Definition of respect and how that definition impacts on others

The young people gave various definitions of respect. Essentially they said it was about recognising and acknowledging each other for who they are and what they are.

Additionally it was not about making judgements about each other and then acting on those judgements as if they were true.

Through discussions they realised that if they showed or had a little bit more regard for each other and treated each other with more concern and care for each other’s thoughts, opinions feeling and well-being this would be equal to respect.

However, they acknowledged that this is something that would take time as there are some of their peers who bully and cause them problems and for others it would be easy.

Genders issues

The young people were challenged on what they believed were straight forward gender roles for both male and female. In order to challenge these views cooking was used. This was chosen because many of the boys regarded cooking as a woman’s role or job. And many of the girls regarded cooking as their mother’s role.

Cooking a meal was used as the means to challenge young people on their views. All the boys participated and thoroughly enjoyed the session to the extent that they wanted to come back to do more cooking. However, the girls were squeamish about touching the raw chicken but never-the-less participated in both the cooking and the discussions.

The young people had the opportunity to cook from scratch and were given the option of taking the food home to their parents; the feedback from parents was that they were impressed with what their child had achieved and expected them to prepare a meal at home.

Public speaking skills

At the outset of the project there were several young people that found it difficult to speak to people outside of their peer group. This was further compounded by their general inhibitions to speak about themselves or on a given topic.

This was concentrated on by the youth workers through activities that addressed why young people were shy and why they lacked the confidence to speak. Some examples given by the young people were: English not a first language, not liking their voice, not wanting to be looked at, and not having the words to say.

With an increase in their ability to express their opinions, and the development of their assertiveness skills by the 3rd session, each of the participants had no trouble expressing themselves. In fact it became difficult getting them to stop talking about what they liked, what they didn’t like and talking during the sessions from there after.