Abstract:

Social workers, in a sense, could provide assistance in curbing the social issues face by the schooling teenagers. To ensure the relevance of their presence in schools, it is reckoned necessary that social workers need to understand these high-risk teenagers. This paper discusses the results of a programme, named “Volunteers Approaching the Teenagers” that was carried out within the year 2008. A total of 120 school students from ten different schools in an education district in one northern state in Malaysia were involved. The students were purposively selected by the school teacher-counsellors based on the students discipline records kept in the schools. Based on the data collected from self-reports and interviews with the students, it was find out that the most reported unacceptable behaviour is truancy, and this is followed by smoking. Other misbehaviours include fighting, unruly, loafing and the social ‘mixing’ that are unacceptable within the culture of Malaysia. The intervention sessions were carried out by 120 volunteers who were the undergraduates of the Social Work Programme in Universiti Utara Malaysia and enrolled in the Communication in Social Work course. Through these intervention sesions, factors pertaining to the students’ misbehaviours were identified, and these factors were related to parents, family, teachers and peers. Based on the findings within the programme, and the intervention sessions, it seems appropriate to work on a model in which social workers are placed in schools to work hand-in-hand with the teacher-counsellors in assisting the studnts’ discipline issues faced by the schools.

Keywords:

Social work, volunteers, intervention, high-risk teenagers.