social media landscape, another question remains. With young people increasingly spreading their digital footprints across numerous social media platforms, how do youth workers keep connected with young people online without uncritically subscribing to all new digital products and one-dimensionally embracing digitalisation?
We heard Twitter was going to die and young people joined its alternative Mastodon. Then people were told to leave Mastodon behind and join Instagram’s latest platform Thread. New platforms will always crop up and young people will always not want to miss the “next big thing”. But what about youth workers who are supposed to help youth to form an independent and critical mind?
Therefore, youth service could view the trend of digitalisation as an opportunity for youth workers to invite young people to reflect on it together: How are young people’s reliance on changing technology and social media affecting their identity? What are the benefits and challenges, and can youth workers explore the bigger picture here, such as why do young people long for “immediately stimulating pleasure” brought by social media?
Techlash
All this is further complicated and made more complex, but what is now known as ‘techlash’. As the word indicates, techlash is a combination of technology and backlash. This phenomenon highlights the contradiction between the convenience brought on by technology and the increasing and uncritical use of technology, infiltrating into every aspect of our lives, in both positive and negative ways.
Ubiquitous social media allows people to share comments and thoughts anonymously, making it easier to act maliciously without being held accountable. According to the Federation’s research, many young people interviewed had experienced cyberbullying and youth workers had an increase in cases where young people’s safety was threatened from making friends online.
Youth service providers should find their position in a digitalised world, while preserving the core value of social service, which is the human touch.
To better protect young people’s privacy online, there is still a lot of educational work that needs to be done by youth service such as tech companies’ policies on user privacy and aligning digitalisation with young people’s wellbeing. Sadly, this was verified by a survey conducted by the Federation which found that more than a quarter of 1,855 young people interviewed said that they never touched privacy settings on social media. 46% of the respondents were often or occasionally tagged on social media without their consent and 21% of them would screenshot and share their chats with others online.
Wellness
So much has been written about the mental, physical and emotional health of young people, most especially during and after the pandemic. In a frightening survey conducted by the University of Hong Kong, it was found that up to 25% of young people in Hong Kong were found to have suffered from mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, panic disorder and others from 2019 to 2022.
Herein lies another area where intersectionality in youth services is paramount. The Federation’s Wellness PLUS, an all-round mental health platform invited local youth to join its “Wellness Manager Certificated Course” and help those in the community with inadequate conditions through a wide range of skills such as mental counselling, diet planning and singing bowl therapy. Through the course, young people are taught how to support their peers who share the same lived experience and identity with them and to provide the most appropriate solutions with nuances.
As the first organisation adopting this new healthcare model in Hong Kong, the HKFYG understands that each young person is the sum of all their characteristics who experience specific challenges, hardship and exclusion, and that only by abandoning the one-size-fits-all approach can we find better solutions for youth’s issues.
Bigger Picture and Context
So then, how do the challenges of youth service organisations create a new environment in which to work? Most obviously, it is looking at the development of young people, not in a vacuum, but as intertwined with the entire community’s development. The Federation, in one of its surveys, found that the majority of Hong Kong youth think they are engaged and related to Hong Kong’s development in the future and they have a sense of belonging to Hong Kong. Many of them want to contribute to Hong Kong’s growth in different ways such as participating in public decision-making and working in civic groups and think tanks. As youth service providers, it is important for us to reflect on the existing youth empowerment initiatives and figure out how youth service can facilitate youth’s ambition better.
Second, building and promoting youth-inclusive networks is an undeniable worldwide trend. During the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum this year, one key takeaway is the importance of youth organisations in supporting young people in taking SDG actions. “Enhancing collaboration between governments, United Nations entities, and youth-led organisations can help young people overcome bureaucratic obstacles presented by the international system by providing information, resources, and mentorship.”
In this evolving digital era where we are told that Web 3.0, a more intelligent, connected and revolutionising generation of the internet is on its way, young people feel compelled to stay connected both online and offline, consume the overload of information through news and social media, and always make themselves available for the next big, exciting and important thing to happen.
This fear of missing out (FOMO) is a contemporary problem among many young people but it also poses a challenge for youth service providers. And that is to find their position in the balance of levelling up digital connections with young people and preserving the core value of social service, which is the human touch. ■
References:
https://yrc.hkfyg.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/sites/56/2022/07/YI069_Report.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16_iHUluHC_650hnGLh93VUJbz87lfNDS/view
https://www.un.org/ecosoc/en/2023-ecosoc-youth-forum