|
This paper was delivered by Ivan Waddington at a conference on Practiques Sportives dees Jeunes er Conduits à Risques, organised by the Ministère de la Jeunesse et des Sports, Paris, December 2000.
"In Britain, as in many other countries, there is a widespread – though largely untested - assumption that sport and physical activities can make an important contribution to reducing crime and drug use amongst young people. The provision of sporting facilities as a means of accommodating disaffected working class youth has been articulated in several policy statements since the early 1960s, and that policy was reinforced by the rise in youth unemployment and by the serious urban riots in the 1980s.
Within Britain, sport-based schemes designed to combat delinquency and drug use among young people have won support from all the major political parties, from the police, the probation service, from youth workers in local government and, not surprisingly, from organizations involved in promoting sport, such as the Sports Council. On this basis, such schemes have attracted large amounts of funding both from the government and from voluntary sector organizations concerned with young people; at the moment they are of particular interest in terms of the British Government's agenda on social exclusion."
This papers seeks to explore the issues and evidence for such interventions (2000) providing an appropriate and educated introduction to the subject area as of the year 2000.
|
|
