I am a qualified and experienced youth worker who was forced out of youth work about 12 years ago when the govt of the day decided to abolish the youth service and instead put money into Connexions (careers advice for young people). As a result, many youth centres, groups and projects across the country lost their funding, and the young people with whom they worked, providing informal "citizenship", welfare support and a safe alternative to hanging round the streets at night, lost out. A generation on, and society wonders why teenagers hang round bus stops, spar shops etc at night - and condemn them for being what they are - young people who want to spend time together, play music, expend energy, and socialise. The message that successive governments have given young people is, by cutting services which were specifically targeted at them, that they don't matter, they are not important.
For 3 years I worked in a young person's sexual health clinic as an outreach worker and education worker. This involved working in schools, colleges, youth clubs (before they closed) and hanging round bus stops etc at night, talking to young people about safe sex, self-esteem, personal relationships, drugs, alcohol and various other issues about which, other than from parents and teachers, young people had no other objective, impartial and factually correct form of advice or support. During the course of those 3 years I came across many young women who were in temporary accomodation in the YWCA, or local Nightstop and who were pregnant. These young women were as young as 16 but for various reasons they were no longer able to live at home in the parental house (assuming that there was such a thing which was not always the case). They were often what people would call "disadvantaged" or "disaffected" in that as a result of far from ideal family circumstances, they did not perform well at school, did not get any support from any adult source and had little or no formal education or adult support and guidance. In many cases, these young people had had such a raw deal from life that their self-esteem was very low. For young women with low self-esteem, the ability to reject any form of attention (including inappropriate sexual attention) and to resist peer pressure, or the ability to insist on contraception, or the ability to maintain a regular daily routine of taking the pill, or the ability to access emergency contraception was very difficult if not impossible. Their priority each day was to ensure that they had somewhere to stay that night. From the work that I did with such young people, I became very aware of the very low understanding of the true facts about sex, contraception and risk - the majority of their knowledge came from peers and teenage magazines.
When such a young woman became pregnant, they often buried their head in the sand and ignored it for as long as possible. By the time they came to the centre where I worked for a pregnancy test, they were often too advanced to have any alternatives than to continue with the pregnancy but not being registered with a GP or having no permanent address meant that they could not access normal ante-natal services. I worked closely with the local midwifery unit to develop a new role of teenage pregnancy midwife to work specifically with such young women, and developed support for them in terms of social welfare.
In all the time I worked with such young women, I never once came across one who had deliberately got pregnant to obtain housing or benefits. I often suspected that a certain young woman may have been careless about contraception because they actually wanted a child (and that is a perfectly valid reason, many older people do the same thing in similar circumstances but are rarely prejudiced in the same way) - and with backgrounds which included little or no love and affection and attention, a baby offered them unconditional love, a basic human need in all of us.
At the time (and this was around 2000), even then it was very difficult for young people to obtain independent housing - private landlords required a month's rent as deposit and a month's rent in advance, often the best part of £1k. As for council housing, the council were only legally obliged to offer accomodation if a pregnant young woman was at risk (and although they often were, the young women didn't always see themselves as being at risk), or under 18 or homeless. Regular emergency accommodation at the various hostels put them lower down the priority pile, pregnant or not. Many young women returned to the YWCA "mother and baby" unit as there was no other accomodation for them, it got them off the streets but was far from ideal and there was a waiting list. Very few were able to get council housing. At the time, a new initiative was being developed, known as Foyers, which were essentially to provide accomodation and support to vulnerable young people, but places were limited and there was a waiting list for those too.
The young people I worked with were very aware that pregnant or not, they would still struggle to find independent accomodation and had little expectation other than continuing to live at Night shelters or on friend's floors, or in the bed of whoever offered.
In the 3 years that I was in the job (and it was a lottery funded job as the public sector did not recognise the need for such work, and at the end of the grant period, continuation funding was not available and so the job folded, and I had to look for work elsewhere), we waited for the govt's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy to be released. It was due not long after I started in the job, and still hadn't been published by the time I left. If it had been, my work could well have continued as there would have been funding to continue it. The message from the govt yet again is that the welfare of young people was not a priority. But they were an easy target to demonise.
In light of continued cutbacks and benefit restrictions over the past decade, I have no doubt that it is harder than ever for young people to obtain independent housing, and this generation of teenagers will have grown up knowing that, so I can not in all honesty imagine that young women in great numbers are deliberately becoming pregnant in order to be socially housed.
And I haven't yet discussed the role of the young men (or indeed the older men who took advantage of vulnerable young women) - equal responsibility for the prevention of unwanted pregnancy has to be given to the man, but there is no national campaign to demonise such young men for their behaviour.
I firmly believe that everyone has the right to their own opinions but, particularly when I hear opinions which are based on incorrect information, I feel that I have to give the true facts (true in my eyes from my experience) and challenge misconceptions and inaccuracies.
