Focus Area 4: Ethics
7. Ethical Dilemmas

Youth work practice is complex. For the most part, there are some informal and usually unwritten principles, like not using violence against a young person or knowingly putting a young person in danger – in other words, “do no harm.” We have some other non-negotiable boundaries like those around romantic relationships between youth worker and young person.  But these relatively basic guidelines don’t always get you very far in deciding what to do when faced with difficult situations in the grayer areas of our everyday work with youth.

Ethical dilemmas will undoubtedly pop up on a regular basis in your day-to-day work with youth. Knowing the difference between right and wrong isn’t always enough to respond most appropriately to those challenges. There are many situations where things are just not that clear cut. And that is definitely true in the field of youth work.

So, the purpose of understanding your role from the perspective of an ethics framework is to prepare you in advance for dilemmas and unclear situations where your good judgment and values footing will need to guide your decisions and actions. One of the most important aspects of good youth development work is the ability to articulate how and why you make certain decisions and choices in your daily work with young people.

There’s an art to making the best choices. Being aware of your personal values and principles, aligning with the principles of ethical youth work practice, is the process of developing mastery in this art form.

Kate Walker and Kathryn Sharpe of the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Youth Development conducted some research by analyzing transcripts from interviews with youth and program staff. They reviewed 250 dilemmas and grouped them into the following five major categories:  

1. Supporting youths’ engagement in program activities

These dilemmas involve how to guide youth’s participation in program activities:

• How to structure, support, or redirect youths’ work in intentional and developmental ways such as situations where youth missed deadlines, overstepped authority, or set out in directions that were at odds with what the leader thought they should do.
• How to create and sustain youths’ psychological engagement in program activities such as situations where youth were bored, lacked confidence, or re-motivating youth after negative experiences, for example, after losing a competition.

Core concerns: For youth to learn from program activities they must be engaged yet creating conditions in which this engagement occurs and is sustained is often challenging.

How to guide and support youths’ activities in ways that lead to meaningful outcomes and are consistent with their development, without undercutting youth’s experience of ownership of the work. Indeed, leaders’ attempts to structure program activities sometimes appear to conflict with youth’s sense of ownership.

There can be a tension between trying to facilitate youths’ learning and wanting the initiative for this learning to come from them.

2. Cultivating program norms and enforcing rules

These dilemmas involve cultivating norms, standards, and rules regarding appropriate behavior for youth and adults in the program:

• When and how to enforce rules, discipline youth, or call youth on inappropriate behavior such as being late or shouting at the leader.
• How to cultivate norms that are shared by the youth, for example not using hurtful or offensive language.
• How to maintain consistency in youth-to-adult relationships that balance personal and professional ways of relating and that youth view as fair (e.g. cases where the leader is a parent of a youth in the program)

Core concerns: Norms and rules are important to group functioning and youth’s development. Yet leaders of youth programs often want to minimize playing the role of The Authority Figure. When and how does a leader take responsibility for sanctioning youth for inappropriate behavior and do so in ways that are effective – that youth view as justice? And how does a leader relate to youth in consistent ways that are both professional and sensitive to youth?

3. Responding to youths’ relationships and personalities

These dilemmas involve youths’ individual personalities and needs, and how youth relate to each other:

• How to adapt or adjust to youths’ personalities, personal problems, and unique limits or needs. For example, their outside crises, difficult personalities, or psychiatric problems.
• These concerns also include youth-to-youth relationships and group dynamics such as conflicts, romance, relations between new/experienced youth, or those youth wanting to exclude someone from their retreat.

Core concerns: Youth bring personal dispositions, problems, limits, and interpersonal issues into the program which are important in their own right but can interfere with program activities.

Peer collaborations can be a powerful vehicle of positive development.

The capacity to use that power to learn together is something special about youth programs.

On the other hand, youth can easily have different ideas, butt heads, and get on each other’s nerves, or they can distract each other from the agenda of the program.

4. Reconciling the organizational system and youth development

These dilemmas involve the organization that sponsors the program, its functioning, and how it influences the running of the program, as well as relationships among staff:

• These concerns include policies, directives, and bureaucratic requirements such as rules, funding demands, and logistics that affect youth
• Organizational demands on staff (overworked, other agency demands on staff time, job security)
• Relationships among staff (staff conflicts, differences in leadership styles)

Core concerns:  Programs for youth are embedded within organizations, and the priorities, ways of functioning, personnel dynamics, and resources of the staff and sponsoring organization can be at odds with what front line practitioners see as the best conditions for facilitating youths' development. 

5. Interfacing with external worlds

These dilemmas involve institutions and life arenas outside the program:

• This includes dilemmas that concern youths’ lives outside the programs such as other activities, schedules, their jobs, outside peers, and school, and their families (conflict, opposition, interference, family problems).
• These also include the dilemmas around how youth learn about, navigate, and connect with their community, including institutions, employers, influential adults, and preparing youth for how things work in the “real world.”

Core concerns: These external worlds often have their own distinct demands, requirements, and ways of doing things that may be foreign (or aversive) to the youth or create conflicts with the youths’ participation in the program. How to interface with institutions and life arenas outside the program?

Ethical dilemmas cut across all five of these ecological categories. These can be among the hardest challenges faced by youth workers.

Here are three scenarios to help you practice your ability to recognize the elements of a dilemma and apply your own values and opinions in coming to your hypothetical decision.

As a reminder, here’s the list of the Principles of Youth Work you learned about in section one of this module:

As a youth work professional, you have a responsibility to:

• Yourself
• The youth you serve, and their families
• Your employer and co-workers
• The profession of youth work
• Your community and society overall

These principles offer a framework to guide ethical thinking and decision making.

SENARIO 1: You have a major event coming up that your youth are performing in. Your organization has very strict registration deadlines for liability reasons because it takes a while to process all the registration paperwork. One of your lead youth performers missed the deadline. The whole group will have to reconfigure their performance if this youth can’t attend.