The youth work contract: professionalism and ethics

Over the past 30 years in Australia there has emerged a growing and diverse body of practitioners who identify as youth workers. In that time, there has been a significant amount of debate (but not enough) about what constitutes youth work practice: about the range of roles that youth workers take; about the defining elements of the relationship with a young person that makes it a “youth work” relationship; about whether youth work is, or should become, a “profession”, and by what definition; and about the institutional locations that are and should be taken by youth workers.