Youth work in Italy: between pluralism and fragmentation in a context of state non-interference

The chapter is a contribution to the socio historical analysis of youth work practices and policies in Italy, with the aim to understand the long-term processes that continued to generate a lack of recognition of this sector by the State and its tendency of non-interference over the private youth work organisations. The model of Hurley and Treacy’s (1993) helped in classifying, from a sociological perspective, the different practices of youth work through history in Italy. Based on the socio historical reconstruction detailed in this article, by offering examples of youth work practices in Italy oriented to social change (reformist or revolutionary) or to social regulation objectives (liberal or conservative). Within a general legislative vacuum in national youth policy, there is still no public regulation of a specific professional role for youth workers in Italy, while the different political or religious associations tend to train educators according to their respective ideologies. Except for the unique youth education system created by the fascist regime, youth work in Italy has never been part of an organic public policy at national level. Resistance would seem to have been nourished by two key events apparently not yet metabolised: on one hand, the totalitarian projects of the fascist regime and its experiment of state mass youth education; on the other, the student protests of 1968 and the inability of the state to address its demands for change. The tendency to support a pluralistic private offer of association-based youth work appeared, therefore, to provide a way to prevent the risk of exposing public institutions to new totalitarian youth education political programmes, such as that created by fascism. On the other hand, the public funding of youth work spaces or projects managed by private associations from the early 1980s seems also a strategy to contain those forces of youth protest inherited from the youth movements of the 1960s, having repressed their violent expression during the so-called Years of Lead (the 1970s).