Over the last few years, I’ve probably met hundreds of young people. With some it’s just been a brief interchange, and with others I’ve got to know them in a fair bit of detail: seen how they’ve developed over the years, how they’ve changed and flourished, often in spite of their situations. And for many, I’ve become an important element of a community in which they can share jokes, make each other smile and generally be a small part of each other’s lives.
Only, I’ve never met any of them. I hardly know what any of them look like, and in many cases I’ve never found out their names.
Colleagues in the youth sector (for there was a time when I worked with real, flesh-and-blood young people) are often intrigued by the notion that you really can be a youth worker entirely online. I’m asked all sorts of questions: What happens when new people turn up in the chatroom? Isn’t it dominated by the same people all the time? Don’t they argue with each other? How do you enforce the rules?
Generally speaking, my answer is the same: It’s just like normal youth work. Yes, there’s a core group of regulars at any one time, but they gradually change, and it’s my job to make sure new people feel welcomed and to facilitate their getting to know each other. Arguments and infringements can and do happen, but by and large the community members have signed up to the ground rules and value them. If they didn’t, they’d have questioned the rules (which, of course, is welcomed) or voted with their digital feet. It’s just like normal youth work. But it raises some interesting issues.
I’ve always had a reasonably strong sense of boundaries. While I’ve often been able to form good relationships with the young people I’ve worked with, I’ve never given them my own phone number or introduced them to my wife. With this kind of work, it’s important to keep the professional and the personal separate. When you have heard, as a professional, detailed descriptions of a person’s problems, and you’re aware that their peer group is only a couple of stages of removal from yours, this instinct is the only way to survive without wanting to go and live elsewhere.
So, I’ve found it interesting to see how this manifests itself in online work. In one sense, our contact with them is already at a fairly intimate level: frequently enough, I’m sitting in my own house (as I work from home) sending an email to a young person who will read it in their own bedroom. But on the other hand, we’ve never met, and never will. In terms of establishing boundaries, it’s hard to draw any natural parallels between this and the offline world.
And yet, while I wasn’t looking, they’ve established themselves. For example, we don’t reply to emails late at night, nor do we ever reply less than an hour or so after the message arrives. This is to avoid giving our users the impression that we can be relied upon as an immediate, emergency source of help. But here’s an interesting one: we won’t talk to our users or their families by telephone. We’ll even try to avoid talking to their teachers, social workers or other professionals by phone if they’re in the same room as our users.
Why is this? It’s partly about being careful not to raise our users’ expectations of what we can be relied upon to provide, certainly. But I think our shrinking away from voice contact is about something deeper than that. It’s about establishing a partition between what our service is and what it isn’t; or between the professional and the personal.
As anyone working with young people knows, the fact that there are such boundaries is just as important as the specifics of where they lie. The wall around the edge is what enables the work to take place inside it.
What harm could come of breaching this particular divide? What would be the damage, should one of our community members discover that not only do I possess vocal cords, but I actually use them from time to time? Almost certainly none—yet this knowledge does nothing to increase my likelihood of allowing it to happen. That’s what shows me that this particular reluctance is just an expression; a symptom of a more general underlying tendency to set, enforce and maintain professional boundaries.
It’s often said that there are cognitive strategies that provided early humans with shorthand clues to new discoveries and rules of thumb to avoid being eaten, and that these are the same tendencies that misfire when we see faces in clouds, apparitions in old castles and religious icons in pieces of toast, or when we blame traffic problems on the position of Mars. True, if we didn’t imagine gods, ghosts, fairies and seven years of bad luck we’d all be the more enlightened for it; but without the general underlying tendency, we wouldn’t have got this far.
Professionalism is similar: if you focus too much on a specific procedure or detail, you risk ignoring the underlying ethos that led to it. But the underlying ethos is everything.
This is why it’s possible, and easier than many people might think, for youth and community workers to bring their skills and their services into the online space. Many of the specifics may differ, but the underlying instincts and ethics remain the same. Technology is just tools; it’s the people underneath, and their values and attitudes, that make the difference. If you have those values in place, you’ll be fine. And if you absolutely insist on reading your horoscope on the way to work, I’ll grudgingly forgive you.
Add a comment