NCJ Number
80898
Date Published
1981
Length
20 pages
Annotation
Findings are presented from an assessment of an action project targeting youth frequenting Coventry's downtown area (England) who were deemed 'at risk' of drug abuse.
Abstract
Although the City Center Project began with the view that the youth frequenting the downtown area constituted a drug-using subculture alienated from normative social patterns and thus in need of resocializing through counseling and education, an analysis of the project's failures revealed that their drug use (primarily cannabis) was not viewed by the youth as a problem. Most of the youth were integrated into a stable pattern of work, home, and leisure but had chosen to live their leisure hours on the margins of normative society. They had no self-perception of needing to be resocialized. This led to the failure of all schemes to resocialize youth to be reflections of normative adult society. The project activities that were apparently most successful were those that helped those particular youth troubled by alienation from school (truancy), home, and being unemployed. Because of situational problems over which these youth had very little control, they were at 'high risk' of serious drug abuse as an attempt to escape from personal miseries occasioned by perceptions of 'dead end' lives. The project's activities that were apparently most successful in helping youth in the downtown area were a counseling center staffed by professional counselors and volunteer youth who talked with their peers in the downtown cafes, clubs, and pubs, along with a program that provided remedial lessons and vocational training for truants and employment training courses. Rather than aiming specifically at trying to stop drug use, these programs focused on the situational problems of youth in areas where they were motivated to change their circumstances. A bibliography of three entries is provided.