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CHAPTER 5: CULTURAL
COMPETENCE,
ADULTISM AND ETHICS
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CULTURAL COMPETENCE IN YOUTH Umum (MPU) Subject

DEVELOPMENT

WHAT IS CULTURAL COMPETENCE?

1. Cultural competence involves understanding and appropriately
responding to the unique combination of cultural variables and
the full range of dimensions of diversity that the professional
and client/patient/family bring to interactions.
2. Cultural competence is defined as the ability of individuals
and systems to work or respond effectively across cultures in a
way that acknowledges and respects the culture of the person
or organization being served. Culturally competent youth
development workers are aware and respectful of the values,
beliefs, traditions, customs, and parenting styles of the
audience being served.
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DEVELOPING CULTURAL COMPETENCE

1.Developing cultural competence includes
 self-assessment, including a review of the
clinician's personal history, values, beliefs, and
biases;
 an understanding of how these factors might
influence perceptions of communication
abilities and patterns; and
 an understanding of how personal perceptions
might influence interactions and service
delivery to a variety of clients/patients/families.
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2. Developing cultural competence is a dynamic and

complex process requiring ongoing self-assessment
and continuous expansion of one's cultural
knowledge.
3. It evolves over time, beginning with an
understanding of one's own culture, continuing
through interactions with individuals from various
cultures, and extending through one's own lifelong
learning.
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YOUTH CULTURAL COMPETENCE (YCC)

1. is one such platform that is not only grounded in
empirical evidence but also is based upon and
resonates with the experiences and insights of the
youth practitioners and educators who work directly
with youth on a daily basis.
2.Youth Cultural Competence is both a belief system
and a series of programmatic strategies targeted at
helping programs to retain, engage, and educate
youth.
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3. YCC is grounded in the concept of youth development and

has three major programmatic components: youth involvement,
positive peer influence, and youth popular culture.
4. In practical terms, adopting a youth development framework
as part of attaining YCC means recognising that young adult
learners are developmentally different from adult learners and
making a commitment to make organisation-wide changes to
the structure of classroom learning, curricula, and instructional
practices.
5. Teachers and administrators need to plan together to devise a
structure for reform that does not burden teachers with an
excessive array of new responsibilities and also includes a way
to evaluate new practices.
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YOUTH INVOLVEMENT
1. Evidence suggests that their motivation is
optimized when they experience this type of
change in classroom and school management.
2. The most authentic way for youth programs to
ensure that they engage and educate young adults
effectively is to give youth a substantive role in
shaping, managing, and even facilitating
educational practices and organizational
procedures.
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3. Genuine youth involvement results in other

important benefits for young adult learners.
4. First, youth who are given a leadership role in
shaping educational and management practices will
likely find it difficult to fault teachers or the
organization for not caring about them or for being
insensitive to their needs. In this way, youth
involvement is both a motivational technique and a
retention strategy.
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5. Second, youth who are invested with decision-

making power are apt to develop the confidence they
need to tackle academic challenges they may have
shied away from in the past.
6. Third, youth involvement can foster a learning
environment that promotes achievement. Adolescents,
more than adults, are heavily influenced by and
conformed to cues in their surroundings that suggest
social norms of behavior. Consequently, programs that
can create a culture of active youth involvement will
automatically socialize new students into a powerful
ethos of achievement.
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ADULTISM
1. Adultism is the bias towards adults.
2. Adultism also can be understood as the prejudice based
on age, especially against the young people.
3. For example, the belief that adults are superior to
minors.
4. The essence of adultism is disrespect of the young. Our
society, for the most part, considers young people to be
less important than and inferior to adults.
5. It does not take young people seriously and does not
include them as decision makers in the broader life of
their communities.
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6. Adults have enormous importance in the lives of

almost every young person.
 This fact may make it difficult understand what
I am calling adultism.
 Not everything the adult world does in relation
to young people is adultist.
 It is certainly true that children and young
people need love, guidance, rules, discipline,
teaching, role modeling, nurturance and
protection.
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Childhood and adolescence are a steady series of

developmental stages, each of which has a different
set of needs, issues, and difficulties.
For example, a three year old needs a different
amount of sleep than a 15 year old; or, what works
to physically restrain a seven year old will not work
with an 18 year old; or, how you explain conception
and birth to an inquisitive toddler will be quite
different from how you explain these to a sexually
active teenager.
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7. Differing cultural, ethnic, gender, class, or religious

approaches to these developmental stages can further
complicate the identification of adultism.
For example, what is considered "weak" in one
gender, may be considered "strong" in another;
or, belching may considered rude in one culture
and an expression of appreciation in another; or,
childhood sex play may be condoned in one
culture and condemned in another.
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8. Some things can be labeled adultist if it involves a consistent pattern

of disrespect and mistreatment that has any or all of the following
affects on young people:
an undermining of self-confidence and self-esteem;
an increasing sense of worthlessness;
an increasing feeling of powerlessness;
a consistent experience of not being taken seriously;
a diminishing ability to function well in the world;
a growing negative self-concept;
increasing destructive acting out;
increasing self-destructive acting "in" (getting sick frequently,
developing health conditions, attempting suicide, depression, etc.);
feeling unloved or unwanted.
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9. There are several basic assumptions that underlie

adultism:
Youth are troublesome and hence, adults need to
deter and correct youth’s problems and stop youth
from “acting out”.
Youth are poor investments because they offer little
to society.
Youth do not desire to become contributing
members of society.
Youth do not care about their community.
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COMMON STATEMENTS

 “You’re so smart for fifteen!”

 “When are you going to grow up?”
 “Don’t touch that, you’ll break it!”
 “As long as you are in my house, you’ll do it!
 “You’re being childish.”
 “What do you know? You haven’t experienced
anything!”
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10. These assumptions have several effects on the

society:

 We hold lower expectations for youth and

expect them to fail or just subsist.
 We fail to provide youth with the resources and
opportunities to participate.
 We fail to empower youth to make full use of
their skills.
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YOUTH AND ETHICS

WHAT IS ETHICS?
1. The term ethics is derived from the Greek word
ethikos which itself is derived from the Greek
word ethos, meaning custom or character.
2. In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is
“good.” Acropolis- the field of ethics or moral
philosophy involves developing, defending, and
recommending concepts of right and wrong
behaviour.
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3. So, Ethics (sometimes called morals or moral

philosophy):
 is concerned with fundamental principles of
right and wrong and what people ought to do.
 inform our judgements and values and help
individuals decide on how to act.
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YOUTH WORK: THE CODE OF ETHICS

1. Youth workers are committed to ethical practice

in their work with young people.
2. This ethical practice is defined by the following
principles:
 Primary Client Confidentiality

Context Cooperation

Promotes equality Knowledge

Empowerment This ethical practice is Self-awareness

defined by the
following principles:
Duty of Care Boundaries

Preventing
Self-Care
Corruption

A Transparent
Relationship Integrity
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1. PRIMARY CLIENT
 This principle is at the core of the youth work relationship,
because it keeps us mindful of who we are there for.
 Youth workers answer to a range of people: funding bodies,
peers, management committees, parents, communities.
 But youth workers are clear that of all the interests out
there, the interests of the young people we work with
always come first.
 Many professionals that work with young people do not
consider the young person as their primary client, but
instead see them as one of many stakeholders.
 That’s okay; it just means they are not a youth worker.
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 For example, a high school teacher’s work entirely

revolves around young people. Whilst they are
concerned with the well-being of young people, the
focus of their work is to teach the curriculum.
 Similarly, a family worker may work with families
that have teenage children and be concerned with the
needs and interests of those young people, but they
will be equally mindful of the needs and interests of
the parents, younger children etc.
Their primary concern is not only for the young
people with whom they work.
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2. CONTEXT
 Youth workers are agents of change in a variety of ways,
both with individual young people, and also with the systems
in society that can cause or contribute to the problems that
young people face.
 Youth workers work alongside young people in their context.
 This means youth workers recognise the impact of that
context when working.
 Context includes things at all levels: place, culture, family,
peer group, community, society.
 In working alongside young people, the youth work approach
ensures that youth workers play a facilitation role, rather than
viewing young people as passive recipients of services.
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3. PROMOTES EQUALITY
 Under Human Rights and Equal Opportunities
legislation, all young people have the right to be
treated in a fair and appropriate manner, regardless
of ethnicity, gender, religion, disability or sexual
orientation.
 This impacts directly on the youth worker’s
approach to young people.
 Regardless of a youth worker’s personal beliefs,
we have a responsibility to treat all young people
fairly and equally, and to respond to young people
on the basis of their need in the best way possible.
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4. EMPOWERMENT
 It focuses our attention to being accountable to young
people. In this context, ‘empowerment’ also refers to
young people’s ethical and responsible action.
 If a young person is empowered, has independence and
 participates in society, they are able to take control of their
 experiences and make informed decisions.
 They can own their identity and pursue the lives they
choose. They are able to participate in the decisions that
impact their lives, whether that be day to day experiences,
or the decisions that are part of being an adult citizen,
such as input into services, or who runs the government.
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5. DUTY OF CARE
 Duty of care is a shared responsibility between the
youth worker and the agency.
 “Duty of Care’ recognises that sometimes we can do
more harm than good by intervening in a situation: that
intervention carries some risk with it.
 As youth workers we can get a bit fired up with our
passion to help people, to get things moving, or to use
the skills and resources we have at our disposal.
 Sometimes this might not be the best thing.
 Duty of care also involves being aware of the safety of
ourselves and others.
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If a youth worker has strong reason to believe that a

young person may be planning to harm themselves or
someone else, we have a duty to act on this information.
Duty of care means that youth work agencies have to
exercise care in the employment of staff, whether paid
or voluntary, full time or part time.
Abuse of young people is not rare, and we must be
careful about who is given access to the young people
we work with.
Proper investigation needs to be made into people’s
work and criminal histories, even when they are
volunteers.
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6. PREVENTING CORRUPTION
This principle encourages youth workers to keep ourselves
honest in terms, of our motivations and rewards.
This may involve financial gain, but also includes other things
such as power, profile, emotional security, personal identity,
agency reputation and so on.
This doesn’t mean we need to act entirely selflessly with
regards to the needs and interests of young people.
It doesn’t mean that youth workers shouldn’t do well out of
their youth work roles.
But this cannot be at the expense of young people, so that
young people don’t do as well out of the youth work
relationship as they would otherwise, or that their needs are
compromised in any way.
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7. A TRANSPARENT RELATIONSHIP
We don’t deceive young people, either by saying things that are
untrue or by not saying things that they have a right to know.
This means that in initial meetings with young people, youth
workers must be clear about what they can and can’t offer.
This applies to various areas of practice, agency policy and the
law.
Whilst being open and truthful, workers should be mindful of
issues of confidentiality, disclosure, health and safety, who the
worker works for and what the agency is funded or contracted to
provide.
We also have a role in explaining to young people the nature of
other stakeholders relationships to them, and the expectations
this may place upon them.
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8. CONFIDENTIALITY
In accordance with the National Privacy Principles, we
presume that young people expect us to keep their information
confidential, even if that is about where they were or who they
were with.
Perfect confidentiality is of course not possible or even
desirable; there are always limits.
 One such limit to confidentiality is when we learn that a
young person may be at risk of harming themselves or others.
We need to know and understand these limits ourselves, and
communicate and clarify them to young people at the onset of
our relationship with them.
This might include organisational policies about sharing
information between workers within the one agency
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9. COOPERATION
Ethical youth work practice involves a commitment to
co-operative partnerships with relevant service
providers; in order to collectively achieve positive
outcomes in the best interests of young people.
 Collaborative interagency approaches enable a young
person a greater range of choices in terms of support
networks and access to a range of information, skills
and resources to meet a variety of needs.
No single program or agency is capable of looking
after every need a young person has.
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Youth workers are one role in a young person’s life,

but they are not the only one.
Other roles are important to ensure young peoples’
needs are met holistically.
Collaboration and cooperation also enables us to
expand our networks to current information and
available resources.
Working in deliberate isolation increases the risk of
dependency-based relationships, and denies young
people the right to choice, and to their fair share of
available resources.
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10. KNOWLEDGE
It is essential for youth workers to maintain a high
level of competence through an ongoing
commitment to training and professional
development, and to being informed and skilled in
relation to ‘best practice’ in youth work.
This is a standard requirement for most
professions.
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11. SELF-AWARENESS
As youth workers, we understand that we are people too, with
our own histories, beliefs, ideologies and experiences.
We understand that these things can impact on our practice.
 Realising this, youth workers take into account the diversity
of values and interests that young people may present with.
We recognise that our own values may be different to theirs,
and we respond to these differences in non-judgmental ways.
Respect and dignity are crucial to being able to accept these
differences between ourselves and the young person, whilst
also recognising that universally accepted concepts of human
rights must not be compromised in doing so.
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Building self-awareness is something we must

invest time and energy into.
This comes through things like self examination
and critical reflection, regular supervision, and
taking part in training and professional development
opportunities that challenge and extend us.
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• Cultural competence is about our will and actions to build

understanding between people, to be respectful and open to
different cultural perspectives, strengthen cultural security and
work towards equality in opportunity. Relationship building is
fundamental to cultural competence and is based on the
foundations of understanding each other’s expectations and
attitudes, and subsequently building on the strength of each
other’s knowledge, using a wide range of community members
and resources to build on their understandings.
• Underlying cultural competence are the principles of trust,
respect for diversity, equity, fairness, and social justice. Culture is
the fundamental building block of identity and the development of
a strong cultural identity is essential to an individual’s healthy
sense of who they are and where they belong. It is more than
being respectful of the cultures represented in the service or even
the community. It is much more than awareness of cultural
differences, more than knowledge of the customs and values of
those different to our own
REFERENCES Matapelajaran Pengajian
Umum (MPU) Subject

1. Cohen, D. H., Stern, V., Balaban, N., and Gropper,

N. Observing and recording the behaviour of young
children. New York. NY: Teachers’ College Press,
Teachers College, Columbia University. 2015
2. Youth Development & Youth Leadership. A
Background Paper. Edelman, Andrea; Gill, Patricia;
Comerford, Katey; Larson, Mindy; Hare, Rebecca.
2004.
3. Kaveri Subramaniam, David Shamel, (2011) Digital
Youth: The Role Of Media In Development, New
York: Spronger-Verlag. 2011.