Preventing young people’s involvement in drug dealing - The value of mutual learning in groups of professionals

By Pierre Roche. Preventing young people’s involvement in drug dealing - The value of mutual learning in groups of professionals. Training and Employment, n° 104, 2013, 4 p. Download the publication.
There are now many groups involved in professional practice analysis; they differ in their theoretical frameworks, methodologies, the object of their analyses and their aims. Since they involve several institutions and professions, some of them encourage participants to develop cross-cutting skills and knowledge and to cooperate in a common sphere of intervention. Those that have been established in order to combat young people’s involvement in drug dealing clearly illustrate this latter dynamic.
Groups involved in reflection on their professional practice have proliferated and the fields in which they are active have diversified (social work and the medico-social sector, as well as social integration, careers advice and guidance, professional advice, education etc.). Some of them bring together workers from different institutions and occupational cultures faced with a specific, often complex problem (developing partnerships for inclusive education, management of the public space, reduction of health and social risks, etc.). There is an important issue at stake here, since these groups are likely, under certain circumstances, to advocate the development of cross-cutting skills and competences and horizontal cooperation, as is the case with those seeking to prevent young people from becoming involved in drug dealing.
Members of these groups include teachers and head teachers, youth workers specialising in prevention, careers advisers or psychologists working for a local young persons’ employment information and advice service, workers at a drop-in centre for young people or in social services, local development officers, social centre directors or workers, cultural workers, social development officers, social mediators or tutors working for the Judicial Youth Protection Directorate. What all these professionals have in common is that they deal with young people involved in the underground economy, and in particular drug dealing. For most of them, the emergence of such trafficking has a profoundly destabilising effect on their practices.
How can teachers and other educators instil a culture of hard work into pupils whose main role model is ‘the dealer who makes easy money’? How can drug prevention workers obtain and retain the trust of young people who adopt the omertà of the drug dealer and maintain the code of silence, not simply refusing to speak but also concealing their feelings and disquiet? It takes nothing more than a piece of false information, a misunderstood action or a wrongly interpreted word for suspicion to take hold...
New avenues for experimentation
Experimentation, by virtue of its programmatic and formalised nature (shared diagnosis, hypothesis and aim, expected results, evaluation and discussion of the results obtained), is a procedure well suited to supporting the development of cross-cutting skills and knowledge and producing professional innovation. From the point of view of preventing young people from getting involved in drug dealing, there are two avenues that should be explored through experimentation: reappropriation of the risk reduction model and transfer of the skills acquired through dealing into the legitimate sphere.
Young people involved in drug dealing run risks and cause others to run risks as well, largely because of the illegal nature of their activity and the violence associated with drug dealing networks: they risk falling foul of the criminal justice system (questioning, prosecution, trial, incarceration), physical harm (physical injury or even death by murder) and damage to their mental health (culpability, fear, feeling of subjugation) as well as incurring risks of a social nature (dropping out of education, deterioration in family relationships, material damage, climate of insecurity, etc.). What might be necessary here is to adopt the risk reduction model, deployed hitherto mainly in the area of drug addiction, when approaching young drug dealers, on the basis that ‘there is always something that can be done’, even if, at any given moment, the young people concerned remain involved in drug dealing.
An ethical code of intervention of this kind is in fact consistent with a depiction, widespread among professionals, of a trajectory for young people that is divided into stages. From this point of view, professionals encourage young people not to spend their whole time drug dealing but to engage in another activity for at least some of their time. Their aim is to move drug dealing out of the institution and to persuade young people not to deal in the substances most damaging to health. They pass themselves off as outsiders in order to reduce the violence associated with drug dealing. They accept the drug dealing as a fact but seek to establish a consensus on a few broad humanitarian principles. Thus in some cases they are able to get an agreement that ‘kids’ should not be used as lookouts. Finally, they can reduce the risks incurred in getting out of drug dealing by helping young people who leave high-pressure environments not to collapse suddenly. To this end, they offer them legal alternatives that give them adrenaline rushes and strong sensations, such as sporting activities for example.
However, in the course of their involvement in the underground economy, young people also acquire skills and competences, particularly in areas such as accounting, negotiation, sales and public relations. Those in the most advantageous positions sometimes manage to get out in time and to apply these skills to legal activities. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why professionals see the provision of support for such transfers of skills as an innovative new direction for their work. They know it is not so much the skills as the need to deploy them in a different context that causes problems. Although the young people have sometimes acquired in the underground economy what is required in the legitimate world, they are very seldom acquainted with the codes of the formal economy and are not always minded to respect its rules and norms. The professionals also know that they have to intervene actively not only among the youngest of those at risk, who might interpret this ‘validation of learning through experience as an encouragement to get involved in the underground economy, but also among employers, who may be reluctant to trust them.
How can such workshops be useful to those who have to - or will have to at some point in the future – face these problems in their areas of intervention on a daily basis? The knowledge created can be accumulated in the form of training modules; priority here should undoubtedly be given to front-line professionals (specialist prevention workers, youth leaders, mediators, social workers, etc.) and students at social work training institutions. Lessons can also be drawn from their methodology for the design of modes of learning and knowledge appropriation in both initial and continuing education and training. Finally, how can such workshops be promoted and how can the social and institutional conditions be created for their establishment in other areas in which the emergence of critical, multidimensional situations calls for new alliances between professionals as the only means of offering responses that match their complexity? These questions will have to be tackled in future research and interventions.