Barrie Voyce, Senior Youth Connector in the Diocese of Gloucester, blogs about what the real issues are facing young people today.
This article originally appeared in the Winchcombe Parish Magazine.
I’m often asked, “What issues do young people face today?” Over 20 years in youth work for various churches, councils, charities and organisations, it seems that the answer to that has changed, and yet also stayed the same.
There are ‘things’ which present as issues and problems. When I started out, ‘things’ were drugs and alcohol. The impact of the 1990s ‘lad and ladette’ culture was still hanging around, young people were clamouring to demonstrate their maturity by doing the things that ‘adults’ did, and that was sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Those things, whilst still around, are not major issues for young people in the mid-2020s. That is sometimes hard for us to believe, but the truth by all accepted metrics is that drug and alcohol use by under-18s has been falling year on year for decades, and is at its lowest levels. The one trend-bucking phenomenon is vaping, but even with that, the numbers are low.
Today, the obvious answers are gender identity and mental health.
I don’t think we have ever seen a culture shift so fast and more distinct than the one happening around LGBTQi+ issues.
Even those in their 20s now are struggling to keep up. The reality is that, for teenagers today, having a transgender friend is completely normal. The issue, mainly, is that the rest of the world (i.e. everyone over 25) exists in a completely different culture. The government has recently issued guidance to schools around inclusive language and practice for LGBTQi+ students, but nothing is in place for staff. I asked some young people the other day, “You know how you call all teachers ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’, what happens when you have a non-binary teacher (who would choose to use gender-neutral terms like ‘they’ or ‘them’)?”
The second issue, around mental health, is much talked about and invested in, and yet the issue seems to be getting bigger and more pronounced. Support services are overwhelmed and young people need to hit extreme thresholds before they can access care.
Yet the issues have also stayed the same. Young people are still the same now as then, and as they’ve ever been. The issues we see, the ‘things’ I’ve listed are symptoms of what lies beneath. Throughout history adolescence has been the period of self-discovery, of moving from the child of the past to the adult you are to become. Young people are grappling with the existential questions “Who am I?” “Where do I belong?” and “What is my purpose?”
The LGBTQi ‘issue’ speaks directly to identity, and the shift in culture is one whereby young people’s identity is not rooted in their physical bodies (male, female) but in the mental, emotional and spiritual.
How I think and feel about myself is much more significant to my identity that how I actually look. That change is profoundly different from what has gone before, hence the culture clash.
The mental health crisis feeds from that, and from the lack of belonging that comes from a world around them torn apart by hatred, difference and distrust. If this is the world, why would I want to be part of it? And how would I function within it? Without a sense of purpose and hope that you could make any kind of difference, the spiral into depression and despair can grab hold.
As a youth worker, my primary desire is to break some of those cycles. To create spaces and times for young people to explore and discover themselves in ways that are positive, affirming, and bring hope, not despair.
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