CHAPTER 3: Youth Worker Professional Development: Moving from Practicing the Symbolic to Working Substantively

Can you imagine a similar legal right or concept in youth work practice? What would “ineffective assistance” look like? Must a youth worker harm a client or can they be ineffective even if they cause no direct harm? What standards would be used to assess the youth work practice episode? Who would assess the case and with access to what penalties? Would one moment, one event, one episode, be enough to drum a youth worker out of their agency, away from practicing and from the field, or would such remedies require a pattern of such asserted malfeasance? These questions reveal the difficulty for understanding youth work professional development.