Velociraptor Mom

[Unfinished and only partly formed thoughts from a month ago, that I forgot to post. And I'm too tired of the subject to try and make a full post. Oh well.]

It's rare for me to get reprimanded at work, but when I do it almost always has to do with the way I relate to temporary co-workers. There aren't many of us permanent or even long-term employees - in addition to me there's Paul, my boss; Chris, the psychiatrist / counsellor who works two days a week pro bono (or whatever the social work equivalent is); Cindy, who does the same as me and who I rarely see as we never work the same shifts, and a handful of volunteers who've lasted a couple years. Summers are the busiest times of year at the center, so we get a bunch of temporary volunteers in from June through September.

I've been booted out of work for the next fortnight while Paul trains them, since last year I chased off two in the space of a week.

Good volunteers are rare. I know there are some out there, because I meet them from other centres and community programs, but somehow most of the ones we end up with are crap. The majority are students who've just finished A-levels (although we get some uni, and a few post-GCSE) who either want a summer job or a gap year adventure. Most of these are white, middle-class, and looking for an exciting couple of months that will look good on uni applications. They tend to run to two types: type 1 are the do-gooders, suburban PC brigade who - either as a way to impress on UCAS forms, or out of a genuine wish to contribute to those less fortunate - have decided to donate some of their time and energy to help the poor little ghetto kids. Sometimes type 1s last and become good youth workers, if they can learn to view the kids as individual humans rather than charity cases. Their earnest and naive ways do grate on me a bit - although that could be jealousy; it's been a long time since I felt that innocent and unspoiled - but I try to be patient. They mean well. Sometimes.

Type 2s are mostly in it for the adventure. They want exciting stories to relate their friends at future parties, where they feature as the intrepid hero who faced down bullets and gangs, and they drive me crazy.

Paul and I disagree heavily on the use of volunteers. We come at the problem from entirely different perspectives. Paul's job is to organise things, to maximise services on a shoestring budget, and that means relying a great deal on unpaid workers. There isn't any other option for him, except for giving up a lot of the activities we offer. From Paul's point of view, any volunteers are better than no volunteers.

From my perspective, volunteers who look down on the kids are worse than nothing. And they do. Frequently. Young people from the poorer areas of London - Dagenham, Tottenham, Peckham, Brixton, several other places - are totally marginalised by the majority of our society. Britain shunts my kids to the sidelines, looks upon them as lower forms of life simply because of the circumstances of their birth / childhood / migration to England, creates these ludicrous self-fulfilling prophecies that say they'll all end up unemployed, scrounging benefits, addicted to drugs and alcohol, committing crimes and having babies indiscriminately - and then wonders why the kids don't automatically know how to, or want to, abide by the rules of a society that's treated them like they don't belong.

It makes me spit, it really does.

So we end up with a whole bunch volunteers who look down on my kids. Not all of them do, but most. At best it's a sort of benevolent condescension; at worst it's an overt sneering. And I don't tolerate that well, AT ALL. I don't respond well when I feel my children are threatened. When kids are beefing with other kids, I tend to let them get on with it unless I sense physical danger. Teenagers fight, and inner-city teenagers fight a lot - it's just a fact of life that I can't change. But when adults come in and patronise my children, when people who've been lucky enough to be born into affluence come and sneer at my kids because they think that the circumstances of their birth somehow make them better people, I see red. Although a generally kind, peaceful person by nature, I have a temper and a sharp tongue, and more than a few people over the years have sustained multiple cuts from it when I've turned into Velociraptor Mom.

There is some sense of poetic justice in the way that so many people come to my centre looking for excitement and danger, and the most frightening thing they end up facing is me.

I do feel bad about it, sometimes. I try to control my temper. I don't enjoy hurting people, even when it's to prevent then hurting my children. But for better or for worse, they are my kids, my heart and soul, and protect them I will. Even if that means turning into Velociraptor Mom and unleashing my fire breath on those who will stamp on them and put them down.

(Mixed metaphors, but you get the point.)

It's difficult to explain this to anyone who hasn't lived it. These kids face danger every day, from drugs, from gangs, from random crime, from their parents more often than you'd want to know. Why, you might ask, am I so worried about their self-esteem when they're facing a multitude of real physical dangers every day?

Well, because self-esteem is where it starts. All of those other dangers, they're all tied in with a person's feelings of self-worth, or lack of. I've said it a hundred times, and I'll probably say it another thousand in the years to come: happy people do not harm others. This is such a simple concept, and it seems to be so hard for so many people to grasp. With the exception of psychopaths and sociopaths - and true psychopathy is far rarer than the papers and TV shows would have you believe - people who beat up, shoot, stab, rape, burgle, mug, deal drugs, or any combination thereof, do so for a common reason: they're miserable.

I am not a bleeding-heart liberal who thinks that every bad choice should be forgiven because the perpetrator is a victim of society. I believe people should be held responsible for their actions, no matter the reasons behind them, and must always pay the debts they owe. My job is merely to prevent such actions from happening in the first place: not by locking up potential criminals - which is what my kids are viewed as by so much of society - but by helping to develop the qualities and values that allow them to become the best they can be.

Those qualities and values are not so much things like respect for law and order or a good work ethic or even respect for other people. Those come later. The basic building blocks that kids need, that so many of mine lack, are things like hope, and compassion, and self-forgiveness, and the ability to be honest with themselves (even when its not comfortable) and a sense that they're worth loving.

Self-worth is irreplaceable. If you don't have it, you have nothing. Without that, you can't develop any kind of real confidence, and then you go one of two ways: either you constantly doubt yourself and have no sense of self-esteem at all, or you develop a false bravado, a cockiness and arrogance that tells the world you think you're the bees' knees and that the whole world had damn well better respect you. After a while, you come to believe, at least on the top layers of your consciousness, that you're as great as you say you are, and then you end up treating others like shit - not because you're trying to make yourself feel better, but because you've become completely incapable of holding up a mirror to yourself and analysing your behaviour with any kind of moral lens.

Too many people - from all walks of society, but particularly those who have grown up poor - end up like this. I could have gone this way if fate hadn't intervened. Most high-level criminals have taken this route, and they can't be helped or rehabilitated, because they're incapable of seeing a problem with how they are. As I said, my job is to stop this before it happens.

We damage ourselves and each other so much with words, and the ways we say them. More than the drugs and the violence, I worry about the effects of derision, condescension, marginalization. My kids are smart. Most streetwise kids are, when it comes to human behaviour. They have reliable instincts. If someone looks down on them, they know. And they hurt. Even when they convince themselves they don't. People are like clay, in some ways, and the heat that my children have been under has been too hot, too fast, and instead of slowly toughening all the way through they've become hard but brittle, with shiny shells overlaying (mostly) invisible cracks. While some of them may keep those hard outer shells intact for their whole lives, the majority are not as tough as they think they are - nor even as tough as other people think they are.

I'm not sure that any teenagers are as tough as they think they are.