This fully revised and expanded edition of Janet Batsleer’s (1996) Working with Girls and Young Women in Community Settings provides a significantly updated text, incorporating new research, which will serve practitioners and academics well into the twenty-first century. Youth work with girls and young women has taken inspiration from feminisms and THE women’s movement, focussing on the strength and potential of girls as beings in their own right, rather than as carriers of social problems. Autonomous community-based projects of can affirm young women’s lives and creativity and seek to challenge oppression. Addressing the significant shifts in the social, political and professional context for informal education, this book makes clear the continuities in community-based informal education with girls and argues for its continuing importance. The impact of neo-liberal approaches to empowerment is highlighted throughout. Drawing together historical, theoretical and practice-based work, including case studies from a range of projects, Batsleer offers an analysis of the significant issues that will affect practice in the future and the significance of feminist inspired informal education rooted in specific community contexts. These include: The impact of violence, coercion and resistance, across a range of practices Female sexuality as a contested space The impact of poverty and the creation of networks of care and mutual support Difference and cross-cultural work, including inter-faith work and practice which challenges racism. This is an important source book for youth workers, social workers, and others involved in education outside of school as well as researchers in the practice and politics of youth work. It is an essential reference tool for researchers, as well as for both lecturers and students involved in the education and continuing professional development of youth and community workers and for those who wish to keep alive a radical alternative
