81

In France, the policies on intervention with young people have been constantly transformed over the last 10 years. While among the measures enacted some may seem positive, improving the quality of intervention, more often there is confusion about the definition of the framework, and usually there is division on the representation of youth. These administrative and legislative developments have had real impact on the professional culture. If this culture is to develop, we must invent compatible settings which permit them to progress on a path which generally and harmoniously supports progress of the young people’s interrupted development. Though the content of each of these laws claims roughly to correspond to that aim, it is in fact overdetermined by a logic both managerial and security-oriented which undermines that goal. Therefore, what is lacking is an in-depth agreement between a shared, directed political vision of youth, and that succession of laws which hover between security needs and economic necessities.