As I edited this issue I found myself considering the “rules of engagement” and how they apply to the work that we do with children and youth. The rules of engagement are a set of guidelines for the use of power in an attack situation and typically are known only to the military or police force that plans to use them. Making the rules public would leave that force vulnerable to attack and make it impossible for them to protect the public that they are commissioned to protect. Interestingly, there is also a North American sitcom called “the rules of engagement” about the changing rules and guidelines for relationships, dating and marriage. The juxtaposition of these two “titles”, one a situation comedy and the other a set of policies and procedures for the military and police, seems to me to embody some of the issues present in the field as we struggle to engage children and youth in a meaningful way in the work that we do with them. Engagement with youth involves both relationship and a struggle with power and application of power within that relationship.

Engagement is a concept that runs throughout the articles and many of the columns that form this issue. Blanchet-Cohen and Salazar describe a method and a process for engaging marginalised youth in their communities and helping them contribute to building community. They emphasize the importance of relationship, building on strengths, and mutual accountability in the work that they do with youth. Increasingly, I find that child and youth care as the field is confronted with the dilemma of a continuum of services in which engagement with youth varies and is understood differently by practitioners. These services range from the community-based youth work, which Blanchard-Cohen and Salazar advocate through to professional, clinical work in children’s mental health settings such as that described by a Egeli and Woollam in their article about a storytelling intervention with young women in group therapy.

There is nothing inherently wrong with either approach, both are based on relationship with the young people that we work with. Both are focused on the strengths that young people have. Both offer sincerity and respect, neither one, forcing compliance, and yet the rules of engagement are distinctly different in each approach. Thom Garfat in his Twilight column describes the historical evolution of these different approaches in our field. He notices that in the beginning, we engaged with caring, and by doing things together. Then, the scientists came along and told us we needed to maintain an appropriate professional distance and be more directive and evidence-based in our interventions. Garfat also notes that some practitioners remained focused on relationship in a more sophisticated, intentional and refined manner refusing to adopt the behaviour modification approach, which objectifies and controls others.

Nancy Marshall, writing “from the line”, describes the ever present struggle of boundaries and relationships; boundaries that are imposed by the employers that we work for, versus boundaries that we discover through our own self examination. She describes the struggle with power that is part of relational work in more institutional settings such as schools. She tells us that the research indicates that the young people that we work with value the caring and personal nature of our relationships with them. She has used the scientists among us, those who are engaged in research, to draw out an argument against the imposition of institutional boundaries without any thought for the effect that those boundaries may have on the young people that we work with. Nancy represents a new breed of professional who believes that scientists can be found within the field. We can use “evidence” from these scientists to argue that the rules of engagement should be relationally-based, without holding power over the youth that we work with.

It is the issue of power that is at the crux of what we do. As child and youth care practitioners, we adopt an attitude of caring that involves listening and equalising the power. Garth Goodwin in his column in this issue describes the police as “youth care focused” when they begin to use rules of engagement that are different from those that are typically defined for them. He describes police and youth work agencies breaking the “rules of engagement” set out for the way they work with young people. They publish pictures of chronically missing youth; by having police carry “caseloads” of specific youth, who are frequently reported as missing, and engaging with those youth; getting to know them; finding out where they are; police can return them to a place of safety. He also describes a group home rowing team, which progressively over several years enhanced their skill to the point where they won the regatta. Not once in all that time were their names ever published, until the youth pointed out that they deserved the recognition. Sometimes we try to protect youth, so that others don’t know about their problems when in fact, if you don’t know about the problems you also don’t know about the things that those same youth do very well. You can’t follow the rules of confidentiality and anonymity sometimes and not others. You can’t talk proudly about what a child is doing well, without providing the context and background to how well he or she is doing.

Janet Newbury (in this issue) says that by using the social justice perspective, we can accomplish the goal of not holding power over and we can strive to understand context and not label youth as a problem or as having a problem that needs to be fixed. Indeed doing so is unjust. Gharabaghi counters that it is social injustice that gives us our jobs. We work with young people who are referred to us because of social injustice. At some point we have to determine what is right and what is wrong. At some point, we have to determine what is good practice, and what is bad practice. For this, we need scientists, we need evidence that follows a different set of rules for engagement with youth. A different definition of what constitutes evidence of good relationships, of caring, of the value of social equity, with the very youth that we work with. We are just beginning to work this out, and when we come to a point where we think we have it figured out, the rules of engagement will change, again.