Session: Challenging Misdiagnoses and Scapegoats: Systems-, Strengths-, and Rights-Based Views of Youth Development (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Research in social work and allied disciplines reveals how social forces and material conditions can determine the course of young people’s lives. Despite evidence that healthy development for many youth – particularly those disadvantaged by interlocked sexism, racism, and economic injustice – is endangered by contextual factors, policy and practice often revert to an individualized and deficit-focused discourse of youth. Consequently, developmentally normative behaviors (e.g., sexuality) are often misdiagnosed as inherently risky and youth themselves often scapegoated for negative outcomes, while the environmental sources of their vulnerability and obstacles to their healthy development go unchecked.

This symposium’s slate of presentations draw on diverse empirical means and a shared systems-, strengths-, and rights-based view of youth to redirect attention to the contextual factors that impede healthy development. Papers 1 and 2 offer qualitative analyses of programs that aim to protect youth and promote their development. Yet despite serving youth disadvantaged by a complex of factors (e.g., poverty, racism, sexism, and histories of trauma), these sources of vulnerability and injustice were not the targets of intervention. Instead, Paper 1’s case record review found that practitioners concentrated efforts on protecting young women ostensibly from themselves, specifically their own supposedly poor judgment and misguided exercises in agency. Paper 2’scommunity-based participatory research into single-sex schooling showed that rather than buffer youth from discrimination, practices doubled down on gender and racialized sexual norms by blaming female students – the majority Black and with low-SES – and their sexualities for their own and boys’ low academic achievement.

Youth sexuality is also at the crux of the quantitative analyses of Papers 3 and 4. Paper 3 examines the obstruction of youths’ right to sexual and reproductive health care. Their analyses reveal the stark reality of reproductive health inequalities: subject to adultist parental consent laws, often lacking financial means, and with limited means of transportation, many young women – above all those with scarce material and social capital – are functionally barred from exercising their reproductive rights and therefore their right to self-determination. Paper 4 also focuses on youth sexual rights, this time in terms of the normative and growth-promoting potential of sexual activity. In contrast to blanket deficit-focused presumptions that youth sexuality is risky, especially for those who experienced childhood maltreatment, the authors show through structural equation modeling that sexual activity among emerging adult women was actually predictive of sexual wellbeing. This held true even for those who had experienced low to moderate trauma as children.

This collective effect of these methodologically diverse presentations is to reverse our perspective so that it is the social environments of youth that are subject to scrutiny and targeted for intervention, not youth themselves. Their findings reinforce the importance of the systems-, strengths-, and rights-based orientation that defines and distinguishes social work research and intervention. They also indicate that ensuring healthy development of youth may be achieved not by restricting youths’ navigation of developmental pathways, but on clearing those paths of barriers and pitfalls created by social injustice.