Rethinking Common Practice in Child and Youth Care

Abstract

This paper deconstructs the dominant Western discourses of childhood innocence and dependence to better understand the importance of cultural contexts in child and youth care (CYC) work. It challenges dominant discourses as they relate to work in CYC settings cross-culturally. Exploring her personal experiences doing CYC work in a favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the author argues that CYC workers must be exible and re exive about the realities of the people with whom they work, or risk reifying the very issues they seek to address. In short, CYC workers can become part of the problem if they are not deeply aware of the ways they might reproduce these dominant discourses.