1. Lewes FC became the first football club to reach gender pay parity

Lewes Football Club announced in July that it would pay its women’s team the same as its men’s team, the first professional or semi-professional football club to do so. On the same day, the club launched Equality FC, a campaign to raise awareness about gender inequality in football and encourage more support for women and girls taking part in the game.

2. Record-breaking budgets for the women’s game

2017 saw a record €101.7m (£90.1m) invested into the women’s game by European nations. This figure has more than doubled, from €50.4m (£44.5m), five years ago. England leads the way here, by investing €15m (£13.1m) into women’s football last season alone.

Image: UEFA

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3. More women than ever before are playing competitively

Last year, a record 1.27m women were playing at professional and semi-professional level throughout Europe. Germany has the most women on its books, with 209,713 registered at youth and senior level, while in the last five years, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Portugal have seen the greatest growth in female player registration.

Image: UEFA

4. Women’s Euro 2017 enjoyed unprecedented interest

The Euro 2017 final was the most-watched sports TV programme of the year in the Netherlands – an average of 4.1m viewers tuned in – while there was a global audience of more than 13m. The Netherlands team was also the first Women’s Euro hosts to sell out all of their matches on the way to a victorious final. The tournament’s total attendance reached 240,045, which also surpassed the 2013 record of 216,888.

Image: UEFA

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5. Women are progressing in football off the field too

The number of women’s football committees is at an all-time high now too. There are now 44, helping develop female participation at every level. Some 155 more women (an increase of 230 per cent) have progressed into football managerial positions or higher since 2013. There are currently 399 women in these senior roles. More generally, the number of male and female staff dedicated to women’s football is 1.5 times higher across Europe than it was in 2013.

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It’s a little before three on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a pushchair, but the park is surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school is out – so where are all the kids?

Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Jónsson, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”

We approach a large building. “And here we have the indoor skating,” says Jónsson.

A couple of minutes ago, we passed two halls dedicated to badminton and ping pong. Here in the park, there is also an athletics track, a geothermally heated swimming pool and – at last – some visible kids, excitedly playing football on an artificial pitch.

Young people aren’t hanging out in the park right now, Jónsson explains, because they’re in after school classes in these facilities, or in clubs for music, dance or art. Or they might be on outings with their parents.

Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15 and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 per cent in 1998 to five per cent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 per cent to seven per cent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 per cent to just three per cent.

Image: Dave Imms

The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed ‘enforced common sense’. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”

If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. It’s a big if.

“I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.”

Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress. Heroin users wanted to numb themselves; amphetamine users wanted to actively confront it. After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer questions such as: why do people start using drugs? Why do they continue? When do they reach a threshold to abuse? When do they stop? And when do they relapse?

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“Any college kid could say: why do they start? Well, there’s availability, they’re risk-takers, alienation, maybe some depression,” he says. “But why do they continue? So I got to the question about the threshold for abuse and the lights went on – that’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience: they could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”

At Metropolitan State University of Denver, Milkman was instrumental in developing the idea that people were getting addicted to changes in brain chemistry. Kids who were ‘active confronters’ were after a rush – they’d get it by stealing hubcaps and radios and later cars, or through stimulant drugs. Alcohol also alters brain chemistry, of course. It’s a sedative but it sedates the brain’s control first, which can remove inhibitions and, in limited doses, reduce anxiety.

“People can get addicted to drink, cars, money, sex, calories, cocaine – whatever,” says Milkman. “The idea of behavioural addiction became our trademark.”

This idea spawned another: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry – because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness – without the deleterious effects of drugs?”

By 1992, his team in Denver had won a $1.2m (£931,000) government grant to form Project Self-Discovery, which offered teenagers natural-high alternatives to drugs and crime. They got referrals from teachers, school nurses and counsellors, taking in kids from the age of 14 who didn’t see themselves as needing treatment but who had problems with drugs or petty crime. “We didn’t say to them, you’re coming in for treatment. We said, we’ll teach you anything you want to learn: music, dance, hip-hop, art, martial arts.”

Kids were being warned about the dangers of drink and drugs but we wanted to come up with a different approach

The idea was that these classes could provide a variety of alterations in the kids’ brain chemistry, and give them what they needed to cope better with life: some might crave an experience that could help reduce anxiety, others may be after a rush.

At the same time, the recruits got life-skills training, which focused on improving their thoughts about themselves and their lives, and the way they interacted with other people. “The main principle was that drug education doesn’t work because nobody pays attention to it. What is needed are the life skills to act on that information,” Milkman says. Kids were told it was a three-month programme. Some stayed five years.

In 1991, Milkman was invited to Iceland to talk about this work, his findings and ideas. He became a consultant to the first residential drug treatment centre for adolescents in Iceland, in a town called Tindar. “It was designed around the idea of giving kids better things to do,” he explains. It was here that he met Jónsson, who was then a psychology undergraduate and a volunteer at Tindar. They have been close friends ever since.

Milkman started coming regularly to Iceland and giving talks. These talks, and Tindar, attracted the attention of a young researcher at the University of Iceland, called Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir. She wondered: what if you could use healthy alternatives to drugs and alcohol as part of a program not to treat kids with problems, but to stop kids drinking or taking drugs in the first place?

Have you ever tried alcohol? If so, when did you last have a drink? Have you ever been drunk? Have you tried cigarettes? If so, how often do you smoke? How much time do you spend with your parents? Do you have a close relationship with your parents? What kind of activities do you take part in?

Image: Dave Imms

In 1992, 14, 15 and 16-year-olds in every school in Iceland filled in a questionnaire with these kinds of questions. This process was repeated in 1995 and 1997.

The results of these surveys were alarming. Nationally, almost 25 per cent were smoking every day, over 40 per cent had got drunk in the past month. But when the team drilled right down into the data, they could identify precisely which schools had the worst problems – and which had the least. Their analysis revealed clear differences between the lives of kids who took up drinking, smoking and other drugs, and those who didn’t. A few factors emerged as strongly protective: participation in organised activities – especially sport – three or four times a week, total time spent with parents during the week, feeling cared about at school, and not being outdoors in the late evenings.

“At that time, there had been all kinds of substance prevention efforts and programs,” says Sigfúsdóttir, who was a research assistant on the surveys. “Mostly they were built on education.” Kids were being warned about the dangers of drink and drugs, but, as Milkman had observed in the US, these programmes were not working. “We wanted to come up with a different approach.”

Image: Dave Imms

The mayor of Reykjavik, too, was interested in trying something new, and many parents felt the same, adds Jón Sigfússon, Inga Dóra’s colleague and brother. Jon Sigfússon had young daughters at the time and joined her new Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis when it was set up in 1999. “The situation was bad,” he says. “It was obvious something had to be done.”

Using the survey data and insights from research including Milkman’s, a new national plan was gradually introduced. It was called Youth in Iceland.

Laws were changed. It became illegal to buy tobacco under the age of 18 and alcohol under the age of 20, and tobacco and alcohol advertising was banned. Links between parents and school were strengthened through parental organisations which, by law, had to be established in every school, along with school councils with parent representatives. Parents were encouraged to attend talks on the importance of spending a quantity of time with their children rather than occasional ‘quality time’, on talking to their kids about their lives, on knowing who their kids were friends with, and on keeping their children home in the evenings.

A law was also passed prohibiting children aged between 13 and 16 from being outside after 10pm in winter and midnight in summer. It’s still in effect today.

Home and School, the national umbrella body for parental organisations, introduced agreements for parents to sign. The content varies depending on the age group, and individual organisations can decide what they want to include. For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations, and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the wellbeing of other children.

Image: Dave Imms

These agreements educate parents but also help to strengthen their authority in the home, argues Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, director of Home and School. “Then it becomes harder to use the oldest excuse in the book: ‘But everybody else can!’”

State funding was increased for organised sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and children from low-income families received help to take part. In Reykjavik, for instance, where more than a third of the country’s population lives, a Leisure Card gives families 35,000 krona (£250) per year per child to pay for recreational activities.

Crucially, the surveys have continued. Each year, almost every child in Iceland completes one. This means up-to-date, reliable data is always available.

Between 1997 and 2012, the percentage of young people aged 15 and 16 who reported often or almost always spending time with their parents on weekdays doubled – from 23 per cent to 46 per cent – and the percentage who participated in organised sports at least four times a week increased from 24 per cent to 42 per cent. Meanwhile, cigarette smoking, drinking and cannabis use in this age group plummeted.

“Although this cannot be shown in the form of a causal relationship – which is a good example of why primary prevention methods are sometimes hard to sell to scientists – the trend is very clear,” notes Álfgeir Kristjánsson, who worked on the data and is now at the West Virginia University School of Public Health in the US. “Protective factors have gone up, risk factors down, and substance use has gone down – and more consistently in Iceland than in any other European country.”

Data-driven change

Jón Sigfússon apologies for being just a couple of minutes late. “I was on a crisis call!” He prefers not to say precisely to where, but it was to one of the cities elsewhere in the world that has now adopted, in part, the Youth in Iceland ideas.

Youth in Europe, which Sigfússon heads, began in 2006 after the already-remarkable Icelandic data was presented at a European Cities Against Drugs meeting and, he recalls, “People asked: what are you doing?”

Participation in Youth in Europe is at a municipal level rather than being led by national governments. In the first year, there were eight municipalities. To date, 35 have taken part, across 17 countries, varying from some areas where just a few schools take part to Tarragona in Spain, where 4,200 15-year-olds are involved. The method is always the same: Sigfússon and his team talk to local officials and devise a questionnaire with the same core questions as those used in Iceland plus any locally tailored extras. For example, online gambling has recently emerged as a big problem in a few areas, and local officials want to know if it’s linked to other risky behaviour.

Just two months after the questionnaires are returned to Iceland, the team sends back an initial report with the results, plus information on how they compare with other participating regions. “We always say that, like vegetables, information has to be fresh,” says Sigfússon. “If you bring these findings a year later, people would say, ‘Oh, this was a long time ago and maybe things have changed’.” As well as fresh, it has to be local so that schools, parents and officials can see exactly what problems exist in which areas.

Across Europe, rates of teen alcohol and drug use have generally improved over the past 20 years, though nowhere as dramatically as in Iceland

The team has analysed 99,000 questionnaires from places as far afield as the Faroe Islands, Malta and Romania – as well as South Korea and, very recently, Nairobi and Guinea-Bissau. Broadly, the results show that when it comes to teen substance use, the same protective and risk factors identified in Iceland apply everywhere. There are some differences: in one location (in a country “on the Baltic Sea”), participation in organised sport actually emerged as a risk factor. Further investigation revealed that this was because young ex-military men who were keen on muscle-building drugs, drinking and smoking were running the clubs. Here was a well-defined, immediate, local problem that could be addressed.

While Sigfússon and his team offer advice and information on what has been found to work in Iceland, it’s up to individual communities to decide what to do in the light of their results. Occasionally, they do nothing. One predominantly Muslim country, which he prefers not to identify, rejected the data because it revealed an unpalatable level of alcohol consumption. In other cities – such as the origin of Sigfússon’s ‘crisis call’ – there is an openness to the data and there is money, but he has observed that it can be much more difficult to secure and maintain funding for health prevention strategies than for treatments.

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No other country has made changes on the scale seen in Iceland. When asked if anyone has copied the laws to keep children indoors in the evening, Sigfússon smiles. “Even Sweden laughs and calls it the child curfew!”

Across Europe, rates of teen alcohol and drug use have generally improved over the past 20 years, though nowhere as dramatically as in Iceland, and the reasons for improvements are not necessarily linked to strategies that foster teen wellbeing. In the UK, for example, the fact that teens are now spending more time at home interacting online rather than in person could be one of the major reasons for the drop in alcohol consumption.

But Kaunas, in Lithuania, is one example of what can happen through active intervention. Since 2006, the city has administered the questionnaires five times, and schools, parents, healthcare organisations, churches, the police and social services have come together to try to improve kids’ wellbeing and curb substance use. For instance, parents get eight or nine free parenting sessions each year, and a new programme provides extra funding for public institutions and NGOs working in mental health promotion and stress management. In 2015, the city started offering free sports activities on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and there are plans to introduce a free ride service for low-income families, to help children who don’t live close to the facilities to attend.

Image: Dave Imms

Between 2006 and 2014, the number of 15 and 16-year-olds in Kaunas who reported getting drunk in the past 30 days fell by about a quarter, and daily smoking fell by more than 30 per cent.

At the moment, participation in Youth in Europe is a haphazard affair, and the team in Iceland is small. Sigfússon would like to see a centralised body with its own dedicated funding to focus on the expansion of Youth in Europe. “Even though we have been doing this for ten years, it is not our full, main job. We would like somebody to copy this and maintain it all over Europe,” he says. “And why only Europe?”

Involving the whole family

After our walk through Laugardalur Park, Gudberg Jónsson invites us back to his home. Outside, in the garden, his two elder sons, Jón Konrád, who’s 21, and Birgir Ísar, who’s 15, talk to me about drinking and smoking. Jón does drink alcohol, but Birgir says he doesn’t know anyone at his school who smokes or drinks. We also talk about football training: Birgir trains five or six times a week; Jón, who is in his first year of a business degree at the University of Iceland, trains five times a week. They both started regular after-school training when they were six years old.

“We have all these instruments at home,” their father told me earlier. “We tried to get them into music. We used to have a horse. My wife is really into horse riding. But it didn’t happen. In the end, soccer was their selection.”

Image: Dave Imms

Did it ever feel like too much? Was there pressure to train when they’d rather have been doing something else? “No, we just had fun playing football,” says Birgir. Jón adds, “We tried it and got used to it, and so we kept on doing it.”

It’s not all they do. While Jónsson and his wife Thórunn don’t consciously plan for a certain number of hours each week with their three sons, they do try to take them regularly to the cinema, the theatre, restaurants, hiking, fishing and, when Iceland’s sheep are brought down from the highlands each September, even on family sheep-herding outings.

Jón and Birgir may be exceptionally keen on football, and talented (Jón has been offered a soccer scholarship to the Metropolitan State University of Denver, and a few weeks after we meet, Birgir is selected to play for the under-17 national team). But could the significant rise in the percentage of kids who take part in organised sport four or more times a week be bringing benefits beyond raising healthier children?

We tried to get them into music but it didn’t happen. In the end, soccer was their selection

Could it, for instance, have anything to do with Iceland’s crushing defeat of England in the Euro 2016 football championship? When asked, Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir, who was voted Woman of the Year in Iceland in 2016, smiles: “There is also the success in music, like Of Monsters and Men [an indie folk-pop group from Reykjavik]. These are young people who have been pushed into organised work. Some people have thanked me,” she says, with a wink.

Elsewhere, cities that have joined Youth in Europe are reporting other benefits. In Bucharest, for example, the rate of teen suicides is dropping alongside use of drink and drugs. In Kaunas, the number of children committing crimes dropped by a third between 2014 and 2015.

As Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir says: “We learned through the studies that we need to create circumstances in which kids can lead healthy lives, and they do not need to use substances, because life is fun, and they have plenty to do – and they are supported by parents who will spend time with them.”

When it comes down to it, the messages – if not necessarily the methods – are straightforward. And when he looks at the results, Harvey Milkman thinks of his own country, the US. Could the Youth in Iceland model work there, too?

Crossing the Atlantic

Three hundred and twenty-five million people versus 330,000. Some 33,000 gangs versus virtually none. Around 1.3 million homeless young people versus a handful.

Clearly the US has challenges that Iceland does not. But the data from other parts of Europe, including cities such as Bucharest with major social problems and relative poverty, shows that the Icelandic model can work in very different cultures, Milkman argues. And the need in the US is high: underage drinking accounts for about 11 per cent of all alcohol consumed nationwide, and excessive drinking causes more than 4,300 deaths among under-21 year olds every year.

However, a national programme along the lines of Youth in Iceland is unlikely to be introduced in the US. One major obstacle is that while in Iceland there is long-term commitment to the national project, community health programs in the US are usually funded by short-term grants.

Milkman has learned the hard way that even widely applauded, gold-standard youth programme aren’t always expanded, or even sustained. “With Project Self-Discovery, it seemed like we had the best program in the world,” he says. “I was invited to the White House twice. It won national awards. I was thinking: ‘this will be replicated in every town and village’. But it wasn’t.”

Cities such as Bucharest, with major social problems and relative poverty, show that the Icelandic model can work in very different cultures

He thinks that is because you can’t prescribe a generic model to every community because they don’t all have the same resources. Any move towards giving kids in the US the opportunities to participate in the kinds of activities now common in Iceland, and so helping them to stay away from alcohol and other drugs, will depend on building on what already exists. “You have to rely on the resources of the community,” he says.

His colleague Álfgeir Kristjánsson is introducing the Icelandic ideas to the state of West Virginia. Surveys are being given to kids at several middle and high schools in the state, and a community coordinator will help get the results out to parents and anyone else who could use them to help local children. But it might be difficult to achieve the kinds of results seen in Iceland, he concedes

Image: Dave Imms

Short-termism also impedes effective prevention strategies in the UK, says Michael O’Toole, CEO of Mentor, a charity that works to reduce alcohol and drug misuse in children and young people. Here, too, there is no national coordinated alcohol and drug prevention program. It’s generally left to local authorities or to schools, which can often mean kids are simply given information about the dangers of drugs and alcohol – a strategy that, he agrees, evidence shows does not work.

O’Toole fully endorses the Icelandic focus on parents, school and the community all coming together to help support kids, and on parents or carers being engaged in young people’s lives. Improving support for kids could help in so many ways, he stresses. Even when it comes to just alcohol and smoking, there is plenty of data to show that the older a child is when they have their first drink or cigarette, the healthier they will be over the course of their life.

Public wariness and an unwillingness to engage go to the heart of the balance of responsibility between states and citizens

But not all the strategies would be acceptable in the UK – the child curfews being one, parental walks around neighbourhoods to identify children breaking the rules perhaps another. And a trial run by Mentor in Brighton that involved inviting parents into schools for workshops found that it was difficult to get them engaged.

Public wariness and an unwillingness to engage will be challenges wherever the Icelandic methods are proposed, thinks Milkman, and go to the heart of the balance of responsibility between states and citizens. “How much control do you want the government to have over what happens with your kids? Is this too much of the government meddling in how people live their lives?”

In Iceland, the relationship between people and the state has allowed an effective national program to cut the rates of teenagers smoking and drinking to excess – and, in the process, brought families closer and helped kids to become healthier in all kinds of ways. Which other countries will decide these benefits are worth the costs?

This article was originally published by Mosaic. We reproduce a slightly adapted version here. Images: Dave Imms, www.daveimms.com

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The post How Iceland cut rates of teen substance abuse with sports and family time appeared first on Positive News.

In July, the Homeless World Cup saw more than 500 footballers – men and women from 52 countries – compete in the centre of Glasgow. In October, the annual Beyond Sport Summit brought together more than 1,000 people from the worlds of sport, business and government
to discuss how sport can trigger positive change.

The United Nations even recognises sport as a relatively low cost, high impact tool in humanitarian, development and peace-building efforts. UN special adviser Wilfried Lemke says: “Sport builds bridges between individuals and across communities, providing a fertile ground for sowing the seeds of development and peace.”

We explore four projects that demonstrate how sport can be much more than just a game.

Figure skating
Harlem, US

The Harlem team at the 2015 Terry Conners Synchronized Skating Competition

When competitive figure skater Sharon Cohen started working with girls in Harlem 20 years ago, she never dreamed she would eventually have 60 staff at her not-for-profit organisation in New York and Detroit. Together, they train and mentor 275 girls between the ages of six and 18 each week. When the girls take part in competitions, they are often the only non-white team there.

“Skating was a country club sport for most of its existence,” reflects Cohen. “You had to become a member to skate. We’ve brought it to communities that don’t have access to the sport.”

Cohen believes the sport’s novelty, grace and toughness help shape its appeal for the girls, most of whom have never set foot on ice before. “Figure skating is a sport and an art. There is a great deal of creativity involved, as well as athleticism. It is also difficult, not like picking up a baseball. You can’t learn skating quickly; you have to work at it. It’s about perseverance and overcoming hurdles. Our girls really like that challenge.”

It’s about perseverance and overcoming hurdles. Our girls really like that challenge

Figure Skating in Harlem combines two or three weekly sessions on the ice with an afterschool programme that covers academic subjects as well as leadership and life skills. Places are worth thousands of dollars each year but are offered to the girls for free. There is one requirement: they must keep their grades up. The approach seems to work. A third of the students achieve straight As and 80 per cent maintain a B+ grade or higher.

“I think that is is because our students learn how to dedicate themselves to something and to be disciplined,” says Cohen. “At a recent reunion one of our alumni told me: ‘What I learned most was how to fall fearlessly.’ I think that is a wonderful lesson in life: don’t be afraid to take risks.”

Street soccer
Scotland

Swiss goalkeeper Ruedi Kalin, 58, was the fourth oldest player at the 2016 Homeless World Cup. Image: Alexander Walker

“The impact is absolutely huge. Life-changing. If I hadn’t found the Street Soccer Scotland programme, I would probably be dead, another suicide statistic.” Robert Hare, 46, first made contact with the organisation at a drop-in session for people experiencing homelessness or social exclusion.

Through contact with prison services, rehabilitation centres, homeless shelters and mental health institutions, Street Soccer Scotland offers free training throughout the country. Anyone – men and women – can join in the weekly sessions, regardless of background, age or fitness level. Current players are aged between 16 and 60.

Five years after being on the winning Scottish side for the 2011 Homeless World Cup in Paris, Hare now works as programme co-ordinator for the social enterprise. At this summer’s tournament in his home city of Glasgow, he coached a team of refugees from Eritrea, Iran, Senegal and the Congo. They didn’t speak each other’s language but they found a common one in ‘the beautiful game’.

He saw a change in the players from the moment they became involved. “They bonded as a team. They still come to sessions and arrive first every time, asking to get started. They ask about our educational courses too; they’re so determined.”

He believes the sport holds the same appeal to all players, whether native Glaswegians or asylum seekers. “Street soccer offers somewhere to go to, release everything and get away from the dark place you’re in.”

Street soccer offers somewhere to go to, release everything and get away from the dark place you’re in

An estimated 100,000 players are involved in grassroots street soccer programmes around the world. The Homeless World Cup sees teams from around the world, from Brazilian favelas to Norwegian suburbs, take part each year. The tournament makes use of football’s global popularity, team spirit and easy entry level to get things started. Once the ball starts rolling, personal development, healing, rehabilitation, and character and confidence building begin.

Waves for Change
Cape Town, South Africa

‘Surf therapy for violent communities’ is the tagline of Waves for Change, an organisation supporting young people from some of South Africa’s poorest and most dangerous townships. In Cape Town, where 45 per cent of children have witnessed a killing and 56 per cent have been victims of violence, the need is overwhelming. Waves for Change works with 250 children from volatile backgrounds, and seeing them undergo profound change is what keeps founder Tim Conibear going.

“We usually recruit kids who are attracted to really difficult activities,” he explains. “They tend to have higher levels of prejudice and reject authority more. “Surfing is a really good tool for attracting kids who head off on high-risk paths.”

Lessons encourage an appreciation of surfing’s reflective qualities, says Conibear. “Surfing is all about your journey through the ocean and how you engage with the waves. Taking part in an activity that is all about you makes you more aware of the benefits of different behaviours,” he explains.

Waves for Change works with children aged between 11-14 with the aim of building their self awareness. Conibear and his team help them build coping mechanisms, heal their ability to trust and support them in making positive life choices. “The kids who choose gangs are the ones who want to stand out,” he says. “We offer the same social structure that a gang might. The kids say surfing is cool and different and it elevates them above their peers.”

We offer the same social structure that a gang might. The kids say surfing is cool and different

The charity worked with the University of Cape Town to measure the project’s impact. Over the course of a year, those in the programme fought less and teachers and parents found they were better behaved and more engaged. “We’re mediating the kids’ ‘fight or flight’ responses. That leads to fighting less, choosing better friends and staying away from drugs.”

Skateistan
Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa

First ride – a young Skateistan skater in Phnom Penh

With more than half the population under the age of 24 and a quarter of all children engaged in child labour, Afghanistan’s social challenges are huge. In 2009, Unicef singled out the country as the ‘worst place’ to be born in the world. Girls face a particularly steep challenge: their lack of education means the female literacy rate is just 13 per cent.

Australian Oliver Percovich didn’t know any of this when he first rode his skateboard in Kabul in 2007. But he soon realised that the children he encountered working on the streets were curious in what he was doing. He let them have a go and quickly realised skateboarding’s potential as a ‘hook’ to get them interested in education too.

About half of the 1,000 youngsters in the Afghanistan programme are girls, which makes skateboarding the largest organised sport for girls in the country. The charity puts extra resources into the girls’ programme, funding transport and extra female instructors. Crucially, the newness of the sport there meant it was relatively free of gender stereotypes. Today, it is still considered inappropriate for girls to cycle, but riding a skateboard is generally accepted.

Percovich believes that skateboarding’s popularity could be attributed to its focus on individual battles. “In Afghanistan, people really like shows of strength. Fighting sports are very popular here, and skateboarding is sort of fighting with yourself. You overcome your fears to jump down ten stairs. With skateboarding, you’re up against yourself and what you think you can do.”

Skateistan has now expanded to Cambodia and South Africa and Percovich hopes the global connection will promote dialogue and understanding. “There is a community of skateboarders around the world who help each other. Young people need to understand that they are one and the same.”

Main image: ‘The Bulgarian team huddle at the 2016 Homeless World Cup, Glasgow’. Image by Alexander Walker

Media shapes society

Media has a powerful influence on our world. We believe excessive negativity in the press is destructive for society, so instead we are working to create a more constructive and compassionate media. To do this, we urgently need your support.

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