The sale of cannabis for adult recreational use has been made legal in nine US states since 2012, and nationally in Uruguay in 2013 and Canada in 2018. We review US research on the effects of ...legalization on cannabis use among adults and adolescents and on cannabis‐related harms; the impact of legalizing adult recreational use on cannabis price, availability, potency and use; and regulatory policies that may increase or limit adverse effects of legalization. The legalization of recreational cannabis use in the US has substantially reduced the price of cannabis, increased its potency, and made cannabis more available to adult users. It appears to have increased the frequency of cannabis use among adults, but not so far among youth. It has also increased emergency department attendances and hospitalizations for some cannabis‐related harms. The relatively modest effects on cannabis use to date probably reflect restrictions on the number and locations of retail cannabis outlets and the constraints on commercialization under a continued federal prohibition of cannabis. Future evaluations of legalization should monitor: cannabis sales volumes, prices and content of tetrahydrocannabinol; prevalence and frequency of cannabis use among adolescents and adults in household and high school surveys; car crash fatalities and injuries involving drivers who are cannabis‐impaired; emergency department presentations related to cannabis; the demand for treatment of cannabis use disorders; and the prevalence of regular cannabis use among vulnerable young people in mental health services, schools and the criminal justice system. Governments that propose to legalize and regulate cannabis use need to fund research to monitor the impacts of these policy changes on public health, and take advantage of this research to develop ways of regulating cannabis use that minimize adverse effects on public health.
This paper presents a qualitative study of 22 youth workers’ perceptions of their roles and practices in seven school-based settings in a large post-industrial city in regional Australia. Youth ...workers are often engaged in school-based settings working with vulnerable young people, yet knowledge of how workers perceive and conceptualize their role and practice in these settings remains limited. Through focus group interviews, youth workers were asked how they engage, and work with vulnerable students, how they conceptualize their roles and the bodies of knowledge to which those practices and roles pertain. We find that youth work in school-based settings requires the dynamic and non-linear application of the practices of youth accompaniment, family support and youth-centred advocacy, underpinned by respect for the dignity, autonomy and agency of the young person. We argue that the complex application of these practices positions youth workers as ‘bridge-builders’ and ‘boundary-spanners’. Bridge-builders assist young people to connect and engage with support services. Boundary-spanners build relationships across service providers to network different organizations and professionals for better collaboration and support of young people. These findings have implications for youth policy and practice in the area of youth work with vulnerable young people in school-based settings.
We use the concept of time-space paths (Gordon, Holland and Lahelma 2000) to explore how young people negotiate manageable educational pathways and experience educational engagement in alternative ...educational settings. For many young people in alternative settings, tight time-space paths (e.g. attending school on time) led to their disengagement from mainstream school settings, as mainstream schools did not accommodate the lives and needs of these young people. We draw on interviews with young people in alternative educational settings in Finland and Australia. We extend the discussion to two alternative time-space paths to explore how young people in alternative educational settings, while expressing a like and need for looser time-space paths to accommodate their difficult life circumstances, still need aspects of tight time-space paths to engage with education. We discuss strategies used in the alternative educational settings that enable the young people to develop a rhythm within their own time-space paths and a sense of agency and control in their learning environment. These strategies enabled communication and the development of positive relationships with teachers that led to a sense of belonging and their engagement with education.
This scoping review provides an overview of COVID-19 approaches to managing unanticipated school closures and available literature related to young people learning outside-of-school. A range of ...material has been drawn upon to highlight educational issues of this learning context, including psychosocial and emotional repercussions. Globally, while some countries opted for a mass school shut-down, many schools remained open for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This partial closure not only enabled learning in smaller targeted groups but also offered a safe sanctuary for those who needed a regulated and secure environment. In Australia, if full school closures were to be enforced over a long period, a significant proportion of students from more vulnerable backgrounds would likely experience persistent disadvantage through a range of barriers: long-term educational disengagement, digital exclusion, poor technology management, and increased psychosocial challenges. This scoping review combines research on technology availability and learning, with analysis of the long-term educational impacts of navigating the COVID-19 disruption. Author abstract
This article employs a range of sources to critically explore the role of children and young people in county lines drug dealing, the potential harms they are exposed to and the difficulties of ...protecting them. As county lines centre upon the movement and exploitation of vulnerable peoples, we utilise the human trafficking literature for further insights into the dynamics of county lines and current policy responses. The article concludes by discussing the challenges of safeguarding young people, particularly that over-worked and under-resourced frontline practitioners can experience difficulties identifying the vulnerability of young people caught up in county lines, particularly beneath their tough exteriors.
Through participatory research and creative auto/biography, in particular, this article highlights how young offenders in southwestern Colombia live at home, go to school and fit in the trafficking ...of cannabis in their spare time. This part-time participation in criminal networks becomes part of a deliberate plan to succeed and confront positions of socio-economic hardship and emotional precarity. This strategic offending in the region of Cauca with its protracted violence and alternative social order constitutes an attempt to confront ontological insecurity and establish improved life chances. These lived experiences of drug trafficking also highlight Colombia’s community, city and country lines – three levels of trafficking route along which these young part-timers shift cannabis to local, national and international markets.
Leaving school early is an issue of global concern and various measures have been taken to help early school leavers return to and re-engage with education and training, including second chance ...educational programmes. This qualitative case study explores young people's reasons for returning to school and continuing education in a second chance educational programme in a successful educational centre located in Ceuta, a Spanish city that is unique in a number of ways (i.e. geography, demography, economy, culture, etc.), and includes a high dropout rate. Our findings indicate that there is a complex interplay of personal and external (educational, family, and economic) factors pushing and pulling the participants to resume education, but that their agentic reflexivity is key in this process.
This article presents the findings of a participatory qualitative study investigating the role and potency of identity and meaning in the lives of vulnerable young people. In-depth interviews with 24 ...young people revealed the importance of connectedness in fostering positive identity and meaning in vulnerable young people's lives. Five critical domains for building positive identity and meaning emerged: caring relationships; participation and contribution within their communities; achieving a sense of belonging; competence; and hope. Young people's experiences uncovered that connectedness lies at the heart of all of these domains, and is therefore the pathway for vulnerable young people to attain positive identity and meaning. The findings reinforce what we know about the importance of connectedness for vulnerable young people and provided insights into how young people want to be supported with these issues. This article critically examines some of the difficulties for support workers in facilitating connectedness for young people and considers why these connections are not always developed. Practical suggestions are provided for how youth support workers may be able to overcome these challenges.
•Identity and meaning are fundamental in vulnerable young people's lives.•Connectedness is key to positive identity and meaning for vulnerable young people.•Support services are critical in building connections for vulnerable young people.
•Children’s services in England face challenging cases involving potentially harmful online risks.•Services showed poor awareness of online risks with narrow focus on child sexual ...exploitation.•Services omit exploration of wider online risks or antecedents of child grooming.•Multi-agency collaboration and online risks data (records) sharing is limited.•Frontline staff training and assessments tools need updating to include emerging online risks.
Local government public sector children’s services working with vulnerable children in England are faced with challenging cases involving potentially harmful digital/online risks. All services have a duty to safeguard. Educators and key professionals in children’s services such as in social care, mental health, youth justice, voluntary sector advice centres or policing may be involved. Yet little is known about how these services identify, assess, refer and respond to such cases.
This study aims to explore how local services working with children and young people, including social care, health and the police, address cases with digital components among children and adolescents and how equipped they are to do so.
Using semi-structured interviews, this study interviewed 14 participants within 10 services such as mental health, social care, youth justice, teenage pregnancy prevention, voluntary sector online youth counselling, school nursing and children’s education inspection and safeguarding services. Interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed.
A narrowly focused awareness of online risk was noticed among all participants, reflecting an emphasis on a singular target (e.g. Child Sexual Exploitation - CSE). This led frontline staff to omit exploration of wider online risks or antecedents of grooming. The outcome therefore was a lack of data on harms other than CSE or sharing of explicit images, and limited knowledge of a wider range of fast changing risks to children, which could inform prevention. Assessment tools seemed generic and focus heavily on CSE or social media; some omitted online risk unless safeguarding issues were raised. Furthermore, multi-agency collaboration was hampered by simplistic or no referral mechanisms for evidence involving online risks. Finally, it was also apparent that there is a lack of structured and mandatory training programmes around online risk and children and young people’s digital lives.
Online risks need careful consideration within children’s services’ cases and to be more systematically embedded within practice. The findings are crucial in guiding services towards modernising their methods, advancing their training and assessment tools to enhance multi-agency collaboration in cases involving vulnerable children.
Guatemala is a country with a long history of conflict, poverty and violence that still affects young people. However, their exist non-governmental organizations such as Guatemalan Olympic Foundation ...(FUNOG) whose purpose is imparting sport and Olympic values as educational principles of the institution. The aim of this study is to describe the sport, health, and psychological characteristics of the youth who participate in this organization. The research's objectives were accomplished through a quantitative methodology and the involvement of 91 participants. Results emphasised the participants' elevated levels of physical activity exceeded those of other youth of same ages. No link was found between the level of physical activity and other personal or health variables. Age was negatively correlated with factors pertaining to meaning in life but not with dialectics. A correlation was found between self-esteem and goals, tasks, and empathy, but health literacy was negatively correlated with interpersonal relationships. These data incentivise us to design and evaluate sport programmes not only as an educational strategy to promote health literacy and social-emotional skills, but also to improve the perception of the purpose of life.
PDF
