Tim Abbott

Youth work and social media: boundaries

Jon Jolly has posted here about the issue of how we set boundaries in our online interactions with young people, citing a forum discussion he kicked off at UK Youth Online.

Here are a few thoughts from our experience, which may have turned into a bit of a ramble, but here goes anyway.

Within CYO our approach is to attempt to replicate the boundaries that we set by, for example, not giving our personal mobile numbers. In practice this means using work email addresses rather than personal ones. When it comes to social networking we do not admit young people (under 18's) that we work with as friends on e.g. FaceBook. Although it hasn't come to it yet, if we felt the need to set up a social networking space, we'd do it in our professional rather than personal capacity. A social networking space in a youth work context will naturally appeal to the same good practice guidelines about how much you share with young people to preserve professional boundaries. So, what photos you post (if any?), what you say in messaging, how much info you add to your profile, how often you update it or are available for IM chat. The guidelines we follow in other aspects of professional youth work practice convert fairly easily to this kind of Social Networking as long as it represents our professional persona.

Most IM clients allow you to save the message log and if you're using instant messaging with young people I would suggest it's good practice to save conversations; just as one would log phone calls, make a record of texts sent / received and save emails.

Collective, the girl band that work in partnership with us, have set up a MySpace page to allow a level of social networking with young people they meet. In their case it's a bit easier and less 'personal' in that they always present themselves as a band and never as individuals, so when replying to young people's emails they sign off as 'Collective' rather than as the person writing the email. If you're the only or main youth worker then obviously this isn't an option - you've got to sign off as yourself!

As above, none of us, including the members of Collective, accept friend requests from young people. However, it's a feature of the internet that if they want to, anyone can find you. We had a very persistent young person who managed to follow a long and ingenious trail to find out personal details about one of Collective.  I would therefore advise anyone, whether working with young people or not, to be circumspect about what they post and where, youth workers especially.

We need to exercise care in what we post - this obviously includes things like blogs and Flickr accounts. There's a whole load of photos I haven't posted to my Flickr account, some for artistic reasons (!) and some because they include people and I want to retain absolute control over how / if I use them, who sees them and in which context. You don't have to post everything; know yourself and be aware of your motives, just as you would be in your work with young people. And be very careful about what gets uploaded to YouTube!

I blog with clear reference to my employer, CYO, and use my work email address, so although it's my personal blog I need to post with regard to the way what I say will reflect on CYO. Anyone can read it, including my Trustees and young people so I seek to post in a way that would not cause problems if one of the young people we work with came by for a look. This means no names of young people and often insufficient identifying information (e.g. name of school) to ensure that if you didn't know the situation already you wouldn't be able to derive missing information.

Any major flaws, or advice you'd add? You're welcome to comment here, but you could also pop over to Jon's blog or the UK Youth Online forum.

Independent Safeguarding Authority

The Independent Safeguarding Authority scheme will go live on 12th October 2009 and covers every person who wants to seek paid or voluntary work with children, young people and vulnerable adults. This gives us all another 18 months or so to get sorted.

• Once in place employers will only be able to recruit workers or volunteers who are ISA registered.
• There will be a one-off lifetime registration fee of £64 per individual. Once you're registered you stay registered with ISA.
• Instead of a number of different lists for various types of offence, the ISA will hold a single list of those barred from working with children and vulnerable adults.
• Where new information comes to light about an individual, the ISA will inform the employer (unlike the current CRB check which is only true for the day it's issued).
• Employers will have a duty to report certain concerns or disciplinary issues to the ISA.

You will still need to do a CRB check on appointment of new staff, but ISA will effectively provide ongoing monitoring of people involved in work with children and vulnerable adults.

As ever, more info is on the Independent Safeguarding Authority web site or the excellent CCPAS site.

You've just murdered Beethoven (or history, as it turns out)

We're doing a lesson with Year 9 groups at the moment on the Christian view of abortion which seems to be working very well with students and staff. Anyway, one illustration we're NOT using is the one that goes something like this...

If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis; would you recommend that she have an abortion?
If you answer "Yes" you've just murdered Beethoven.

There are two reasons why I've come to conclude that this is a ridiculous contribution to any discussion about abortion.

The first is that the story doesn't match the historical facts. Maria, Ludwig's mother, had seven children in total of whom only three survived infancy; tragic, but not uncommon for the time. Ludwig was the second born and the oldest of the survivors including his two younger brothers. Although his father is known to have been harsh and prone to drunkenness, there is no record of syphilis or mental illness in the family, though Ludwig later suffered from Hepatitis and probably from Systemic Lupus Erythematosus as well as the onset of deafness from around the age of 30.

The other objection I have is theological. At one level, aborting Ludwig would indeed have denied us the music of Beethoven. But it didn't. God has not given us the option of living in every possible outcome from every possible decision ever made in history. What if Hitler hadn't come to power? What if my parents hadn't divorced? What if that person had left for work 2 minutes later and not been killed because of a careless driver? What if Judas hadn't betrayed Jesus? What if...? Are God's plans so easily derailed by our stupidity, ignorance or rebellion? I somehow doubt it - I believe God is bigger than that, more capable, wiser and all this in ways that we can't fully fathom. Stuff happens and as it does, God walks with us shaping our lives for the best and guiding history towards his intended destination.
Did God have plans for any of Ludwig's brothers or sisters beyond a death in infancy? It's a huge question with profound implications - I don't know. But I suspect that the tragedy of their short lives did not limit God's plans for the rest of the van Beethoven family, for history or for us. God is not just creative, he's re-creative, or redemptive.

There are bigger questions here too, about the limits or otherwise of God's plans and the age old debate about how much is down to him and how much is down to us.

But please don't give me any nonsense about Maria van Beethoven aborting any of her children - that's just shredding good history for the sake of a shoddy illustration.

There's stuff about Beethoven here and here (as well as lots of other places!)
Also, check out truthorfiction.com for this and other possibly unreliable stories.

Saturday 9th

On Saturday Tom, Amy and I were at Kingsland church with about 200 others for Facing the unthinkable, a 4 hour child protection training seminar for Churches run by the Churches Child Protection Advisory Service. CYO is registered with CCPAS to keep us up to date with child protection policy and to do our CRB checks.
David and Pauline Pearson bring over 30 years experience of child protection, and it shows. What was essentially a four hour lecture on child protection could so easily have been tedious; I've heard a few people speaking on the subject who seem to have had some kind of interest bypass op. But David and Pauline are great communicators, blending essential child protection information with practical worked examples taken from real situations that they have had to face or advise upon.

In the evening Diana and I went to the Colchester Boiler Room Community feast, a meal and prayer event as part of the 24-7 Prayer tour.

Each table had a 'host' representing some aspect of prayer or ministry within the town and between each course people were encouraged to move to a different table to meet others and hear about that particular ministry focus. Some of the things that members of the local Boiler Room Community are doing include a couple currently visiting Uganda and a group going out to a Mediterranean country soon to set up the first prayer room in that country. Phil from 24-7 spoke, bringing us back to the timeless principle that effective mission flows from prayer, illustrating this with examples from around the world. A helpful reminder to us about how we fulfil the calling the mission that God has placed on our hearts.

Friday 8th

Friday night I went to help out at the Highwoods Youth Cafe run by a couple of local churches. It's been going for two years following a schools week in early 2006 with Collective. The leaders are an amazing bunch and are having to work with what might be termed challenging young people. But there have been some moments of real breakthrough, like the lads who made first time commitments a few months ago and the 25 who chose to spend time in a weekend prayer room locally.

I then had to pop into town for 10pm to help set up Street Pastors for the evening. I wasn't on the rota for the night so although I didn't go out I did stay for a bit to join in with the prayer. We're recruiting again to get the numbers up to the point where we can send out teams on Saturdays as well as Fridays.

Young Disciples - retain, release and incarnation

On Monday and Tuesday Tom and I went to LICC for a mini conference called "Young Disciples". It would be a mighty blog post indeed to report on all the wisdom that was shared and discussed, so I thought I'd try and share bite sized chunks of the things that made an impact on me.

First, a couple of questions that help us to discover the heart of what we're about. Do we 'convert' and then seek to 'retain', or do we 'train' so that we may 'release'? Yes, it seems so obvious. And for us as an inter-church ministry retaining is not an issue in the sense of some kind of church  membership. But we need to be sure that we're maintaining an emphasis on training and releasing and passing.
And if we're really honest, is the heart of our ministry Information or Formation? So much of what tends to happen in church is information (teaching and the like). And here we're much more culpable since one aspect of our work in schools is RE lessons and assemblies. We really want to be much more about formation, helping young people to grow to be disciple making disciples. So perhaps our occasional frustration with the more information driven aspects of our work is OK. And our joy at seeing young people grow in, and take responsibility for, their faith is understandable.

We often refer to Jesus incarnation as the primary model for good Christian youth work - the importance of entering into the lives and world of the young people we're working with. As The Message puts it, "The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood". But incarnation isn't an end in itself. Jesus came to usher in the Kingdom of God, to release a band of disciple making disciples, and ultimately to die on the cross before returning to the right hand of God, the first resurrection body to take a place in heaven. So I'm challenged about whether we too easily stop at being incarnational. It's a theme developed by Steve Griffiths in his new book, A Christlike ministry. I've bored people here for years by saying that schools work is a great place to start but a poor place to stop. Incarnational youth ministry needs to lead to discipleship. And that can include the work of discipling young people away from unhealthy lifestyles or attitudes. But surely our greatest goal is to help young people themselves become disciples of Jesus.

I guess the key indicator that discipleship is actually taking place is when people are confidently able to pass on what they've discovered to others. Now that is a challenge we want to rise to.

Young Disciples

London Institute for Contemporary Christianity have a two day conference (Feb 4th & 5th) looking at discipleship and young people. Details are here.

Day 1 looks at the contemporary context through the stories of several youth work practitioners and researchers.
Day 2 is a mix of teaching and discussion led by Graham Cray looking at the question 'how do those involved in ministry and mission with young people create communities of whole life disciples?’

We'll be there.

Independent Safeguarding Authority

The Churches Child Protection Advisory Service has a page of info here about the new Independent Safeguarding Authority which will be updated regularly. Info about the ISA is currently represented by this page on the Every Child Matters web site.
You may know all this already, but it represents an important change in the law on vetting applicants for posts and volunteers so it's worth repeating.
We use CCPAS as our umbrella organisation for CRB checks and they're brilliant.

Not at the Youthwork conference

So many people have posted about going to the Youthwork conference in Eastbourne that I feel compelled to let you know I won't be there to meet up or buy you a coffee because we're looking after this...

GSUS Live is a mobile RE multimedia classroom that gets students thinking about how the teaching of Jesus still relates to the situations faced by teenagers today. It's making a huge impact with students and staff and this weekend we'll be overseeing it's move from one school to another, ready for next week.

However, Kat and Laura from Collective will be at the Youthwork conference so please look out for them on the Innervation Trust stand and say hi!   

Dove - "Onslaught"

There's a new video from the Dove campaignforrealbeauty called onslaught here. It depicts the barrage of unreal images and stereotypes that influence young girls' self image with the simple message, "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does".

The Dove campaignforrealbeauty web site contains a range of ideas and resources for mothers, daughters and mentors working with young girls. There's a lot there, even though finding some of it (or remembering how to get back to it) can be a bit of a challenge.

Many of us have used the previous Dove video, evolution which depicted the transformation of the image of a model. There's also a downloadable video here which revolves around the image of a boy and a girl and  takes a slightly more documentary view, spelling out the techniques used in a bit more detail. Well worth a look.

[ via: ypulse]