Kathryn Daley

The wrongs of protection: Balancing protection and participation in research with marginalised young people:

Protecting participants – especially the vulnerable and/or young – is essential to respecting individuals and doing so upholds the merit and integrity of research. Research is a way of improving the lives of the vulnerable as research informs policy and service provision. Research participants need to be protected, but as their right, they also need to be able to participate in research as a way of being heard on matters which affect them. This article argues that ethical review of research is so heavily focused on minimising risk that young people’s right to participate in discussion is often overlooked. I use my own research with young people who have experienced problematic substance use as a running case study to discuss the tension between balancing protection and participation in research design and offer strategies for balancing the two when designing research.

“I’d Just Cut Myself to Kill the Pain”: Seeing Sense in Young Women’s Self-Injury

Self-injury is a complex and stigmatized phenomenon, most commonly associated with young women and generally assumed to be damaging to wellbeing. This chapter challenges the assumption that self-injury is a threat to wellbeing by arguing that it is a defence mechanism some young women draw on to cope with immense emotional pain. When understandings of self-injury begin from the assumption that the behaviour is “harmful” (“self-harm”) and counter to one’s wellbeing, they are unable to capture its nuanced function. To presume self-injury compromises wellbeing is to presuppose that the effects of cutting are worse than the effects of not cutting. Drawing on narratives of young women accessing drug treatment services who also had a history of self-injury, the complex correlations between self-injury and childhood trauma – specifically, sexual abuse and experiences of abandonment – are highlighted. These traumas appear to lead to a ruptured sense of embodiment and emotional dissociation. The accounts of these young women suggest that rather than an indicator of psychopathology, self-injury may be better understood as a logical response to trauma. The young woman is not seeking to compromise her wellbeing; rather, she is trying to ensure it.

Dancing with Death

This chapter meets some of the 61 young people Daley met in the course of researching how young people get drug problems at the point at which she met them. High rates of homelessness, drug abuse, sex work and other risks are part of the everyday life of participants. These young people may well be using drugs but their lives and drug use patterns are at odds with the available data on youth drug use. In this chapter, the differences among these young people begin to emerge.

Becoming a Man: Working-Class Masculinity, Machismo and Substance Abuse

In her study on the pathway’s into youth substance abuse, Daley uncovers gender differences. For young men, their understanding of masculinity is integral to their substance abuse. Daley draws on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, along with Goffman’s dramaturgical model of self, to explain how the young men were constrained by the understandings of what a “real man” ought to do. Living in subcultural working-class worlds where machismo, crime, drug use and aggression were celebrated, the young men had little ability to express emotions such as sadness or fear, as this demonstrated their vulnerability—a trait not associated with a “real man”. This inability to be vulnerable often became unbearable for the young men, culminating in psychological breakdowns or violent outbursts. Young men discussed falling in with the “wrong crowd” but it appeared that this crowd gave the young men a sense of belonging that was otherwise lacking in their lives.

Cutting Out the Pain: Sexual Abuse, Self-Injury, Abandonment and Young Women’s Substance Abuse

In her study of youth drug users, Daley finds considerable gender differences. This chapter focuses on the experiences of the young women. Twenty (77 per cent) out of the 26 young women disclosed that they had engaged in self-injury (“cutting”) when they were in primary school or in their early teens. Most of these young women had also been sexually abused and/or abandoned by their mother. Daley offers a deep level of analysis, investigating whether there is any link between self-injury and substance abuse and what, if any, relationship there is with past sexual abuse. She finds that the young women have complex relationships with their body and emotions—often separating the two with the psychological defence mechanism of dissociation when their emotional pain is too much to bear. It is explained that drug use and cutting both serve the purpose of controlling and numbing this emotional pain.

Moving on from Substance Abuse

Having mapped out how young people come to experience problematic substance use, Daley seeks to outline how the young people negotiate the task of “moving on” from a drug problem. Her participants make individual choices about the pathway out of substance abuse, and for some it is much harder than others. The participants are negotiating detox and rehabs with a hope to have a drug-free future. However, structural barriers such as limited education and poor employment prospects hamper the progress of many, nonetheless, they remain both persistent and hopeful. There is clear gender difference in how they seek to move on, with women seeing education and training as necessary while all of the men seek to skip this and find work. Regardless of their pathways, both have bleak options given their poor education past and, often, criminal histories.

In the Mix: The Beginning of a Drug Problem

Daley provides an insightful account explaining why school exclusion, homelessness and separation from family are common co-occurrences in the lives of young people with substance abuse issues. Structural factors such as patchy schooling from being raised in state-care account for the very high rates of early school leaving. Recreational drug use becomes a way to pass the day for a group of people who have no place in the labour market. Homelessness, triggered by school separation or by problems in the care system isolates these young people further entrenching them in a subcultural world of drug use and, sometimes, crime. Once homeless, the desire to use drugs increases further entrenching this group on the outside of society.