Evaluation of the Crash Course March 2009 - De Montfort University

“No – the staff support is not sufficient. [The work] is highly emotionally
charged. They want someone to turn to on a regular basis, a fixed location, a
line management system, permanent funding and a place in a structure.”
“We’ve got to look out for each other. We’re not Jackanory here. We’re not
telling stories. We’ve seen it, smelt, felt it. Maybe we don’t support each other
quite enough. We hear each other so often, we get immune to it. [What would
be ideal?] Someone away from the team who would just listen. It’s not about
fixing it – just about being able to off load.”
“Two sessions a day are difficult. When you have an emotionally charged
audience. I don’t like it when people are really sobbing and you know you’ve
upset them. And I find it difficult to talk about incidents which have hurt me as
well...It’s not all the time: sometimes you just switch off...No, we haven’t got
hard shells. I remember sitting at my dining room table in tears.”
It was acknowledged that the pressures were sometimes felt because of the high
levels of resistance in some members of the audiences. At times young people can
be badly behaved or make rude remarks. While a large proportion of this behaviour
is probably due to defensiveness, it is still extremely draining for the presenters who
must keep control of their own emotions despite the fact that they have been
personally affected by the experiences they describe.
“Sometimes you get difficult people. Like those who are texting all the time.
But nobody has lost it.”
“If you criticise people’s driving, they may go up like a firecracker. It creates a
barrier. You want them to say ‘OK, that was worth listening to.’”
“X is still laughing and grinning. It hasn’t touched him...It’s not cool to be smart
or better than anyone else.”
“Is it a fear of grief, of having to deal with loss? Unless they have experience
of it, people don’t identify with grief and loss. There’s an element of
indestructibility. Putting grieving off because it’s not something you have to
think about now. It goes back to ‘are you afraid of dying?’ Most young people
would say ‘I don’t think about it – it’s not going to happen to me.’”
“People who come to the Diversion Courses are cynical. They are feeling
anti-establishment and won’t compute the danger. They have fallen out of
love with the agencies who do it. But at the end, they do look crestfallen and
they do thank the inputters...If you can influence people that cynical, there’s a
real market outside Year 11.”
5.8 Future developments
Some stakeholders spoke of potential future developments and linkages that they
felt would be beneficial in the longer term. Some of these are reflected in the final
recommendations of this study.
“I dream that all strategies will tie up together as part of a community-wide
thing...social and community cohesion and intergenerational work. This could
link in to older and young people or parents and young people watching this
together.”
“As we are working towards Integrated Youth Support Services, there are
opportunities to work with the Youth Offending Service and the Leaving Care
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