@bella_again wrote:
One of the problems is that those who face the hardest struggle in life are usually the ones least well equipped either culturally, intellectually, or educationally to cope with it.
Spot on there she ele. While everyone beats them down, points out their failures and continues to tell them they are drop kicks don't expect much else. I have only watched about 22 mins of it so far but its sad, sad that lives are ruined in a cycle of poverty and abuse, sad that our system fails these people daily.
We are all arm chair experts, we all feel that they can get over it they get 600 a week get everything else free or low cost. But you know what, that's just a cop out because we don;t know how to deal with the issues that have arisen in pockets of people in poverty. Btw by the time they pay rent, medical expenses I'm not sure they have a whole lot left but that's debatable.
As for the comment about taking kids off them and putting them in foster care, good luck finding carers. They system there is in crisis and the other issue is it solves nothing longer term.
I think we have to empower them to break the cycle. I think services need to be better directed, early intervention needs to take place and we need another class of social workers who know how to relate to people not focus on stats alone. We also have to remember that these are people if you keep kicking them expect them to stay down but if we can give them hope for the future along side empowerment there is chance. If not then nothing will change.
This is possible and it does work to some extent. As part of my decade in the public service, I spent a period of time supervising young men aged around 18-24 who had been given court ordered community service orders. I already had plenty of experience supervising young tough nuts in my previous work as a sheep shearing contractor. These where invariably young men from low socio ecenomic backgrounds who could not pay earlier fines, had little guidance, sometimes substance abuse issues and where regularly commiting low to mid range crimes. Maybe the judges had already sent the real hard cases to prison and the ones we got where the ones who had some chance of rehabilitation, I don't know. What I do know is that almost all of these young people knew they had problems, they wanted to change, get jobs, get into stable housing and get a future together. 50% of the supervising I did with these men was just talking to them one on one while we went about our physical work.. It was basically providing real life counselling services, without all of phschology mumbo jumbo the trained professionals can at times provide.
Virtually all of the mature aged men working in the community service orders, supervisory role sector where down to earth blokes with plenty of life experience behind them. We had a few wins and helped steer a few young blokes in the right direction. The limitation of the programme was that we where only supervising their court orders and where not charged with going the extra step to actually get right into their lives, visit them at home, approach employers on their behalf for potential jobs etc. If the programme was extended to allow us to actually mentor these young blokes for six to twelve months and really help them get back on track, we could make a real difference.
It would need to be very hands on with a low ratio of offenders to supervises and would be expensive. I cant imagine the governments coming up with the money, but community organisations such as Rotary may be able to assist with funding. The important thing would be to ensure the supervises where down to earth, compassionate but rough, tough types who where willing to call it like it was. The young blokes respect this type of role model, where as they just laugh at the do gooder types with degrees and closseted backgrounds.. ( gets back to the other thread last week about how important tertiary education is ) There are a few people like this around, its just that they are often undervalued and overlooked because of the rigid bureaucratic systems which requires uni degrees for counseling. The supervises would benefits from some initial training but would rely on hard physical work and tough love to really break through.
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