What’s in a word?
By: Sarah Wayman
Tags: Systems Thinking, Social Change, Youth, Language, Zine

The power of language

I’m writing this blog right now because I want to change the language that’s used about young people within the services that are there to help them.

How we choose to frame a young person and their lives can shape how they are perceived by others or the support they receive.

I’m looking for other people who are interested in this issue to get involved in a zine I want to produce where we gather and share the views of professionals and young people on this issue and hopefully find some opportunities to improve things.

(If zines aren’t you’re thing but you’re interested in this topic, Ryan from Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE) and I are organising a meet-up to discuss language and how we can create change on 25 April in London. Get in touch if you’d like to come along!)

Call out for my zine — get in touch!

The power of zines

This is already set to be too long for a blog, and a quick Google will let you into the rad world of the zine, so I will just say that I love zines.

Zines are self-published booklets that allow the creator(s) to express things however they like.

They are a democratic, DIY, creative way of people sharing ideas. I’d love to work on a zine that shared the insights of adults and young people on issues in the same publication.

Why language?

Language is incredibly powerful — it’s how humans have got to where we are today — but it can shape things in ways that reflect our assumptions and our prejudices which can be hugely damaging too.

Last year, I was reading a Guardian article about a serious case review of a young woman who was murdered by her stepbrother. The review found that despite being in contact with 17 professionals, she was murdered by a family member. Her name was Becky Watts.

The report makes for sobering reading. Something that stuck out for me was that it found that not enough time had been spent looking at the risks Becky’s wider family. And, in part, this was due to how Becky was described and framed by those services:

‘In the initial report, Becky was described as “controlling” and “lacking aspirations”. She was not seen alone and the dynamics of the wider family were not explored. The report says Becky was treated as the problem and there was little understanding of the needs of a 13-year-old who felt isolated and fearful. From this point on the focus was on Becky being problematic and having problems without a consideration of what was the cause and what, therefore, might be the solution.”

My investigations so far…

The language we use about young people we work with and how this can shape the support they receive — is something I have been grappling with for a few years now. It’s something I have seen arise time and again when speaking to colleagues at The Children’s Society and in my voluntary work directly with young people.

I worked on a project with Snook to explore this further and have some great consultation tools as a result (you can see an example below — get in touch if you would like a set). We also developed principles with young people for what positive language should look like.

Example of one of the consultation tools we developed to understand the issue with language in services

Since then, I’ve spoken to lots of practitioners and young people in that time and it continues to be something that anyone I speak to agrees is an issue.

These are the things that come up repeatedly:

- Jargon - Assumptions and stereotypes - Victim Blaming - A culture of disbelief

These things can damage rapport with a young person, make a young person question their past or the validity of their views. It can leave a young person feeling unheard or worse, that there’s ‘no point’ in telling someone something. And this is how ultimately a little thing like language can cause young people to become disengaged with a service, or withhold important information from the very services designed to keep them safe.