Young People’s Participation. Группа авторов
the Votes at 16 Action Research Group was in one of the rooms in the city chambers. I remember showing the video that we’d made and then I remember feeling kind of stupid about the video and thinking, “They won’t understand our inside jokes and maybe they won’t take us seriously.” But then I remember that we talked and got our points across and then I remember leaving and thinking like, “Yes! We just did that, that was really cool.” But it was frustrating because we said, “What are you guys going to do about this?” and they said, “We’ll get back to you about that ’cos we need to speak to our superiors and we need to have another meeting to talk about it” but nothing happened.
At the time I was very curious about the world; I was questioning all these things and the more I learned about the world and the more I became friends with these people and learned about their experiences and things they’d done I was like, “Oh I wanna do that”, but then I’d realise that, “Actually no I can’t do that because of my parents or because this goes against my religion or this goes against my culture.” My parents didn’t like that I was questioning our community and how traditional it is. It annoyed me because I wasn’t being influenced, I was like, “I’m making my own decisions, I’m learning these things and then I’m choosing, do I believe this or do I not, do I agree or not.” There were all sorts of little things. For example, I remember not being able to say the word sex and beginning to think, “Why am I not able to say that word?” and then later thinking, “Me not being able to say that word is giving power to the word.” I tried to explain that to my parents but they just didn’t get it. And also I would go to events and be startled by what people looked like, so like girls with really short hair or guys with long hair or girls that identified as guys, just all that sort of thing that I was not used to, and the more I met new people the more I learned to accept that it was okay and it was normal. And then I was so proud of everything we were doing. I was especially proud of Alex and Charlie.2 I couldn’t wait to be able to say, “I’m a published author.” I thought it was so cool that we’d done that and how much hard work we’d put into it and that we were helping to educate little kids.
The most important thing I’ve learned from all the different groups is that it’s okay to think freely, that it’s okay to have an opinion and that, even if people don’t like your opinion, it’s still okay and you shouldn’t change that opinion just because you are afraid of what other people might think. YEA also taught me that I can be friends with adults. In my culture you can’t be friends with them because there’s a barrier of respect that you have to have for them. YEA taught me that you can respect someone and also be friends with them. None of the staff talked to us as if we were children or too stupid to understand complex things.
When I was 16 there was so much of a clash between the world that I was living in and the world my parents wanted me to live in. It got to a point where whenever I wanted to do something that I knew they wouldn’t like I was too scared to talk to them about it, so I would lie and I would say that I was doing something that I wasn’t just so that I could be with my friends and do normal teenager-like things. And then the more I lied, the more difficult the relationship got.
I left home and I was homeless for four months, just couch surfing, moving from house to house with my little suitcase. I finally got a place in a hostel and I lived there for nine months and it was difficult. That was the point I was quite crazy and impulsive, and I didn’t care about my education at all. I stopped going to school, I stopped really caring about my future. My motivation went down and my mental health started to break down. The people who lived in the hostel they didn’t care about their lives either, they didn’t care about school and that was who I was surrounded by. Then eventually I got my act together towards the end of those nine months and I tried to go to school more and to prioritise what was important in my life. And then I got my own flat.
Over that time I stopped going to as many meetings with YEA because everything else was happening. It was difficult because it was just me and I didn’t have parental support, but the YEA staff were amazing at helping me and making sure that I had all the support I needed to help me deal with stuff. I remember always feeling comfortable talking to them about my life and what was going on. It felt natural to talk to them because they already knew me, they knew my background and knew my story. We had a day where all of my YEA friends came round and we painted my new flat. Like everyone! People came who I hadn’t seen for ages and it was a lot of fun. One of the girl’s mum even came round and brought some furniture. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t gone to that first meeting with YEA ’cos YEA is just so intertwined with a lot of things in my life.
Katherine’s story
From what I remember I got involved with YEA through school. Every morning my teacher would read out things in registration class and when she read this one out she said, “This is a great opportunity, it seems like a you thing” and I was like, “Yes, that seems like a me thing!” I guess I was always a bit of a social warrior in some ways.
The first thing I did was the peer mentor training. I was a baby, a 12-year-old girl who didn’t say anything and always had her hair up in a ponytail – I was so shy! Lots of shy people might have stopped going, but I kept going and I stayed silent but still took everything in. At that point I didn’t know much about politics and the others would all go off on all sorts of tangents, I was learning so much about things that I’d had no idea about. It was around the time of the independence referendum and everyone was very heated in their opinions and that was really interesting; in school our teachers avoided the topic but in YEA those conversations were encouraged. And what was good about it was that it wasn’t a big group, there were only about ten people, we were always sat in a circle so I never felt excluded.
Then I got involved in the gatherings and the action research groups. At first I was a bit confused about what was going on, but confused and enjoying it so it didn’t matter that I was thinking, “Why am I doing this?”, and then it got to the point that I was like, “Okay, I think I understand what I’m doing now” and then suddenly, “I’m also chatting loads! What? I’ve changed!” So you stumble slowly further and further into it and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m fully in this now!”
It’s like a wee community – that’s important – I don’t feel like we just come to do the activity, we come to see the people. It’s important that there’s a time in each meeting just to catch up. I feel like the staff are aware that it is a safe space for us. When people come from all over the city they want to chat and I feel like the staff are very good at respecting the fact that that needs to happen. I also feel like the open atmosphere is really important; you can say anything, there’s not exactly rules but there is respect. If you disagree with someone, you can just say, “I don’t agree with you because …” and then you explain why and people will respect what you say but if they disagree then they are going to tell you. You can have a debate and that’s okay as long as you are respectful.
But it is also important to me to get stuff done. It’s exciting seeing what you’ve been working on for the last six weeks come together and start to become something. When you achieve something, it makes all the bits that were confusing before tie together. We wrote a book! We created a whole new job for someone! We did important research!
I learned a lot about how research works in the real world with actual people and important social issues. The first project I did I learned everything as I was going along. It just started to make sense – it was like … “Oh okay, two weeks ago we thought of a question, and then we broke that down into five different questions and those questions have been answered by the people who filled in the survey and we’ve got some answers to the first question!” I learned how difficult some bits can be – like how some private schools and Catholic schools didn’t want to talk about certain topics. And then I learned about how important it is to get the survey out to as many different people as possible and to highlight what didn’t come up because that’s still just as interesting. I learned a lot about how to analyse what we found out. Analysis is something you’d think would be really boring but we did it in really fun ways so that it was memorable, like we had the data up all over the walls or had