1 YOUNG MEN IN WESTERN SYDNEY AND QUALITY SERVICE ...

4on a list of eight major problems. Other issues such as unemployment, lack of trainingopportunities and poor public transport were ranked as more important.The need to genuinely listen to young men is an issue not foreign to other sectors. Sladeand Trent’s paper (2000) summarises the views of 1800 year 9 to year 11 male studentsabout declining rates of achievement and retention in schools. Their multi-stage projectutilised questionnaires and focus groups to collect valuable feedback, which indicatedthat male high school students believe that the adult world is ‘not listening’, and ‘notreally interested’.Understandably, the role of the school system and teachers in the lives of young menplays a different role to that of youth service providers and youth workers. Nonetheless,parallels can be drawn. Just as in Slade and Trent’s research (2000), if time and effort istaken to ask young men about the issues that are currently facing them and their peers,so too could youth service providers learn much about the reality of young men and thestrategies required to provide quality community services.However, responding to people’s needs requires some critical analysis and thought.That is, ‘needs’ are shaped by various social and political forces and the satisfaction ofthe perceived need may not necessarily be good or helpful for the person identifying it.According to Flowers (1998:34), youth workers should not only be wary of imposingtheir own view and expectations on the client’s needs, but they must also recognise thedanger involved in articulating a need at face value — without some analysis of theunderlying complexities.2. An analysis of group work as a medium for working with young menThe survey for youth service providers asked them to identify the most appropriatemedium and subject matter for their service’s target group. In relation to medium,sixteen out of the twenty-two respondents for this question stated ‘group work / groupactivities’ as the preferred medium for addressing the needs of their target group ofyoung men.This contradicts the findings of projects such as The Game, whereby group workactivities for young men rate poorly. Critchlow (1998:45) describes the success of TheGame, the result of an 18-month project in the United Kingdom aimed at increasingopportunities for young men to meet and communicate their feelings, frustrations andconcerns. The theme for the project developed from the realisation that young menpreferred to speak on a one-to-one basis to speak about the difficulties they faced in life,love and work. However, group-based situations were found to be avoided by youngmen. In fact, one of the three major factors relevant to the Salisbury project was that“young men are very reluctant to join groups” (Critchlow 1998:45).It must be acknowledged that there are different forms of group work, each havingdifferent aims, such as therapy, the provision of health education, or focus groups toelicit information. In addition, whether a group work session is voluntary or compulsorymay have an impact on participation.